You can think about consciousness, have all sorts of interesting ideas about it, take sides in the debates, get quite zealous, but all without feeling the full weight of the fact that what is present here, that in which all these thoughts and feelings are, and the thinking and feeling of them, is consciousness itself, fully and unrestrictedly present. For you this is a mystery only because you can't grasp absolute openness, the absence of the least hindrance. What you are is the grinding mechanism, one thing against another thing, always either building tension or releasing it, subject against object, life against death, now against then, the real against the unreal ad nauseam - at least that's what you would be if there ever was such a mechanism, but since there isn't... what are you?