Consciousness and qualia are two different ways of speaking about the same thing. When you determine experience as consciousness or as happening for/in/to a mind, then its contents are qualia, and any mode that is constitutive of consciousness, such as self-reflexivity, is so as mediated by qualia - which fact keeps them rather busy. However, it doesn't seem to be correct to say that the qualia themselves are conscious - is the blueness of the blue book-cover seen over there the consciouness of blueness? No. We speak in terms of qualia in order to arrest the process of self-reference, to break it down into simple reference, and since anything salient must have qualia of some sort there must, we conclude, be a sort of topology of qualia which enables the cognitive depth of experience to be constituted. In Samkhya terms, qualia is prakriti, in fact is probable exactly what was meant by this term, rather than matter. Qualia are distinguished from things in that they are necessarily, that is, by definition, experienced, but they do not experience themselves, are not their own experiencer. A tree falling in the forest away from any ears may produce sound waves, but gives rise to no aural qualia. So, thinking in these terms seems to bring us closer to the source of experience, but in fact leaves the mystery of the ultimate experiencer untouched. It is difficult to refrain from subtly reifying that which experiences, there is no pleasure, or valence, in it since pleasure too is objective, is prakriti. It is hard to admit just how sovereignly unthinkable, unexperiencable is that which is experiences - even though 'this' is the only 'thing' that could ever be real.