The thing about consciousness is not the presumed qualia, the what it feels like to experience or be x, but that such notions can even be in question. In other words, whatever the content it is at the same time not the content, that it overflows or negates the content, that it is never what it is. Since it won't alight anywhere the mystery is how any content comes to fill it, to define it at all, there being nothing less akin than the very idea of such content. The self is all compacted out of such stuff, whatever it can explain of itself, and given a chance it will never stop explaining like one of those writers whose books are full of endlessly reflexive and recursive accounts. These infinite branching trees, these fractal narratives, seem to have touched the essence of the conscious self in action, but are more likely the endless suppuration of that oxymoron, conscious self. The self is not conscious but the practical residue of consciousness's inherent inability to be itself, or one of the convenient structures by which it asserts its paradoxical nature. The desiring world is what perfectly appears just so consciousness can find no place in it.