The concept that goes by the name consciousness is perhaps a natural on for Eastern religions with their technics of meditation but in the West it only emerges out of soul around Descartes with the attempt to extend the categories of natural science to experience, and hence to postulate a mind stuff, or abstract and essentially impersonal general quality of experience-ness. The problem of consciousness then arises in reconciling this abstract quality with other more unequivocal generalities of substance, time, space motion, impenetrability, change etc. Perhaps the true 'hard problem' is with that aspect of soul that has been suppressed, its personal-ness. Now it is believed that this can be transcended through 'ego-death' or some such event, but even then, a having-been remains, as well as the fact the even such an event only has any sense within someone's personal experience.