What is so mysterious about human consciousness?

[Shankapotomus]

54. Yes, this was exceedingly helpful

Hopefully I can use your post as a guidepost when I start practicing meditation. If I understand you correctly, you are stilling your thoughts and emptying the mind to reach this state? It almost sounds as if you're accessing Aristotle's Tabula rasa, though, I would gather you would describe it as something more than that. I don't have to tell you emptying the mind and forgetting your body, brain and sense organs is not the same as not having a body, brain and sense organs. And you have alluded to it all being a "feeling", not measurable or verifiable via the instruments of science.

Your edit suggests that when you think of consciousness you're thinking of thinking, in contrast to unconsciousness which is not-thinking

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With such uncharted territory, I don't really stick to any firm definition of consciousness beyond just awareness so I apologize for my loose use of terminology. I mean, this is an internet forum and no one has figured this stuff out yet and I am occasionally guilty of throwing things out there without the attention to detail a more formal discussion would demand. I am certainly capable of seeing consciousness under multiple definitions, including the one you are offering up. It's all a puzzle and if one piece doesn't fit somewhere I have no problem substituting another definition if it works and if, in the end, we are still trying to account for consciousness or whatever other phenomenon we are trying to understand. Exactness doesn't really come into play for me until we get down to asking "Well, how does that actually work?".

While I am personally at a point where I don't believe consciousness, or to use a term we both might find more precise, awareness, can exist separate from "matter" (a relative term as all terms are) - indeed, without material differentiation there would be nothing to be aware of and, therefore, no awareness - I do have a belief, of an almost religious fanaticism, in a "Universal Relativity" where everything in the Universe is relative to what it is that is doing the observing and interacting. Existence, non-existence, space, matter, consciousness, non-consciousness, entity, non-entity, even the Universe's existence is relative, depending on what you are and, in my view, many things can be both this and that, there and not there at the same exact time and not be a contradiction...and so I have a tremendous flexibility in the area of "awareness" and when I use one term, it doesn't mean I can only see it one way. It's possible we are both right in a way. Awareness could exist beyond what we understand and perceive as the material world. But that doesn't mean awareness exists beyond the material. It just may exist on a material plane we ourselves, with our limited sensory organs, cannot detect.

Like colors that exist but our eyes are not adapted to see, we are only seeing pieces of existence. If our senses could sense "everything", perhaps we would see that there is nothing there at all. No Universe. No Us. So our consciousness of objects represents a subtraction of Awareness - in other words, we can only see so much and so that's why we see anything at all - because we can't see it "all", we see some of it and that makes us think there's something there, that a Big Bang happened. In this respect, maybe a rock is on a higher plane of "Awareness" than we are because it can see nothing which may be a more accurate picture of the "Universe" than ours. Perhaps "Awareness" works the same way and to be fully aware is to be aware there is no Awareness?