Metaphors! Riddles! I am not toying with you, I promise. That is the tersest way I can phrase it. The rest of this book will expound, but I urge you return here as things start to make sense. Okay, back into the deep end.
Consciousness is everything we can experience and the only thing that really exists.
We are going to talk about consciousness a lot. You'll save me some carpal tunnels and yourself some eye fatigue if we can give consciousness a nickname. Plus we can leave behind any baggage the term "consciousness" has picked up during its divergent forays into medicine, psychology, parapsychology, ontology, and elsewhere. Let's call it Ε, short for Only Every. Note that calling consciousness Ε is not an attempt to personify it, but rather to represent it as a proper entity, rather than a vague concept.
We don't know much about consciousness, but luckily there isn't much to know. As Baba Ram Dass, or Steven Kaufman, who painstakingly constructed the Unified Reality Theory, might say, the best way to gain an understanding for something is by standing under it, where we can peer up and gaze in wonder. Unfortunately, I do not think consciousness has a bottom or a base to stand at or any ends or beginnings to speak of. The most instructive figure I can conjure to illustrate the structure of existence-consciousness-bliss is a MΓΆbius strip, or less geometrically the Ouroboros that decorates the creation myths of so many human cultures. Douglas Hofstadler calls it the Strange Loop.
Ε learns by evolving into as many different possibilities as it can imagine and allowing them to interact in every way it can conceive.