O Consciousness! To be working on consciousness again! It stokes within me a fire, it beats at my back as if the furies chase me and I flee laughing. It is my heavenly manna and my djinn lover and my assassin all at once. As I rise to its challenge strength flows through my frame, my intellect becomes a piercing lighthouse sweeping across choppy waves, and words summon themselves to me so that I overflow into prose. My cup runneth over. An energy hums in me with such intensity that I can naught but shout it into ink, all in reverberatory response to the very scope of the thing, a problem cosmic in its implications and reach. What a mighty thing, consciousness! What aspect of our world does it not touch? In science it shows itself across all hierarchies, all primary and all special sciences. It appears as the monarch of psychology with all other mental events its yoked subjects. Within neuroscience it hides as the intrinsic meaning of the alien popping of action potentials in the brain. It lurks in the agential equations of economics, pops up as the irreducible remainder after genetics has done its deterministic work, and down at Planck time it may even trigger the waveform collapse that transforms the mere relata of possibility into the definite fact of existence. Indeed, what other candidate for the noumenal is there? Look unto history and see all of it as the consequences of consciousnesses en masse! It is the foundation for all axioms in mathematics, the fixer of reference for all language, and the provider of the only indubitable certainty possible. It is the boundary condition for all knowledge! The domain of universal discrimination! It acts as the demiurge of all art, and yet at the same time it is also the audience, a double act as it both creates and gives meaning to the creation. If left unexplained, so far does its reach extend that no aspect of reality can be said to be truly understood. Not anything that flies or crawls. For what snapping amphibious creature first contained that divine spark? Did it first wink on in the neural nets of swimming hydras or did it slowly accumulate like dust over all biological processes? Was it brought about by predation, by the need for ambulation, avoidance, and planning on the millisecond timescale? Could it have arisen from such dark origins, as biblical as freedom arising only from the Fall? And what of its fate forward in time? What beautiful consciousnesses will one day occupy the tangled bank of our solar system if we can only persevere? Consciousness spreading the torch of its internal light from Earth to Mars, to Europa and then Enceladus then even beyond, past the Oort cloud, to that beckoning bright density at the center of the Milky Way. Beginning in one ocean and after a landlocked interlude ending in another, a wine-dark sea far more vast. Yes, the history of the world has been, and ever will be, written in consciousness, and they are the only words that matter! Imagine then what that final theory will entail, what it will give us: a sensorium syntax as pristine as mathematics, a dialect of pure consciousness. Imagine what type of alien utterances it will allow, for to write in such a language, to speak in such a language . . . No poet has ever come close. Words blow away as empty signs next to the white-hot heat of it! There is something it is like to be! And it is not just mere being, which alone is no different from its antimony of nothingness, but rather the awareness of being, for that is sublimity itself! What greater gift can be given? I ask you this: what is a finer property? And how is it that of all imaginable properties we happen to have the sweetest? Roll the dice of all possible worlds and we stand upon the infinitesimally small face that happens to not just be but to also vividly experience being? How finely tuned this instrument of a universe! And thus with the perfection of consciousness comes its mystery, that ever-retreating hooded phantom, that which stokes the fire within me, nay, which sets me aflame.