Consciousness is a concept that the unconscious mind creates in order to try to understand itself. The you that is reading this believes that it is the conscious mind which has a separate unconscious mind hiding underneath the conscious mind somehow. We call it the shadow, the dark, unconsciousness, soul, spirit, life energy, and so on and so forth. We believe that we have fundamentally two levels of consciousness, for fairness, it has also been claimed that we have three levels which includes the subconscious level. Then there is what would be called universal consciousness which we will get to in a minute. We need to first explain how individual consciousness is an illusion and why it was created in order to understand the collective or universal consciousness or unconsciousness.
We cannot see our consciousness; we believe our unconscious to be the opposite of our consciousness. The unconsciousness cannot see itself; the unconsciousness cannot understand itself. We all know this to be true when any of us are asked to describe our unconscious which is also known as soul, spirit, life energy or life force. We can't describe our soul or essence because we have no way of looking at it, no way of seeing it. We have no way of comprehending what we are at our core. In an attempt at understanding ourselves and who or what we are, we created the world around us so we could try to see ourselves. We try to see ourselves through "others". We decide who we are based on how "others" see us, we then form a persona and call it "self". The "self" is formed in childhood and usually sticks around until what we call death or for some of us until we decide to let go of the "self" before death.
The "self" is simply a collection of personalities, identities, thoughts, beliefs, symbols, images about "ourselves" that we collect in order to figure out who we are. We create this concept called "self" and we say that the "self" has consciousness and since we say that we have consciousness that means we must in fact have an unconsciousness. The unconscious does not exist anymore than consciousness exists. Consciousness is made up by the "Self" we create in order to try to understand ourselves which we can never do since there is no consciousness or unconsciousness in which to understand. The "Self" that is trying to figure out what it is, is only a concept or an idea of what it thinks it is and therefor can never see what it is.
One of the biggest questions humankind faces is what is consciousness? No one knows exactly what consciousness is, no one understands it. The answer is, there is no consciousness. No one can understand consciousness because it simply doesn't exist. Obviously, the argument would be "but I exist, I know I do, I'm right here, the fact that I am having this discussion and aware of the fact that I am here doing it just proves that I am conscious." That doesn't really prove anything aside from a vague awareness in general. If you believe that you are conscious and that you are the self that you created in order to understand yourself then explain who you are that isn't considered the "self". Take away everything considered the self and what are you left with? The self creates consciousness, without the self, there is no consciousness. Strip the self of all labels and see what is left.
That which is left after removing everything that you refer to as "self" is who you are. Without any "self" there is nothing left to create the consciousness in order to understand itself. When the "self" disappears the unconscious shows that the conscious is a self-created illusion. When the conscious is seen for what it is, which is nothing, the unconscious vanishes along with it. This is what is referred to as enlightenment or becoming a buddha or finding Christ. No one can "attain" or "achieve" enlightenment since enlightenment is the realization in which there is no self in which to become enlightened. Enlightenment is the letting go of the "self" that you created that doesn't exist. Some of us are afraid that if we become enlightened that we will vanish, and it'll be like we never existed. The you that is worried about not existing is the same you that already knows it doesn't exist and is trying to continue its imagined existence. Your true nature can never die, unlike your concept of "self".
Enlightenment isn't just the knowledge of how it all works but also the experience itself. We can't truly understand anything until we experience it firsthand. None of us had a clue what an orgasm was like until we experienced our first one and it changed the way we saw the world. Those of us who have never had an orgasm will never be able to understand what it feels like. Enlightenment without firsthand experience is like being an expert on sex and having never had an orgasm. Enlightenment is the knowledge, understanding, and the experience. Knowledge can be acquired. Wisdom comes from within, wisdom appears to come from the unconscious. Wisdom is the inner knowing of the truth which is the "self" that you created doesn't exist.
We can see that on the individual level how the "self" creates our imagined consciousness and our assumed "opposite" the unconscious. On the individual level there is no consciousness or unconsciousness, and that which applies to one individual applies to all individuals. Our true nature cannot be named or labeled because as soon as it's labeled it becomes part of the "self", in order to see our true nature, we must look past the "self" and we can only do that by not naming it or labeling it. Since our true nature cannot be named, it becomes very hard to even describe. How does one describe that which cannot be named? The closest description that we might be able to get would be "awareness-ish" but even that adds the assumption that there is something which is aware which in turn creates the "self" and a "self" cannot possess awareness.
The individual "self" that thinks it has a consciousness and an unconsciousness knows that we are all the same and that we are all connected, therefor we all have a "universal or collective unconscious." Since there is no individual consciousness or unconsciousness, there is no universal consciousness or unconsciousness. On an individual level all that can be said is "I AM" anything beyond that is just part of the created "self". Since we all have the same feeling and experience of "I AM", we are all one. Every human on earth knows in our hearts that we all have an "I AM" feeling. That "I AM" feeling is who we are, as soon as we add any labels or descriptions, we "become" that label or description. Become aware of the "I AM" within without adding anything to that statement and you are aware of your true nature. Love and Peace!