Consciousness; its ALL about consciousness.  Now, I do not act as I am presenting something that has not been mentioned hundreds of thousands of times before.  But like so many things repetition is the key to awareness.  It is like battering a wall until it final crumbles to pieces letting in the light of reality.  What is reality?
Reality is only what you make it.  "True" reality is the void.  When you can be nothing you can be everything.  We are in a ruthless, exhausting effort to define ourselves.  In other times we are just as fervent protecting ourselves from what we are not.
So where do we not understand the great Masters and Teachers of the past:  "True self is no self." "A man must die in the watery grave of baptism and be raised a new man."  It is ALL the death of the ego and surrendering to the higher power that will best serve us.  An argument generated between a friend of mine and I when she said, "What about my core values."  "Really, who defined what you core values are?"  Are not core values just "likes?"  I like chocolate cake.  I like honesty.  So?
These are only limiting factors and blind us to the larger vision of reality. That vision meaning we identify with non-identity which leads us to the void, the beginning of all creation.
As the Buddhists describe in the Heart Sutra-" No old age and death, no end of old age and death," or the Taoists in "High defines low and cold defines hot."  Definitions and identifications only limit who we are.  Open your mind, open your heart, open your soul and seek the expanse of nothingness to find who you really are...