Here's tonight's Lazy Rant. This one wasn't written with an audience in mind, so it's not quite as user friendly. It's just me writing to try to give language to what I think Nis is saying. It could become something more at some point. Feel free to read or not to!
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As a Westerner and a scientist and a sort of Occam's materialist, I can look at the brain and human development objectively, and I can tell a story about how the self comes into being. From this perspective, consciousness seems to be a byproduct of a complex neural network and self-consciousness an overlay of culture into that biological matrix. Even here, however, we have to admit that some mysteries remain, and that no scientist yet really understands how consciousness springs from matter. That leads us back in to the subjective to seek additional data. From the subjective viewpoint, I can concede that some evidence may exist in support of an explanation that our current level of material understanding is insufficient for.
For instance, when you think back, can you remember the moment you started? Most people would say no. At some point, as you reach back, memory fades or blurs into a fog, a sort of memory horizon beyond which you can't see. For the few who would claim to remember their birth or the womb, I think they're just fantasizing. Nothing wrong with that, but even so, it would be impossible for them to remember a moment when something coalesced from nothing. Whenever that could have been, whatever was storing the memory of that moment couldn't have had the cognitive infrastructure to select which elements of the experience to record or to construct a narrative frame in which to record them. Regardless, most of us would say that there is no memory of a beginning. It is as if you have always existed.
Your inability to remember when you began may be an accurate reflection of reality. You may not have ever begun. Your consciousness may have no beginning. If this is true, calling it "your" consciousness may be misleading. What you are could be thought of as consciousness that has been accessed by your brain and your body at some point in your biological and cultural development. That was a temporal event. It required a level of maturity that occurred at some vaguely identifiable moment in your body's history. From there, a tangle of affects, drives, and neuro-motivational feedback loops interfaced with the familial and cultural features of your social environment to teach you a language and structure you an ego with which to navigate your world. You, as a cultural-biological being with a developmental history, managed to make contact with the non-temporal consciousness without which you could never know you were having experiences, could never have formed an ego in the first place.
So there are two levels of youness in this model. Most of us, most of the time, identify with the egoic self, attached as it is to the arbitrary accumulation of memories that distinguish you from other people who have their own random knot of memories to attach to. But that ego, the one who gives meaning to those memories, could not exist but for the matrix of consciousness that brought it to life. That consciousness, which isn't precisely yours, and which seems to have begun before your body was born, is also you. It's the other level of youness.
This consciousness is not the same as witnessing awareness. Learning to identify with the witness is a valuable step in ceasing to identify with the body, emotions, and thoughts. All these transient phenomena can be witnessed with equanimity by witnessing awareness. But even the witness can be observed doing its thing from a higher perspective, from that of consciousness itself. Identifying with the witness expands your scope, but only to a wider personal scope. Consciousness, because it isn't "yours", isn't personal. It's a wider scope by far than that of the witness.
Consciousness isn't personal, but it is you. You're made of it. There is no you separate from it. But whatever this mysterious medium of consciousness is doesn't end at the semi-permeable edges of your personal self. It includes that self and it includes everything that self could ever perceive or experience. So this second, transpersonal level of youness doesn't seem like "you" at all, at least not from any viewpoint inside the egoic self. It seems like everything. But this seeming is correct. It is everything. You are everything.
Self level one is the personal self - body, memories, ego, witness, time-bound perspective, and vague boundaries distinguishing itself from other selves. Self level two is the consciousness that preceded your individuality, that permeates every aspect of your individuality, and that transcends experience, including all things.
Some people manage to successfully navigate the maze of the ego. They find the exit and emerge with a comprehensive realization that what they are is not the maze but the eternal infinite consciousness within which the finite maze arose. We variously call these folks enlightened or awakened. Many of them teach that this second level is more real than the first. What they mean is that from the perspective of the second level, the first level is just a trance, or a dream, or a cluster of relatively ignorant beliefs. Identifying with your developed adult personality is no different than identifying with the unformed blob of protoplasm you were as a newborn baby. Nether one is what "you" "really" are. Both were just bio-cultural bridges linking your time-bound body self with something you've always been and will always be, even as everything time-bound about you changes and dies.
Eternal-consciousness you isn't actually more real than ego you. In the same sense, daytime-waking you isn't more real than sleeping-dreamtime you, and adult-developed you isn't more real than infant-undeveloped you. Each reality makes sense on its own terms from within its own frame. But each frame is subsumed within a larger one. Larger frames can see the smaller frames within them and so can comment on the scope of the reality they're playing out. And the frame of eternal-consciousness, or so I've been told, is the ultimate frame. It's the background behind all frames. So its got the ultimate privileged perspective from which to view the finite games and dream-like realities of all little ego self frames. And from that perspective, eternal consciousness is the only game going and the only thing that matters, though, of course, it's not a thing at all. It's the "real" you because its the only you that matters.