Most people have difficulty defining consciousness as have most of the big thinkers from 1000 BCE! For me it is fairly easy because I have a spiritual basis in my life. For those that haven't a spiritual basis, consciousness is almost impossible to understand or explain as Daniel Dennett discovered.
Consciousness is the limited time we have to experience and communicate with the universal consciousness commonly known as God but more accurately described as the Hebrew Yhwh , the elohim (several or many gods) the Holy Spirit ,Nirvana , Param Brahma ,Vishnu etc
As a side note it was the elohim (a Hebrew plural) that created the heavens and the earth in Genesis 1.1 not 'God' as most bibles translate