One way to understand consciousness is as the experience of pure existence, which is the beginning of your mind, the seed of all experience, the root of all concepts. Such existence is actually a presence, a conscious presence. When we experience it fully, we recognize it as pure consciousness, a field of awareness that includes our capacities of perception and experience. And furthermore, we recognize consciousness as the underlying ground of everything. Everything turns out to be a manifestation of and within this field. We find out that this consciousness is the ground of mind too, of all concepts and knowing. Although pure consciousness is nonconceptual, it is the ground of all concepts and all kinds of knowing, both the ordinary and the gnostic. – Diamond Heart Book Five: Inexhaustible Mystery, Ch. 6