Let me start first by trying to understand spirituality. What I am more interested in here is about consiousness. From my extensive reading of the books of vedic wisdom,talks of vivekananda and many others my idea about the consiousness is this. There is a consiousness within us. It is neither our body nor our mind. It is us. The proof for this is that even if we stop hearing from all our senses and also make our mind still we exists. It is that something that we call our soul. This consiousness is the same as that in everyone of us. This consiousness is the same one as the one that created the universe. This is why we tell that god is within us. So what is consiousness. Consiousness is all of this. Me, you , earth,sun ,universe,light and everything else.
Suppose i want to make a consiousness, what will it comprise.
1) It should have freedom. Like time. No one can stop it.
Freedom comes from the fact that it is the higest of kind at that place. Just imagine human consiousness. Why human consiousness is so supreme is because we actually are our creators. Humans,Animals or a natural catastrophe can kill and take away our body but we stay intact. Noone and nothing can touch us. This is one essential quality that consiousness pocess.
2) It should have a purpose. One purpose.
There will be a reason for the existence of that consiousness. The consiousness itself may be unaware of it. When that reason is satisfied the consiousness will cease to exist. Note that this does not conflict with the first one. This is because the consiousness can do anything regardless of its purpose.

Let me try to put things mathematically.

Suppose c is a consiousness
I tell that c is a consiousness. No one in this world can kill of destroy this c that i have created.
So it satisfies the first requirement. Now it needs a purpose.
c=a+b.
now understand that two new consiousness have been created , namely a and b. The sum of a and b gives c. The purpose of c is to store the sum of a and b. All the three consiousness are self sufficient in themselves with respect to the two conditions.

Now we know the meaning of the a,b,c in the above expression. What we should give thought to is the other two operators in that expression = and + . These represents interaction between the consiousness in some way. Mind you that a,b and c are necesarily the same thing. But they are covering themselves in a veil of Maya and presenting themselves as c=a+b. Maya is a imaginary thing. Once you remove Maya you can see that there is no c=a+b, there is no c,a,b. But there is only one and just one consiousness.

Now this is a small universe.
So universe is a place where consiousness co-exists.