Consciousness and awareness are two different things; just as perception is not the same as consciousness. Consciousness is also often confused with sentience. Sentience is the capacity to be aware of feelings and sensations. Sentience and awareness we share with the animal world, consciousness is not available to animals as it requires sort of a ‘double take’, a ‘thought about thought’ modus and may even require language to develop and exchange concepts.
In Scientology consciousness is adequately described in the concepts of the thetan, the analytical mind and awareness of awareness unit. Awareness is mostly perceptual experience, it  exists in many forms such as sense perceptions, the experience of art, in meditation and Buddhist mindfulness. Percepts depend on the concepts of space and time, as without those one cannot hear or see. Consciousness requires concepts and thought about concepts, even hierarchies of concepts, it’s meta-awareness. It’s also referred to as apperception, in more scientific or philosophical circles.

Hubbard in Scientology, often fails to distinguish between these two concepts and defines consciousness as awareness and awareness as perception:

CONSCIOUSNESS,
1. awareness of now. (DTOT, p.24)

2. consciousness is awareness. Awareness itself is perception. (2ACC-8B, 5311CM24)

AWARENESS

1. the ability to perceive the existence of (HCOB 4 January 1973)

2. awareness itself is perception (2ACC-8B 5311CM24)

ref. Dianetics and Scientology TECHNICAL DICTIONARY

THETA IS REASON

REASON IS MATHEMATICS

LIFE IS BASICALLY MATHEMATICS

That is basically what I am trying to say in my book ‘Critique of Pure Scientology’. Hubbard was so close but missed this final step in the puzzle which is that mathematics is underlying the considerations and postulates. Mathematics determines what is considerable.

ref. Phoenix Lectures

ARC-1: Affinity, Reality and Communication= Experience

ARC is what we have in common with animals, we can experience things love, agree and observe, we can communicate with things and thus experience them. ARC has to do with the phenomenal world.

ARC-2: Actuality plus Reasoning and Concepts = Understanding

Actuality, not ‘scientological reality’ is accessible through reason and leads to concepts which all together leads to understanding. Understanding goes deeper than surface reality, or appearances it goes into why things are what they are. ARC has to do with the noumenal world of ideas and theta (reason, mathematics) itself.

To understand something it is not enough to merely perceive it, although noting the existence of that something, ought to be part of it. Something can be an idea or an object, in other words mental or physical. Let’s consider the case of objects first.

To fully understand something you have to know what it is and also where, when, how and why it is. The latter amounts to grasping the reason for its existence. What it is, is a matter of identification and definition. It amounts to correct categorization. Where and when is a matter of locating it in spacetime.

One could see an object and practically immediately state with some certainty that this is a radio. You have perceived it and could place it in a category of things already understood to some degree. To some degree, is stated advisedly as one could categorize the object correctly without understanding how it actually works which would be part of full understanding. Thus we have degrees of understanding. Full understanding would embrace all the constituents listed in the second paragraph above.

Concepts and percepts

There are concepts and percepts (sense messages). We can’t have percepts without concepts, we can’t have percepts without communication, we can’t have communication without space. Something like ‘honesty’ is a concept, not a percept. You can try as much as you like but can’t really see ‘honesty’. If we could our world would have looked differently. Without the concept of space, there would be no percepts. Thus concepts are senior. Percepts have a mechanical communication aspect and concepts do not.

Concepts can exist independent of observation, whereas percepts are the direct result of observation. So we might say that there are two types of understanding, a priori understanding and a posteriori understanding.

Understanding ideas

In the case of ideas the matter is simple. The only requisite to understanding ideas is to be able to define them and relate them to other ideas. One might say as Hubbard did that the degree of understanding depends on how much relationship one can give it to other ideas. {EVALUATION OF DATA, a datum is as understood as it can be related to other data. (SOS Gloss)}

ARC  and experience

Experience is defined (Merriam Webster) as the act or process of directly perceiving events or reality.

When you experience something you are at the effect end of a communication. You duplicate whatever was steered in your direction. Experiencing life and things involve ARC. Hubbard defined communication as the operation, the action by which one experiences emotion and by which one agrees. In another context he defined it as the interchange of perceptions through the material universe between organisms. Experience thus can be considered, the duplication of that which emanated from the source point, but it is more than that. The experience also implies that you have an attitude or a feeling about that what’s been duplicated. Also the fact that you may agree or disagree with it plays a role. So here we have it A+R+C=Experiential Understanding one could say. Not necessarily conceptual understanding, quod erat demonstrandum. ARC does not always equal understanding.

1.   Before the beginning and forever there is nothing.

2.   And the entire secret is that nothing did not, not exist.

3.   Nothing existed.

4.   And the nothing was called zero, an ontological zero.

5.   It is immaterial and exists beyond space-time.
Thus had no beginning and no end, thus eternal

6.   It was dimensionless (a mathematical point)
Just like Descartes said: mind has no extension

7.   In other words the zero is the domain of the mind.

8.   In the nothing are the numbers equating to zero.
(-∞ – 0) + (0 – ∞) = 0

9.   All mathematical equations balance to zero.

10. Zero is the singularity as nothing existed before the Big Bang.

11. Zero is an existential plenitude of infinite potentials.

12. Implicit in the singularity zero is an infinity of zeroes.
There is no reason why there would not be an infinity of zeroes, if one zero already implies infinity, it follows that zero must contain an infinity of zeroes.

13. The physical universe stems from these mathematical points but have
® > 0. A mathematical point is a circle with radius ® zero, between zero and infinity we find the physical world.

14. The ground state or native state of the singularity is an infinite potential for knowledge.

15. And this goes for each of the zeroes which are all alive and sentient.

16. The zeroes evolve from sentience to intelligence and self-consciousness.

17. The evolution goes from full potential to full actualization.

18. The mind (zero domain) processes information (sinusoidal waves, or higher dimensional vortices) (numbers) to then experience that information as feelings, sensations, perceptions, adventures etc. in space-time.  

ref. Critique of Pure Scientology