I have things like logic and rational views of the world.
If so, can I ask you a question? It would be this. Are people born blank slates onto which everything we become must be learned, or does our genetic code include something like a genetic memory that shapes the bodies and brain? Are we not plastic in the sense that we can learn any language our parents may speak no matter what it is, but the brains structures to do so are hard wired in? Do we not, as an extension of my question, have a human nature, a tiger a tiger nature, a gold fish a gold fish nature. Don't humans have a capacity for self awareness.
As a rational person using logic to answer what is conscious awareness? Can you enter a state of conscious awareness by examining data from a machine. I would suggest that using logic and reason to discover this odd human potential you would have to practice some other form of science, a science where you yourself would be the observer and the observed and for that to happen you would have to stop thought which is fear and time.
But if you were thought and time and fear, the ego, how would you do this. You would have to die to the I you imagine yourself to be. But the ego is the fear of death. Do you think it will die willingly.
Maybe religion is just a placebo to get you over the hump. Religion tells us that nothing evil can happen to a good person in this life or the next. Pity the poor Atheist who fears his own death. Blessed is he or she who can transcend it through faith.
For people like you and I, full of self proclaimed reason and logic, religion is not our way. We aren't so luck to be able to have faith. But if the religious can have what we would call a delusional feeling of grace that brings them great happiness, then such a state of consciousness must be built into our brains. Do we know why we evolved that way? I don't but I'm grateful that we did. Those who have faith do not need ego like those full of fear but an Atheist can go to the same place differently. The loss of all faith, all hope, can lead you to the pit of despair from which there is no escape. What good is your ego there. Of those who see the emptiness of everything there's no point in it. Grace can then appear.
That capacity is built into our genes, seems to me. Built in also I think is a discriminatory capacity to assign rank to emotional states. Pleasure is better than pain, Grace is better than endless worrying thought. The Buddha beats the Thinker because he isn't in the past or the future think about things, he's hear in love with being. If all paths lead there what difference do they make. They are only means to an end and like a map, mean nothing to the arrived unless there is someone else for whom that map can be followed.