"While all forms of life, to differing degrees, have consciousness, only human beings have the miraculous capacity to be aware of consciousness itself. As human beings, we know that we know. This capacity for self-reflective awareness, or self-consciousness, in the context of fourteen billion years of development, is a very recent emergence. And it means everything. Because of the gift of self-reflective awareness, the human being, distinct from all other forms of life, has the capacity to recognize his or her own true identity as being not separate from the whole event of creation....The human vehicle becomes a vessel through which the whole universe is able to know itself."
Evolutionary Enlightenment: A New Path to Spiritual Awakening by Andrew Cohen, pp.43-44.