You mention starting from consciousness -- are you familiar with Husserl? Your strategy was his strategy, and he considered himself to be approaching the issue scientifically. I have a lot of respect for Husserl's perspective, although I'm not sure it's productive.

I'm somewhat skeptical about a universal spirit. These days, I'm attracted to Mark Solms' thinking that consciousness emerges from biological processes. This works for me because I believe the sensations and intuitions that would lead us to see our consciousness as other than an evolutionary survival mechanism can be (easily) explained as static or noise in our minds, so dualism is not a necessary path to go down, imho.

Hope my comments are coherent. This is an engaging discussion.