The property of the universe to become capable of self reflection after billions of years of non-intervention is just mind blowing. Life is the most amazing thing. It's as if life and consciousness are inherent emergent properties of certain systems. If you create a complicated enough state machine with low enough entropy (i.e. the universe), the ability to self reflect simply seems to emerge after a while. It's as if life just wants to exist. Amazing.

As for animal consciousness, there are probably degrees of that. Humans are probably the only living beings on Earth that are capable of higher order reasoning and self reflection (meta-thinking). That's not to say animals aren't conscious; they probably just aren't able to reason about the world and their own existence the same way we are (since their brains aren't as developed). In the same vein, who is to say there aren't beings in this universe capable of reasoning on such a high level that even with sufficient explanations, our brains wouldn't be able to accommodate such reasoning on the biological/hardware level due to a lack of proper circuitry.