A central dilemma for theories of consciousness concerns the status of experiential character. If experience is constituted by physical, functional, or representational structure, then a complete account of that structure appears to exhaust it, collapsing the subject into what constitutes it. If experience instead exceeds every such structure, it seems withdrawn behind appearance into an inaccessible interior. Both horns share an assumption: that real presence and inexhaustibility exclude one another, such that whatever is fully present is exhausted and whatever exceeds disclosure must be hidden. This paper argues, from within Participatory Non-Reductionist Realism, that the assumption is false. Its central claim is that consciousness is the reflexive case of manifestation: manifestation whose term is the manifesting being itself. Manifestation is understood not as representation but as real presence, and is in general transitive, a being disclosed in relation to others, often with no subject in view; consciousness is its reflexive case, in which the manifesting being and the term of manifestation are one and the same being. Because every being exceeds every disclosure of it, self-presence never becomes self-possession: a subject is genuinely present to itself while never exhausting what it is present to. On this account, the self is neither a substrate beneath its disclosures nor the mere series of them, but a distinct actuality present to itself without becoming its own object; and representation does not constitute consciousness but presupposes it, articulating contents already disclosed in self-presence. Self-presence proves to be one structure with two folds: manifestation, folded reflexively, supplies the presence, and participation, folded reflexively, supplies that the presence is at issue for the being whose presence it is. The felt character of self-presence is thereby grounded, though by identification rather than derivation: that a being's own inexhaustible actuality is at stake for it is what the reflexive fold of participation is. The view dissolves the dilemma rather than answering it on its own terms, and what remains open is not why consciousness exists but which beings instantiate the reflexive case. That question is shown to be open in a particular way, and not peculiarly. Whether a being stands in the reflexive fold is not among the things a description of its properties states, and an ontology on which beings are distinct in themselves, rather than in virtue of how they are described, will find the like wherever it asks what a being intrinsically is.