Sartre

Ok, I seriously love Sartre. I haven't been able to put him down. I had been put off of philosophy for some time because from what I have read about many of the key authors, we just wouldn't get along... but I absolutely LOVE Sartre. He is a very strict rational atheist, but somehow his writing crosses over into the realm of transcendental mysticism.
From what I have tried to understand so far, consciousness is nothingness, just past and present perceptions of our own being and that which is around us, but our 'Self' itself is nothingness and each human strives to reconcile the true void within themselves (i.e. the fact that the moment is only the act of perception, and the future is made up of the unattainable need to become one with a reality which is foreign to our consciousness). We want to become Something, to become Real, but consciousness is "Translucent" and ever changing. We will never know our true selves, just our ego at any given time, which is the nexus between all our past and present conscious perceptions. We choose to be a slave to this ego we have created, even though we know our consciousness is completely free from the constraints that the ego places upon it, we are capable of any action, but we confine ourselves in the hopes of better knowing ourselves. Knowing our ego is not knowing ourselves though, and when we delve deeper, we will never encounter consciousness, the nothingness, because it exists outside of ourselves, it is simply an act of perception. We can feel our own foreignness whenever someone looks at us, and we are forced to acknowledge ourselves as an "other."
In short Sartre says that humankind's search of an unreachable goal is hardwired into our existence. Consciousness creates a void and we feel that emptiness within ourselves. We forever search for the Self that we will never truly possess.