"I am finding that everything we say about consciousness is just an artifact of our language. If we are careful to always include the subject of the sentence as well as the unspoken assumptions then I have not come across any questions that don't have a straightforward answer. Same with morality."
It sounds like you're influenced by Wittgenstein, or at least his ideas. If you assume all these issues are artefacts of language then there's no way I can give you an adequate summary in any amount of writing, and especially not one comment. Human minds can only communicate by exchanging strings of words, after all.
To give you a straight answer, though: in vipasanna meditation you focus on one thing (typically the breath, though I often used ambient sounds) and attempt to break down your experience of that thing into constituent sensations. One thing you learn from this is how frequently your attention wanders, and by really training yourself to focus you learn how your attention is directed from moment to moment. The main thing you are trying to gain, though, is a first-hand experience of the Buddhist view of reality: that solid objects do not exist, and that existence consists only of flickering sensations, with no permanence or independent existence.
I really can't summarise Ayn Rand, since her writing is already extremely well summarised and essentialised. Click around that website if you want to learn her views on any particular topic. The relevant ideas here, though, are her views on concepts. There's been a long-running divide in philosophy between people who thought concepts reflected something intrinsic to the universe (e.g., that all horses contain an essence of horse-ness, or reflect Plato's ideal horse) -- and the people who thought this was nonsense and that language was therefore an arbitrary human construct (this latter view is currently dominant). Rand found a third position: concepts are human constructs, but they serve an objective purpose, and there are objective rules which determine their formation. ITOE is the only place where you will find her full argument.
To compare the two: Buddha takes sensory experience as the gold standard for reality, and concludes that reality exists, but is ultimately transient and lacks identity. Rand takes perceptual experience as the gold standard and concludes that reality exists, that the everyday objects we perceive really exist, and that therefore reality is logical and consistent.
(As for Wittgenstein, he says human language is just an arbitrary game which can never describe true reality, and ends up in a kind of quasi-mysticism (man helpless in the face of an ineffable, incomprehensible universe)).
I predict you will not be satisfied with this answer, because you are following a very misleading philosophical framework, but I wrote it up for the interest of lurkers.