Identification as Consciousness

English version of ‘Identification as Consciousness’ – an article published in the September 2026 edition of the Dutch language non-duality magazine InZicht. The topic for this edition of the magazine was Identity.

A friend once told me that he had met an interesting man in a sauna. The man told him that he had a practice that had brought him a lot of peace and wellbeing. This practice involved endeavouring to remain focused on the words ‘I am’ and the felt sense that accompanied this. The man worked as a long-distance lorry driver. He described how he attended to these words as he drove and it helped to sustain a sense of ease and equanimity on his lengthy journeys. 

My friend was impressed. “It’s the one thing that is knowable for everybody” he told me. “Everything else is illusionary, but the one thing thing that cannot be doubted is that I am”.

I felt a little confused. The words ‘I am’ didn’t mean anything when I said them. There was a searching for something they could relate to but there was nothing there. It was a little surprising as I was aware that many spiritual teachers considered this ‘I am’ to be quite a big deal.

At the time, I was engaged in writing my book The First and Last Belief. I had already defined the First Belief as ‘the false sense of being a separate self’ and described it as a sort of embodied assumption. However those words ‘I am’, or perhaps ‘I exist’ now seemed to offer a more direct way of pointing to the primary illusion itself. 

Funnily enough, when I was training in Sensorimotor Psychotherapy several years earlier, we were taught that realising ‘I exist’ was the first milestone for an infant in the instinctive process of building a healthy sense of self. But it was not until I heard about the man in the sauna and tested the words out that the penny really dropped:- the sense of existence probably plays an important role in the development of complex human brains, but it also appears to be the assumption that disappeared in the sudden, apparently irreversible moment that I call ‘Liberation’ in my book.

In the story above (and in this sentence too), I use the word ‘I’ to refer to the personality that we call Monica. In some ways ‘she’ feels likes a better descriptor – though not in a clinical depersonalisation* sort of a way. On the contrary it’s quite the opposite of this: all of experience is very intimate, non-separate, immediate and alive since the Liberation thing apparently happened.

*It is possible that early confusion and ambivalence around ‘being’ or ‘existing’ may play some role in mental health symptoms such as depersonalisation or derealisation. As a therapist I sometimes work with survivors of developmental trauma who express uncertainty about whether they do exist or actually want to. It can often seem like people are instinctively endeavouring to get away from (memories of) unbearable sensory experience. They imagine that if they could just not exist then this would be easier. But trying not to exist creates it’s own stresses and also limits the natural capacity for enjoyment of life. Cultivating the ability to allow physical sensations and a wider range of present experience can help the nervous system to assess when it is safe to rest and recover – or maybe even play. And who knows, maybe for some of these people, attending to the words and felt sense of ‘I am’ might also be helpful.

This brings me to the point of this little article. In starting to write and talk more about Liberation and the disappearance of the ‘I am’ more than seventeen years ago, new ways of speaking about it (and presumably new neural connections) are arising. It now seems to make clear sense to say that the primary illusion is the sense that ‘I exist’. And that even when identification with all sorts of other things (a Me contained in a body, a being called Monica, being good enough or not good enough, a writer of articles or a doer of any other actions) lose their grip, the subtle identification as an identifier or experiencer can still be in place. Even if it seems like ‘I am Consciousness itself’, that too is still a subtle and pervasive identity. 

I am speaking about this from experience (or at least from a vague memory of it that is appearing presently). Before the sense of separation suddenly disappeared there was an in-between state (or experience) of identification as Consciousness. The felt sense of being located in my head looking out at a separate world had gone and it often felt like all of life was happening inside an expanded version of ‘myself’. This seemed to fit with many of the descriptions of liberation that I had heard. There were frequent experiences of ‘One-ness’ and ‘in-love-ness’ with people and things, but there could also still be a troubling sense of personal-ness and unease that seemed to suggest something wasn’t quite right.

When this last identification suddenly evaporated, or was seen through (by no-one), it was then plainly obvious that everything was simply arising in the same Timeless Presence or Consciousness. The sense of actually being anything at all or needing to do something to sustain peace was completely gone. Its absence revealed a kind of undramatic, un-special, simplicity which isn’t personal or impersonal, has obviously always been the case, doesn’t come and go and is actually rather a relief. There still seems to be a personality who answers to the name of Monica though. And that personality appears to have her own habits, preferences and confusions like any other apparent person. This simply arises naturally as part of the appearance, like everything else.

The end of identification as Consciousness might sound like a loss.  After all, a lot of beautiful, mystical teachings and poems appear to emanate from this sense of being something so special and wonderful. As a psychology student I fell in love with Walt Whitman’s poem ‘Song of Myself’ and others in his Leaves of Grass collection. They felt profound and inspiring and spoke to what seemed like my own mystical experiences. Lines such as “I am larger, better than I thought, I did not know I held so much goodness” still evoke a sense of something expansive and good. I quote this verse on my therapy website for this very reason. Nonetheless such poems generally point towards aspects of experience, rather then the unchanging, undivided ‘nothing-ness’ of Timeless Consciousness. 

Ideas of bigness or smallness, a sense of expansion or contraction, inside or outside, aliveness or dullness, me or not me, are all simply phenomenon arising in Consciousness. Even the sense of ‘being Consciousness’ is simply another experience. There is no real separate you or me within life that could ‘be’ anything. 

What Consciousness ultimately is remains unknowable. It may be some sort of by-product of brain activity or something else entirely. All I can say is that, from this perspective, life appears ‘as if’ there are brains. And perceptual science suggests that these brains receive information via the senses from some sort of ‘real external world’ and create their own representations of it.  These representations are all that can be known because everything that is experienced is generated in this way. So there is no way to experience anything directly.  There is only Consciousness – and all phenomena, every aspect of life, arises and disappears in this Consciousness and has no know-able existence beyond this. This does appear to fit with the way life appears in Liberation. When the identification as Consciousness or as anything else persists, this might seem a little less obvious – but then that’s the nature of an illusion!

Let us now return to the lorry driver in the sauna. It sounds like his practice of focusing on the words ‘I am’ was of great benefit. I hear that many other people have discovered something similar. This is enough to make it a valuable practice in itself.

There could also be another reason that some spiritual teachers suggest turning towards the sense of ‘I am’ or ‘I exist.’ For example, Nisargadatta Maharaj reportedly advised his followers to remain with, or give attention to, the ‘I am’ until the truth revealed itself. In simply registering what these words seem to be pointing towards, there is a possibility of recognising an unexpected, inherent mismatch with how life actually is. A contradiction or dissonance of this type has the potential to trigger neural networks to update a learning or assumption that no longer makes sense. (This is the theory of Memory Reconsolidation which I explore further in my book.) If this happens then, at least theoretically, the belief that ‘I am’ could suddenly disappear. This might be a surprise, but not generally problematic in itself as far as I can tell. Though it’s probably better not to experiment while you are driving…

Monica Khosla is the author of The First and Last Belief: a theory of Liberation in the age of neuroscience.