A few days ago, I was in a car, waiting for my mom. I found myself parked outside the high school I went to back in the day. As I glanced at the building, after the initial wave of nostalgia, I felt something strange. It was something I knew intellectually, but this time, I felt it in my body.

I could recollect memories of myself standing in those hallways and climbing up those stairs. I could see the imaginary face of that person who was me more than a decade ago. And then I turned and looked at the mirror in the car to see my face. It wasn’t the same. The face, the entire body, was completely different. It didn’t look like that was me back then.

I recollected how I thought when I was in school – my attitudes and beliefs. And I felt a strange disconnect to them – they weren’t mine. Yet I knew it was me back then who spent his days in that building. It was a strange feeling to realise that I was there back in the day, yet it wasn’t me. I would not identify with that person, either physically or mentally. The body has changed. The psychology has changed. It was only the memories that informed the identification.

I asked myself, who am I? I knew the answer. Not just intellectually, but experientially. And today it came back to me again, as I posed that question. I could see quite clearly in the mirror that I wasn’t the body. I could say that I wasn’t the thoughts and beliefs and attitudes. I could say that I changed – and I could see what changed – but what was the ‘I’ that did not change? What was that part of me which says that both of these people are me – despite having different bodies and minds?

It was consciousness – the ability to be aware. It was the life force – the aliveness that was occupying this body that differentiates me from an inanimate object. As the enlightened scottish philosopher Syd Banks puts it, ‘pure consciousness uncontaminated by personal thought’. It was the ‘unconditioned mind’ that Jiddu Krishnamurthy talks about. I had the body. I had the thinking. Both of them keep changing every moment. But I wasn’t them.

I was that ability to be aware of the body and the thoughts. This felt so impersonal. It reminded me of what my mentor Michael Neill said in his Genius Catalyst Intensive – ‘Genius is impersonal’. ‘I’ was that Genius – that observer that’s also the observed. I was the universe becoming aware of itself. ‘I’ am awareness – nothing less. And so are you.