Many articles often mention using conscious presence, or the light of consciousness, as a way to free yourself from ego or pain body. What is conscious presence?
It is the awareness that frees you from identification with any thought or emotional form.
Awareness
Conscious presence is awareness. Awareness is different to thinking, or being taken over by emotion. When you are aware of your thoughts and emotions, this conscious presence is what separates you from the thought or emotion.
By using conscious presence you automatically disidentify from a thought or emotion within you. This identification is what gives thoughts and emotions the power to take you over - because you believe they are who you are.
But who you are is just a field of awareness, and conscious presence is a practicing of experiencing this. Conscious presence is a silent observing of thought or emotion. You can practice being the space in which the thought or emotion takes place, arises and subsides.
When you are in this state you do not resist the emotion or try to change it, you just allow it to be, but from a state of awareness. When you become aware of a thought or emotion in this way, you see these thoughts and emotions are not you. They becomes forms that you are simply aware of. This removes your identification with them, and they weaken and disappear by themselves.
This is also known in buddhism as mindfulness.
Once you lose your identification with thought and emotional forms, or even practice conscious presence - you feel the inner peace that is within the awareness of what you are.
It is ironic that the moment you can accept a thought or emotion and just be the awareness behind it - you free yourself far quicker than resisting the inner state or trying to change it.
Conscious presence is the awakening process taking place within you. A consciousness shift occurs, moving from thinking to awareness.
The Light Of Consciousness
Conscious presence could also be called the light of consciousness. Whatever it comes in to contact with becomes transmuted into increased conscious presence. It illuminates any darkness within you and uses the darkness as fuel to become brighter. The more you practice this conscious awareness in yourself, the stronger it gets over time. Past pain can not survive for long in the light of consciousness, the same way that darkness can not survive in the presence of light.
Notice what there is before a thought arises - stillness. This is you. A thought may then come and go, but the stillness is always there, unaffected. Feel this for yourself and you notice that the awareness that you are is never changed or affected by anything - it is just constantly there, even if you lose your awareness of it.
Conscious awareness involves no judgement of what arises. It is a seeing without naming. It is what you are.