In Part One of this series, we defined the ego — not as a personality flaw or a character weakness, but as an entire orientation of the soul away from its Source. In Part Two, we watched it operate in the texture of daily life, in the stories we tell ourselves, in the things we claim as our own.

Now we come to the big questions. What actually dissolves the ego and what is on the other side?

I showed the second blog to a colleague of mine recently and she asked something. She said:

“I understand when they say the ego is what makes you unhappy in life, because you are attached to something that is not you, and you are afraid to lose it because you think it’s part of you. But when you get rid of your ego, does that mean you get rid of what makes you, you? In that case, at the end — who are you really? What makes me, ME? And if I’m no longer attached to my belongings, my partner, my job — does that mean I should be left with no feeling? Not involved in what is around me? I know the answer is no, but then when should I care, and when should I not care?”

The questions get to the core of the final step in truly encountering one’s nature and can be summarised in two simple questions:

“Where is freedom and who am I?”

What Really Is Freedom?

To begin we need to understand the nature of personal freedom, and to answer this, Emanuel Swedenborg gives one of the clearest descriptions.

Freedom, he writes, is not the ability to do whatever you want. It is something far more specific: freedom is what you feel when you act from what you love. Whatever a person loves, they do freely — with the full, natural movement of their will, without compulsion, without reluctance. It is an interior quality that follows directly from what a person loves most deeply.

He goes on to explain that there are two kinds of freedom. The first is the ego’s freedom — the freedom to pursue its own desires, protect its own interests, and arrange the world according to its own preferences. It feels, from the inside, like genuine liberty. But Swedenborg is clear that this freedom is, at its root, slavery. A self that is governed entirely by its own desires is not truly free. It is simply free to want — and wanting, as we have seen, is a wheel that never stops turning and never provides true or lasting satisfaction.

The second is what he calls heavenly freedom — the freedom of a soul that acts from an inner place of selfless love, a love that is no longer looking for praise or validation in any form. Its actions are not driven by force or self-punishment, but by an inner recognition that right is right. It cares because care is good. It acts justly because justice is right. And it does none of these things in order to add another bead to its identity bracelet — but because something deeper than personality has taken hold: a conscience, a conviction, an inner life that no longer needs the world’s approval to know its own direction.

There is no “I am a very giving person.” There is no “I love being caring.” There is simply the doing of what is right, and the quiet understanding of fundamental truths as a natural expression of what one has become — not a role the self performs, but the soul moving as it was always meant to move.

So now we have established what is Freedom. It’s is not the absence of feeling, desire, or engagement with life. It is not detachment or indifference. It is the condition of a soul whose inner heart has been reordered to correspond to its deepest nature. It no longer circling back to the self, but flows outward, naturally and without effort, toward what is genuinely good and genuinely true. In that freedom, a person is not less themselves. They are, for the first time, fully in line with their true self.

The Dark Before the Storm

So now we have established the nature of freedom — let’s move forward. What makes me, ME?

This is the most honest question anyone can ask at this stage of the journey, and it deserves an honest answer. Because at this point, the ego begins to sense its own potential nothingness — and it is afraid. The idea that it could end is shocking as in most cases the person believes they are an ego and the whole process opens the door for one word to walk in, and it is not a word most of us like to hear.

Death.

And here is what they won’t tell you: the fear is real. And in a sense, you will die.

Or at least a part of you will. Why?

Imagine for a moment that everything you have built your life around — your role, your reputation, your relationships, your carefully held beliefs about who you are — begins, quietly and without warning, to feel less solid than it did. Not because anything outside has changed. But because something inside has shifted and a new awareness has become possible. A certainty you were carrying has suddenly loosened. And to go further into this place seems like a journey into nothingness. A void. Something that feels uncomfortably like death.

This is the moment the mystic Teresa of Ávila entered. Not as a theological concept, but as a lived and vivid reality that arrived without asking or warning. Everything she had built her spiritual life upon — her devotion, her discipline, her carefully held image of herself before God — suddenly had nowhere to stand. The presence that came to her was nothing like the God she had held in her mind as concept and prayer. It was immediate. Overwhelming. Alive in a way her constructed self could not contain. The “I” she had so faithfully maintained simply had no place in it. And what she found, on the other side of that dissolution, was not the absence of herself — it was the presence she had been reaching toward her entire life, now no longer a thought about God, but God himself, closer than her own breath. An internal and ever-loving presence that, from that point forward, touched and transformed every aspect of her life.

Jung called this stage the Nigredo — the blackening. When the identity one has spent a lifetime building begins to fall away, a void opens in its place. He was also clear that this is not a collapse. For those willing to stay with it, it is the necessary precondition for genuine transformation. The mask — the accumulated persona of roles, achievements, and self-concepts — must come off before what lies beneath can breathe. And yet most people turn back at precisely this point. The ego, faced with this horizon, does what it always does when threatened — it retreats to the familiar, the safe, the known. Better the prison you understand than the freedom you cannot yet see.

Who am I

So who Am I? The answer is much more simple to this question for all those that walk past the void.

You are not alone.

The ego’s defining condition — the thing that drives every defence, every attachment, every restless search for completion — is precisely this: it is alone. It was born in the thought of separation. It has lived in that separation ever since. And everything it has ever done — every role it has adopted, every bead it has added to its bracelet, every relationship it has leaned on, every achievement it has pursued — has been an attempt to solve the ache of that aloneness without ever addressing its actual source.

The ego cannot solve it. Not because it lacks intelligence or effort, but because it is looking in the wrong direction. Outward, always outward — for something that can only be found within.

And within — beneath the noise, beneath the roles, beneath the accumulated weight of a lifetime of self-construction — is something the ego has never been able to control. Not because it is distant or difficult or reserved for the spiritually advanced. But because it requires the building of a relationship. Humility. Openness. You are body, soul, and spirit — three distinct dimensions of a single, unified being — and at the deepest centre of that unity is a presence that has never once left you and never will. The ego can run from it but it cannot alter the foundations of its house.

Those foundations are what God declared to Moses at the burning bush: “I AM THAT I AM”. Simply, being itself. Pure, unconditional love. The great I AM that underlies all consciousness, all awareness, all selfhood and all creation.

And here is the thing the ego could never tell you: that I AM is not only God’s name. It is the ground of yours.

The journey back to the Source is not long. It is simply, as Rumi knew, just a matter of stopping the journey in the wrong direction — and turning around.

This is the third and final part of the series exploring the ego, we hope you’ve enjoyed your journey with us. “The Enemy Within.” Part One defined the ego and named its antidotes. Part Two examined how the ego operates in daily life. This final part explored the path of transformation and becoming — the unanimous teaching of the great mystical traditions across time and culture.

The Conference for Consciousness and Human Evolution (TCCHE) bridges ancient wisdom and contemporary consciousness studies to support seekers on the path of genuine transformation.

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Sources and Further Reading
For readers who wish to explore the themes in this article more deeply, the following works are particularly recommended:
Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Vieira, Take Me to Truth: Undoing the Ego (O Books, 2006)
Emanuel Swedenborg, Regeneration: Spiritual Growth and How It Works (Swedenborg Foundation, 2014)
C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy and Memories, Dreams, Reflections — for the Nigredo and the process of individuation as parallel to the mystical emptying of the self.
John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul — the classic Christian mystical account of the soul’s passage through spiritual desolation toward union with God.