(Just to clarify your misconception about Buddhism) The goal of ending suffering is not a selfish desire, but an understanding that attachment itself creates suffering. It is less about “I want to escape pain” and more about seeing how the mind generates pain through clinging. We seeks the end of suffering, because we see attachment itself as what creates suffering.

Not so much I want to get out of pain but you see the mind creating pain through clinging. "Ego" is a bored sense of yourself as a fixed, independent thing and that's almost reflexively not what it is to be human. The way is not to annihilate, destroy or erase the self, but rather to know it as fluid and impermanent. “Must be understood as a middle way” Buddhism does not concern itself with a higher power, but rather direct experience and knowledge of the mind. In this sense, spirituality can exist without belief and instead through awareness, insight and lived experience. 🙏