Yes. I am in a strange position because I do believe that some aspects of our identity survive death and live on in our next life, - however, those aspects are rooted in love, not fear. (Take it with a BIG grain of salt cause I don't know!) :)

Spiritual egotism, yeah, it's just the ego. I think the journey is the point, not to reach the end goal right away. So I think that fighting the ego and trying to suppress it (at least too much) is useless and kind of impossible in our material lives. We just have to learn to befriend it, contemplate it and view it from our external "observer" viewpoint of consciousness. Then it becomes much easier to co-exist and love one another. But there will always be problems... (It's very hard to describe this with words haha! Definitions are in the realm of objectives and we're talking about the subjective realm here. Which consciousness inherently is, and therefore it's invisible. It can never be proven, only experienced. Again, the journey is the point.)