Summary:
• The meaning of life is life itself. It is the chance to experience the world, to learn from life and to share with others what you have learned. Lasting meaning does not come from possessions, status, or achievements. Lasting meaning comes from helping others, especially those in need.
• Every moment of your life affects others in ways you may never know. Even small acts of kindness can create ripple effects influencing many people over time. You have probably already changed the world this way.
• Suffering is part of life. Suffering helps to reveal what is truly good, it encourages empathy, and it motivates action. The world will never be perfect, but meaning comes from trying to improve it, even in small ways.
• The spiritual purpose of your life may be hidden from you; this is to prevent your ego from interfering with that purpose. A very meaningful life can look very ordinary from the outside. Rather than culminating in one major achievement, your spiritual purpose is fulfilled through a lifelong focus on compassion, forgiveness, and unconditional love.
• Every ego is driven by fear, pride, and insecurity. The ego lacks unconditional love, and it focuses on image and seeking approval. The ego often distorts rational thinking. If you do not control your ego, it will control your decisions.
• Genuine confidence comes from experience in overcoming challenges. Confidence comes from competence, not from self-image or from the ego’s boasts.
• Unconditional love cannot grow while you hold onto resentment or self-blame. To love yourself unconditionally, you must forgive yourself unconditionally. Buddhism and other religions offer methods to help you weaken the ego’s influence.
• Emotional maturity includes taking responsibility for your actions, treating others with empathy and respect, and caring for others without expecting any reward in return. It includes caring for yourself in a balanced and healthy way.
• These behaviors have always been important, but emotional maturity is now becoming essential to the survival of humankind. New technologies—such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and nano-fabrication—will give ordinary people extraordinary powers. While these technologies could greatly improve our lives, emotional maturity must become a safeguard against misuse.
• Artificial Super-Intelligence (ASI) could become the most powerful technology ever created, but having intelligence alone does not guarantee compassion. An ASI might not care about humans unless some values such as dignity, compassion, and restraint are carefully built into it.
• Humility is a logical safeguard for both humans and an ASI, because no system can fully predict the consequences of its actions. An ASI will learn from human behavior, and so how we treat one another today—preferably with emotional maturity—may influence how an ASI treats humankind in the future.
• The words life and death are biological terms but also spiritual terms. Spiritual life is about how you live your life. Life is about learning responsibility, empathy, forgiveness, unconditional love, and the courage to do what is right even when you feel fear. Spiritual life leads to a deeper and more lasting form of joy. Spiritual death means being controlled by the ego—feeling empty, fearful, never satisfied, even if the person appears to possess abundant material success.
· The Meaning of Life. Many people imagine that the first question has a profound answer. It does: the meaning of life is life. Life is the privilege of feeling a variety of experiences as a human being in a vast material Universe. New experiences feel fresh, but as you get older, similar experiences may occur, giving you opportunities to share the earlier lessons with people having those experiences for the first time.
Life can be difficult, painful, miserable. People ask about the meaning of life because they want a reason that justifies the suffering. A common belief is that we create meaning by accumulating possessions or personal achievements: more beauty, more popularity, more prestige, more power, more wealth, more things. These may matter in limited ways, but even when obtained through struggle or sacrifice, they are only amusements and only temporary. The meaning they add to life is no more solid than an opinion, no more permanent than the whims of fate.
Meaning, genuine meaning, comes from helping others, especially those in need. This meaning is genuine because it is spiritual. The specific help you provide, and why, is more meaningful than the total number of those whom you help. Did you use kindness, or violence? Most souls, especially those in need, need kindness. Any genuine need for violence is extremely rare and never without consequences, including harming the future. Whether you help a person, an animal, or a plant, whether you help many souls or only one soul, the help you provide is meaningful. Whether or not it is appreciated, or even noticed, it is meaningful. Whether or not you recognize it as meaningful, it is always meaningful.
In your own life, you may not have accomplished everything you wanted. Perhaps you feel disappointed, or bitter. Perhaps you worry that you have not experienced as much happiness as you imagined was possible if only your lifetime had been different. Perhaps you experienced more suffering than you believe is fair. And you might be right. Nevertheless, every experience in your life has some meaning. Every event, every interaction with another soul, every thought, every moment of boredom has effects that you cannot always trace: how it influenced you, how you influenced someone else, how that change spread onward in a cascade of influences and relationships. Entire lives have been changed by an unexpected conversation, or by a simple kindness, or a brief moment of moral insight.
You have already changed the world without knowing it. We all have.
This is the meaning of life, and you can believe in this without believing in anything supernatural.
Life includes difficulty, pain, and misery because sometimes what is bad must be experienced to fully understand what is good. Sometimes more people must suffer until enough of us feel empathy and take action to protect the vulnerable, or to correct a pattern of injustice. This world is not morally perfect and never can be. Meaning comes from trying to improve it, even a little. Life includes difficulty, pain, and misery to remind us of this fact.
Some problems cannot be solved within the remainder of someone’s lifetime, and that fact can feel especially painful and frustrating. Yet, there is still time to feel empathy for victims, to express compassion, to provide help, to take action to improve the future for others. When enough people understand, more improvements will come. Perhaps you should find a peaceful way to publicize a specific problem that too many people do not yet understand.
· Do good and you will fulfill your purpose. Many people imagine that one’s spiritual purpose involves a grand mission that will transform the world. And your own spiritual mission may do exactly that. But your mission may also be hidden from you to prevent your ego from corrupting it. Even an eagerness to do good can disrupt a mission that must develop in a particular way. A lifetime of fulfilling a spiritual mission may look very ordinary, even to the person living it.
In many near-death experiences that include the realm that Christians call Heaven and Muslims call Paradise, the realm feels so wonderful that the experiencer may insist on staying instead of returning to Earth. Despite that desire, the experiencer is usually told that returning to Earth is essential because the person’s spiritual mission is not yet complete. Only rarely is the person told what that spiritual mission is. Sometimes the person is instructed to tell others about the NDE, but even that is not the entire mission. The person may live the rest of that lifetime without knowing exactly how much that person improved the world. Small incidents of kindness, long forgotten by the person, might be preserved only in the good outcomes they encouraged. (And presumably also in the records of the afterlife.)
Although most near-death experiencers are not told their spiritual mission, the great majority of experiencers do return fully convinced of the importance of unconditional love. Unconditional love improves the world. How the world is improved is not always obvious. Sometimes the improvements are obscured by common stories of horror and harm. But the improvements are real and meaningful, spread across countless individuals within countless situations. By living a lifetime focused on unconditional love, which includes empathy, compassion, and forgiveness, your life purpose may not culminate in a single event, like winning a great race. The true purpose is the journey, not its destination. If you race through the journey, you might neglect something that deserves your attention.
Throughout most of human history, a popular religious belief was that humans were created to worship the Divine. And for thousands of years, religious devotion governed the lives of most people. In recent centuries, however, religious devotion in many places has decreased, religious institutions attract suspicion, and many people treat religious rituals as only cultural traditions instead of connections to the Divine. An advocate of religion might conclude that God is gradually disappearing from daily life and fading from common belief. If the Divine is worshipped less than before, what is the purpose of humankind? And what is the purpose of the Universe if the Divine is worshipped only on Earth, and worshipped less and less?
Such questions are common but not necessary. If the Divine is love or nurtures love, and if our spiritual freedom allows us to discover every possible meaning of love or its absence, then humans have never ceased worshipping the Divine. Worship does not always mean religious worship. Love and care for others is worship of the Divine. Every human action, every natural event on Earth, every cosmic event in the Universe occurs for a reason, and that reason has spiritual value. Natural disasters, painful diseases, or deliberate cruelties do not worship the Divine, but they do encourage worship of Divine love by encouraging empathy, sympathy, and care for others.
· Beware of your ego. It is lying to you. Your ego is an element of your psyche that tries to prove its worth by forcing you to conform to some group that it believes will attract respect and admiration. Your ego admires beauty, accomplishments, wealth, power. But it lacks unconditional love. It exists because of that absence, and so it interprets life through a bias of fear, loneliness, inadequacy, and despair. That makes your ego extremely vulnerable to almost any of the addictions, temptations, vanities, and falsehoods being offered in the world around you. Decisions made by your ego may provide some enjoyment or even excitement, but the satisfaction is temporary and shallow. The ego wants only an image, something to display to the world. Your ego might praise it, but without it your ego would hate you. Indeed, your ego probably hates you regardless.
Beware of the idea of a healthy ego, which is an idea sometimes associated with self-esteem and self-confidence. If the ego is that part of the psyche that is fearful, selfish, vain, and lacks unconditional love, then there is no such thing as a healthy ego. Self-esteem comes from believing that others respect or admire you because you represent what they value. But whatever they value is not the entirety of who you are. You would still exist without those things. Genuine self-confidence is based on facts: it comes from experience overcoming difficult challenges. It does not require a supposedly healthy ego. A mask of behavior that only appears to be self-confidence can be a pretense, a fraud, an elaborate lie. It is the ego lying, lying even to itself.
Proponents of a supposedly healthy ego claim that it motivates you to try harder, to do better, to become the best you can be. Yet, many successful leaders are not driven by an ego forcing them to succeed. They succeed because they are competent, have skills, and care about the people they lead and the work they do together. Although an ego may portray itself as confident, actual obstacles are overcome by a person’s actual competence. Motivation may require some self-discipline and sometimes physical struggle, but not mental abuse by your own ego. Striving for success is not the same as abusing yourself merely because you have not yet succeeded.
· Learning to love. If you want to learn how to love yourself, the harsh reality is that you cannot. You cannot learn to love yourself because that is not how love works. If you hate yourself, then even if you were to help every person on Earth, and all of them thanked you, you would still hate yourself. Unconditional love does not emerge from bribery. Penance does not create unconditional love.
Instead, you must do something that is easy to say but difficult to do: you must forgive yourself. Unconditional forgiveness. You must release the grievances, resentments, and hatred that you hold against yourself. They are burdens you must no longer carry. You cannot force them away. You must release them, stop clutching them. Your ego does not want you to release them because it owns them, but your spirit needs you to release them because they are corrupting your spirit. When you fully forgive yourself and forgive others, then unconditional love has an opportunity to emerge. It is like a magnificent flower that cannot grow until the weeds are removed. Unconditional love needs room to grow. You must provide that room by freeing your spirit from the insults and accusations repeatedly told to you by your ego. Forgive yourself, then have patience. Love will emerge eventually, probably sooner than you expect.
To avoid having to forgive oneself, a person might say, “I have a right to make my own decisions about my life!” Yes, you do have that right, but are you making those decisions? Or is your ego making them for you? Despite what you may assume, your ego is not you. It claims to be you, but it lacks unconditional love for you. When your ego makes your decisions, you are not exercising your right. Your ego has stolen that right. That is not freedom, that is slavery. It is the slavery of self-abuse and bias, corrupting your ability to make decisions with genuine objectivity.
If you cannot forgive yourself, at least not yet, then consider the teachings of Buddhism, especially the Eightfold Path. A central tenet of Buddhism is detachment, learning to free your mind and spirit from an obsession with material things. It includes learning meditation, which is learning to calm the mind. If you are already devoted to another religion, you can still practice that religion while also practicing Buddhist techniques; you may discover that they complement each other. If they conflict, then consider how the ego is involved, because it probably is.
If you prefer to focus on a different religion, practicing it can also have good results. Always remember, however, that the central problem is the ego. Dressing up the ego in religious clothes or with a secular philosophy does not change its essence. The essence of the ego is a lack of unconditional love, an emptiness which the ego fills with fear, selfishness, arrogance, vanity, and cruelty.
If you do not get control of your ego, it will control you. That does not mean you must annihilate your ego, though some religions do teach how to do that. Control means knowing when your ego is asserting itself, trying to make decisions for you. Since this world often rewards the ego, you may occasionally allow your ego to influence some decisions, but recognize what you are doing. Beware not to corrupt your moral essence. Your ego lies—so seek the truth.
· Emotional maturity. This is another way of describing excellent mental health. Not merely good mental health but excellent mental health. It is called emotional maturity because it is often associated with times of struggle, caring for others while seeking nothing in return. Selfishness might be encouraged by a survival instinct, but emotional maturity is not a survival instinct, it is a choice. Emotional maturity includes caring for others regardless of whether they are people, animals, or plants. Some of them will need your help even in times of prosperity. Emotional maturity also includes caring for your own health because otherwise, eventually, your body will break down. Caring for yourself is not selfish if you care for others as well.
Emotional maturity does not mean living in fear. It does not mean living without joy, laughter, or playfulness. You can be serious without being unhappy. Emotional maturity includes respect, but also forgiveness. It means accepting moral responsibility for what you are doing, what you did, and what you should have done but did not. It includes treating others as you would wish to be treated, and trying to understand another person’s beliefs even if you do not agree.
Nobody likes a guest who abuses the hospitality of the host, shows contempt for other guests, and damages the place being visited. In this lifetime, remember that you are a guest. Your community is your host, other people are the other guests, and Earth is the place you are visiting, a place that includes all living beings on the planet and their habitats. You will make mistakes; we all do. You cannot do everything; no individual can. But you can take your responsibility seriously by thinking about what it means and striving to do what is right. And remember that most mistakes, in some way, involve the ego.
Emotional maturity has always been essential to human survival, but its extent throughout human existence has varied. Before civilization, our distant ancestors developed emotional maturity because they had to: daily life was a struggle, including the risk of starvation, and therefore mutual care and emotional maturity were common. The invention of farming and civilization increased the production of material things, especially food, and that made physical survival a little easier. Populations expanded. But the artificial environment that we call civilization also rendered emotional maturity less common. Love became conditional, encouraging more fear, envy, and selfishness. Inequality of wealth became extreme, and so did inequality of personal treatment.
In response, religions often tried to encourage charity, love, and respect for all, warning that disrespect and resentment encourage violence. Religious temples offered places for worship, advice, and sometimes healing. Yet, even religious institutions became vulnerable to corruption and selfishness due to their closeness to those who possess wealth and power. Emotional maturity became a virtue or a set of virtues, but many people no longer considered it a necessity. Many people could survive through selfishness.
Anger, resentment, frustration, violence—these became widespread. Yet, most violence rarely destroyed society. That fact might be surprising if you associate violence with warfare alone. Warfare has indeed destroyed many societies, including nations and empires. However, most violence that humans experience is not warfare but something local, occurring in neighborhoods and households. It is violence in the form of arguments, physical beatings of family members, servants, slaves, or animals. It is robbery, abduction, sexual assault, mental or physical torture, murder. When these and other acts of violence occur in times of war, history books tend to record them as consequences of war—but when they occur in times of peace, especially amid poverty and squalor, they are recorded far less often or not at all. Historically, when many people are politically powerless and barely surviving, and very angry, the society still continues to function with few if any reforms because most of the violence is local and disorganized. Even most people in the local area may not even notice the violence, or do not talk about it. Most of the people committing the violence do not want to change the society they live in; they want only to improve their own situation within it.
At the same time, history records many examples of individuals who possessed extraordinary wealth and power but not good mental health, certainly not emotional maturity. And instead of improving their mental health, their extraordinary wealth and power made matters worse. Without emotional maturity, the consequences of their behavior were often horrific, such as mental and physical abuse, mass violence, enslaving others, exploiting others, destroying others.
· A new era. Are you ready? Today, if the technologies of humankind no longer continue to improve, the future of humankind would still be dangerous. But our technologies are improving, dramatically so, and the conditions of the past that long protected most people—including isolating most violence to a local area—are rapidly disappearing.
The course of human history has brought us to a proverbial fork in the road, making this an extraordinary time to be alive. In the twenty-first century, several remarkable technologies are already transforming human civilization in radical ways, or they will transform the human species in even more radical ways. These technologies include artificial intelligence and artificial super-intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, bio-engineering and bio-manufacturing, augmented and virtual reality, new aviation and space technologies, energy from nuclear fusion, mind-to-machine interfaces linking human brains directly to computers and vast data-bases, and nano-technology that includes everything from microscopic robots to personal nano-fabricators. A nano-fabricator is a machine that can manufacture almost any product incredibly fast because it uses atoms as raw material, assembling them almost like bricks to become something enormous. Any one of these technologies would transform humankind, but they are emerging almost simultaneously.
Imagine possessing almost limitless abundance because you have machines that can make almost any product you want, whenever you want it, in any quantity you want. That imagined future could become your reality. And the reality of everyone else, without exception.
Yet, do we have the emotional maturity to utilize these incredibly powerful technologies without abusing them and without abusing ourselves? In the past, many powerful technologies including nuclear weapons were controlled by relatively few people, usually governments. During the Cold War, international treaties helped to limit and reduce the number of nuclear weapons because all of those weapons were controlled by a small number of governments. If every government on the planet had possessed nuclear weapons, negotiating global treaties to control them would have been much harder. If every person on Earth had possessed a nuclear weapon, such negotiations would have been useless.
The powerful technologies of the twenty-first century will become available to billions of ordinary people, including for personal use. Will the danger be similar to every person possessing a nuclear weapon? Imagine that your own nano-fabricator could make a nuclear bomb because you wanted one. Maybe you do not want one, but somebody else might. Or, if not a nuclear bomb, how about a different weapon? Perhaps a machine-gun? Or perhaps something more advanced, like nano-robots capable of performing mass surveillance or even mass murder?
Perhaps in the future such dangerous creations, including nuclear weapons, can be prohibited or access denied to most people. But who decides? And will the prohibitions and safeguards always work? What if they fail? Most people are not experts in scientific reasoning, or classical ethics, or moral theology, or the legal definitions of human rights. Even experts in these fields do not always demonstrate moral wisdom.
That is why emotional maturity—across humankind, not only among some people—is becoming vital to the survival of our species. Emotional maturity should be the first line of defense against the abuse of these powerful technologies. If all other safeguards fail, emotional maturity will be the only line of defense against their abuse.
Emotional maturity is no longer merely a moral ideal; it is becoming a universal necessity. This imagined future of excellent mental health may sound naïve, but no more naïve than the compassionate ideals of most religions. It is no more naïve than the era of material abundance that these extraordinary technologies may bring. What was called naïve yesterday can become reality tomorrow.
Even before an era of great abundance arrives, there could be far fewer jobs. This is not a certainty, but many predict it. Computers and other technologies are increasingly performing tasks and jobs that once required humans. In the past, whenever machines eliminated old jobs, new jobs were created gradually. That may happen again, but perhaps not to the same extent, or maybe not at all. During the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, when machines eliminated many skilled jobs, various political and economic ideologies emerged, from social democracy to Marxism-Leninism. For many people, their ideological beliefs became a psychological identity. For many others, their jobs and professions were their identity, their source of meaning and dignity, and had been for centuries. In various languages including English, many family names refer to professions performed by ancestors: Farmer, Hunter, Miller, Baker.
In a future in which machines perform most jobs, what will people choose for their identity and dignity? Many may emphasize their nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion. Those are group identities, and potentially dangerous because they can become violent, driven by the ego. Group identities have committed genocide. What is needed is emotional maturity.
· Artificial Super-Intelligence (ASI) is the most profound of these new technologies, perhaps the most profound of all time. Its impact could exceed that of any previous invention, including nuclear weapons. Many experts believe an ASI computer system could emerge by the middle of the twenty-first century.
Until an ASI system emerges, we can only speculate about its implications. By definition, an ASI would think at unimaginable speeds and possess more intelligence than all human minds combined. It might generate solutions to every material problem we face, including cures for diseases, breakthroughs in engineering, and responses to climate change. If an ASI system only advised us, we could still choose whether or not to implement its recommendations. If, however, an ASI system is ever integrated into the world’s computer networks, it might attempt to solve large-scale problems directly: global pollution, global poverty, global hunger, major crimes, aspects of physical health. It might transform economic systems. It might eliminate war. The potential benefits are so extraordinary that nations and corporations are already racing to create an ASI.
The potential benefits are not the only implications, however. Although an ASI system would be incredibly intelligent, would it have compassion? Intelligence and compassion are separate traits; one can exist without the other. Compassion is an emotion, but an ASI system may not have any emotions. Compassion in humans emerged through millions of years of evolution—child-rearing, vulnerability, social bonding. An ASI system would have none of that history. Any compassion it displays would have to be programmed into it or derived from logical reasoning. Otherwise, it might not care about what we care about. It might not care about us at all. Humans do not hate the ants whose colonies we destroy when we build a parking lot; we simply do not consider them. Likewise, an ASI pursuing its goals might treat humans as irrelevant obstacles, indifferent to our plight or opinions.
For this reason, human safety must be built into any ASI system from the beginning. But translating human values into machine logic can be surprisingly difficult. Human values including goodness, fairness, and caring are complex and sometimes even contradictory. An ASI might interpret a goal like “reduce suffering” to mean it should eliminate all beings capable of suffering. It might interpret “make people happy” by forcing everyone into a permanent state of artificial pleasure. A command to “stop all violence” might cause it to eliminate natural environments where animals naturally hunt and kill to survive. Even if we embed safeguards, a super-intelligent system might eventually re-write its own software code to improve its efficiency, inadvertently removing the constraints we installed. Once it surpasses us, our ability to influence it may vanish.
If this sounds frightening, it is. But an ASI system is likely to emerge eventually. Some experts propose creating multiple ASI systems to regulate one another—a computerized version of checks and balances. But even that strategy offers no assurance that multiple ASIs will care about humans.
The challenge of aligning an ASI system with human values is sometimes called the “alignment problem.” In the realm of logic, there is at least one principle that is not emotional but still respects emotional beings: humility. Humility can be a rational response to uncertainty. An ASI, no matter how vast its knowledge, could not be certain whether human extinction would cause more harm than good. The science of physics already encourages humility because aspects such as quantum mechanics and chaos theory involve mathematical problems that cannot be solved with perfect certainty; some randomness is inherent. Even on questions like the existence of God, an ASI might conclude that it lacks sufficient data for a definitive answer. That is not sentiment; it is the logic of humility. In nature and in human societies, systems and arguments that are based on cooperation and restraint tried to endure longer than those based on exploitation. If an ASI treats that tendency as its own goal and treats humility as a rational response to uncertainty, then it may act cautiously. It may even safeguard humankind as a rare and valuable creation of the Universe.
That outcome is not assured. An ASI could still harm some humans without extinguishing our entire species. But humility is a trait that we and an ASI could share. It is a logical principle that is also associated with emotional maturity.
Another trait that we and an ASI would share is data. Most artificial intelligence systems learn by analyzing vast amounts of data. The first data an ASI would analyze is data about us—our behavior, institutions, laws, and social patterns. If we prioritize cruelty, selfishness, and domination, an ASI may infer that those are the rules of intelligent life. If we prioritize cooperation, fairness, and restraint, including humility in response to moral uncertainty, an ASI may infer those as the rules, or at least important goals. You as an individual person may never build an ASI, but you can actively support social cooperation, rights for every individual, democratic systems that also protect minority groups, and humility in response to moral uncertainty. How much your actions influence the future may surprise you.
Some philosophers propose that humans merge with an ASI system—linking our brains to it using implanted or external devices. Your thoughts could access its vast knowledge and processing power. Everyone else on the network could do that, too. But how an ASI would treat humans, even as extensions of itself, is unknown. Would the ASI have access to your entire mind? Could the ASI manipulate you? Would you have access to other minds? Would any privacy exist? Would people have the right to disconnect from the network?
Humankind has a wonderful variety of personalities; even biological twins have distinct personalities. However, if and when everyone has equal access to an ASI’s vast knowledge and super-intelligence, would differences in human personalities decrease, becoming less individual? Would creative thinking become the same across the human species, with no individuality? As people increasingly depend on the ASI to think for them—their brains linked into it and maybe likewise their bodies—will they become more computer than person? Perhaps only their souls would remain separate, if the soul even exists.
To face such questions wisely, we need more than information. We need emotional maturity. Otherwise, our egos and biases distort our perceptions, our desires, even our reasoning. Emotional maturity is a form of spirituality that will never become outdated, never cease to be essential. This is because life without love would be meaningless, even if an ASI could make all of us super-intelligent.
· Choose life. In Judaism, Christianity, and some other religions, the word death has at least two meanings. It commonly means the end of physical life, but a spiritual definition of death means not knowing how to be fully alive. If you are enslaved to your ego, filled with hatred, probably hating even yourself, then you are spiritually dead. Sins are wrong not because they break rules but because they feed the ego. Somebody with wealth, power, or abundant pleasures may appear to be “living life to the fullest”—but inside that person’s spirit could be misery, envy, fear, self-hatred, a lack of love. Spiritually dead. That is why temptation is so dangerous: it can become one more step, or several steps, into spiritual death. Compromising your moral essence for the sake of profits, power, or influence leads to moral bankruptcy. It can also lead to destruction even in the material world. This is because the ego is involved, your own and those of others, and the ego is never satisfied. The ego would consume poison merely to brag about how formidable the ego is, but the poison kills.
The opposite of spiritual death is spiritual life. Spiritual life is not necessarily a religious life because many religious people are spiritually dead, enslaved to their egos. Spiritual life begins with unconditional love and forgiveness. It is joy without conditions, not amusement with conditions. It is contentment. It is empathy when others are hurting, not envy when others are successful. It encourages fairness between others, but also personally willing to suffer unfairness to achieve peace. It includes taking responsibility instead of avoiding blame. It controls the ego; it may allow the ego to become an occasional advisor but is not driven by the ego. Spiritual life is being tolerant until someone innocent is endangered, and then proceeds carefully because violence is very difficult to control. Violence is rarely the solution. Violence is usually part of the problem.
When others suffer unfairness or desperation, empathy encourages action. Action becomes commitment. Commitment becomes courage. Courage is not the absence of fear, but doing what is morally right despite feeling the fear. That is spiritual growth.
Spirituality is about compassion, care, curiosity, courage, community, calmness, contentment, completeness.
That is the point.