But therein lies the rub: Buddhists do not try to eradicate the self in order to achieve abstract nothingness. Beneath the self, so to speak, the empirically constructed self or memories, attachments, the "stream of consciousness", is joy, bliss unparalleled. There is nothing more palpable than this.

It is an argument that begins with an analysis of ethics and I will have to present it in pieces. First, ethicsd is a matter of parts, and are all things. There is, on the one hand, the "presence" of that which ethics fights over, the material presence of suffering, bliss and everything in between the referring this as "presence" is to reduce the material part to its phenomenological essence: the very clear and actual feelings of the deliciousness, the gladness, the the raw feel of the arm breaking, the tediousness of doing homework, and on and on. This is, of course, the existential basis of all ethical issues, for if there is no actuality of this nature in play, there is simply no ethics.

On the other hand, there is the entanglements in our engagements in the world, our politics, interpersonal contradictions and our principles, culture and the magnificent messiness of our lived lives. These conditions are in themselves ethically incidental, that is, they are the, as Wittgenstein put it, facts, and factual affairs are without ethical nature.

So the matter turns away from what to do and how make principles of good behavior in entangled conditions, and it turns to metaaethics: the GOOD. This is the beginning of the argument, pending your response thus far

I think what you are talking about really is what is called the ego by psychologists, and is the conscious entity which makes decisions. It could be called a self but the idea of a self has wider implications, encompassing deeper levels of consciousness which merge in and out of conscious awareness. — Jack Cummins

The ego, or, better, the egoic center to release this term from the grip of psychology. Deeper levels of consciousness? But the self is only revealed in the conscious unfolding of such things, and when they do arise, as with a good old fashion repression, they do not present the observing agency with a disclosure of the self, only a presentation TO the self. I, this self, am not the recollection of the trauma of my parents arguing.

That is the way of apophantic theology/philosophy (neti, neti in the East), and this is certainly does seem to be the "end" of philosophy, in both senses of the term. I am reading Caputo's Tears and Prayers of Jacque Derrida, and an epigraph is from Meister Eckhart: Oh God, deliver me from God!" Derrida infamously uncenters all thinking, revealing a kind of nihiism of semantics. But once there, Husserl's epoche, one might say, reaches its definitive juncture. I think this is essentially what the Eastern philosophies of liberation have been teaching for many centuries.

What you are looking for, Solarwind, is something that is not merely posited to make the ontological difference. You cannot insist that "who one is" constitutes a real basis for the distinction of being a singular "who"? Or, the singularity of "whoness" does not constitute the need for an ontological distinction.
OR DOES IT? They way to go is to examine this "I", the who in question. The matter turns to the self (and certainly not to physics). One has to make an examination of the self, and this is done via phenomenology: One begins the inquiry with the world itself, which constituted by the self, and therefore free of the nuisance of dualism (an absurd idea supposing that existence as presence is divisible), and one then faces the most authentic terms of analysis. The self becomes an altogether different concept, for it is not viewed through the lens empirical science but as it is presented in its most immediate describable features, and here, it is not ontology that rules, but meaning and ethics, and the self is first and foremost an agency of meaning. It is though this premise, the singularity, if you will, of meaning/value.

If you want to affirm the self, you cannot do this via trying to conceive of a different form of something that has absolutely no meaning to begin with, physical existence. A nonsense concept.