❤❤❤ Yes! I see this almost clearly. Most of the time I have no doubt that this is so. I came to a similar conclusion after some elderly relatives died in recent years. They lived in other countries and I saw them infrequently but I was glad to know they were OK. After they died, I had to ask myself, What is really different now? And the answer was not much. They were still just as "alive" as before as far as I was concerned but we couldn't talk on the phone anymore... This part I wouldn't have been able to express as clearly as you did here, but yes, it's the experience of them that was gone. But they were still there. (I'm still not expressing clearly what I want to say.)
“Listen Sariputra, all phenomena bear the mark of Emptiness; their true nature is the nature of no Birth no Death, no Being no Non-being, no Defilement no Purity, no Increasing no Decreasing." -- The Heart Sutra.
The sense of self is at its core the wordless knowledge that "I Am"; the sense of being. This need not, and cannot, be negated because it is the basis of all experience itself! Only the persona built on top of this sense of being needs to be seen for what it is. I went a bit deeper into it in this episode: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-nFUmr7EPICo.html