Of course, I did not mean to deny this. No, preferring things has nothing to do with self-image. It is not selfish to prefer vanilla over chocolate, for example. Or drinking water when you are thirsty. Those are just biological imperatives which do not require a self at all. The perception of thirst is not selfishness, and the perception of a pleasant flavour is not selfishness, the perception of those two things as being selfish is itself selfishness. 

It is a common misconception to perceive desires and preferences as something which involve a self, but that self only appears when you create beliefs about yourself in relation to those desires and preferences. For example, it is not selfish to want to reach first place in a race. It is selfish to say "I desire to win this race, because otherwise I will be unworthy." In the latter case, the only reason the race is desired is because it is genuinely believed it will solve a lack of self-worth. What is desired is not actually the race, but the absolution of the belief that you are unworthy. When you win the race, that is the moment that you start to change your self-image, because now your experience contradicts your previous identity, which was the identity of someone who has never won a race before and therefore is not worthy.

Your emotions are perfectly in tune with what you think you are perceiving, which is an imagined self. If you live in a world that is threatened by imagination, then it is perfectly normal to seek a state of non-imagination, just as normal as it would be to run away from a bear. It is not wrong or morally inferior to live in the imaginary world, but what is being pointed to is that the imaginary self can be permanently uprooted, and it can simply be realized that it didn't exist in the first place. What is called "selfishness" are the actions you take to "defend" that imagined self from thoughts and beliefs.  Ah ok, but it seems related, because at the end of the day, these thought-based emotional problems are to do with that "me" entity which lingers around. Perhaps if that is absolved you will stay there longer.  That is fair, you can enjoy that silence if you want, but I see that you are creating thoughts about yourself from the experience. Experience silence if you want, but no point in thinking about how your current experience isn't that silence.

You are building ideas around it, for example, "normal egoic consciousness." I am saying that believing in that label is ironically a belief system created from that very blissful experience of silence. You created a dichotomy which says: "This experience is bliss, this experience is normal egoic consciousness, and neither can ever converge."  For sure, there are certainly very blissful states which are worth pursuing. But I saw ideas about ego being mixed up in there, which I saw as a conflation.