Of all the themes the contemplatives circle, this is the one the modern reader tends to flinch from. Ego death. Annihilation. The crucifixion that is not metaphorical. The Sufi fana. The Buddhist gate gate paragate. The Christian die before you die. The Hindu giving up of the giver.
The arithmetic is the same in every tradition. What walks across the threshold cannot be what wanted to walk across. The small self that has been doing the seeking is, on closer inspection, the obstacle. To finish the journey, the journeyer has to be willing to be the journey’s first casualty.
This is not, in any tradition’s serious reading, a destruction of the person. It is a recognition that what the person had been taking themselves to be was always too small for what they actually were. The me that is taken away in al-Hallaj’s sentence is the contracted me; what remains is the wider being that the contracted me had been borrowing reality from all along.
The contemplatives are unsentimental about how hard this is. They do not promise it will be quick. They do not promise it will feel good. They promise only that on the other side of the dying, the one who said yes to it discovers that they were never, in any reachable sense, what they had been afraid of losing.