Desire for Annihilation

A practitioner emailed me recently about the flip side of the fear of annihilation – what I see Dogen reassuringly addressing by bringing up in the moon-in-the-water metaphor (click here) – by raising the desire for annihilation:

I’m going through one of my cyclical periods where zazen is… unsatisfying… even a bit turbulent: the ‘old black dogs’ from the past are growling at each other a bit down there/up here and I get that grating frustration that comes with the uncertainty that ‘I’m not doing it right’ or that ‘I could do it better’… I found myself in the back garden tonight having my ‘occasional cigarette,’ and I stood looking up at the cloudy night sky. I closed my eyes and said to myself, ‘Take me away.’ I just stood there and let that desire go and the night spread… a sort of resolution. 

This has been an important issue in my own practice too. Seems to me that there is a subtle difference between Way Mind aspiration to drop the whole works and the desire for annihilation. The desire for annihilation arises from our self-hatred, it seems to me, while Way Mind blooms from compassion – may I become a Buddha to carry all beings across. 

And there is a distinct body difference. Way-Mind-dropping-it-all is relaxed and warm, even passionate. Desire for annihilation is tight and cool or even cold, craving escape and especially common among transcendent types.

Buddha addressed this (although I can’t think of a Dogen passage that does – perhaps suggesting mental frailty on my part or that in his cultural milieu desire for annihilation wasn’t much of a problem or recognized) saying, 

One who is liberated abandons craving for being without relishing non-being.

Nicely put, no? Liberation is neither this nor that – now where have you heard that before?! 

Also, the thirst for non-being is listed as one of the views that keeps us fettered to swirling in our heads and is just the flip side of the view of a permanent self. 

Our practice is to let go of it all, again and again. The view that we’re not doing it right as well as the view that we’re doing it right. The desire for being (and concomitant fear of annihilation) and the desire for non-being (and the concomitant hardening of the categories).