This is a pretty excellent summary of a lot of traditional spiritual thought.
But in reality it would be erroneous.
The Right-Hand Path pursues union with a Universal Reality—whether defined as God, the Absolute, or a Supreme Being—where the individual self is ultimately annihilated, and personal Will is subsumed into the perceived Divine Order.
In the RHP, the individual self is not annihilated at all, but transcended; it does not cease to be, but what is realised is Selfhood as such.
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According to an error widespread in the West, the spiritual “extinction” that Buddhism has in view – for generally it is Buddhism that is cited – is a “nothingness,” as if it were possible to realize something that is nothing. Now either Nirvana is nothingness, in which case it is unrealizable; or else it is realizable, in which case it must correspond to something real."
Frithjof Schuon, "
Treasures of Buddhism".
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The following is redacted from
Paths to Transcendence according to Shankara, Ibn Arabi, and Meister Eckhart" by Reza Shah-Kazemi. (From p91-94, detailed Sufi experience according to Ibn Arabi. I have not traced the same path in Eckhart or Shankara.)
In Sufi circles, there is
Fana’ (Arabic: فناء 'passing away'. 'annihilation').
This annihilation is a passing 'state', necessarily so by virtue of an enhanced state of awareness.
The individual (
mawjud, مَوْجُودٌ, 'existent') exists by virtue of their participation in Being, as opposed to That Which Is (
wujud وجود, 'pure Being').
The individual undergoes an 'annihilation', yet returns to their individual conscious state. Nor, in terms of outward corporeal existence, does the individual 'cease to be' during the exalted state itself – a consciousness that transcends the bounds of phenomenal, contingent being – but often uses the language of death, extinction and annihilation, when speaking of unitive consciousness.
Transcendence is attainable only when the individual is 'annihilated' with regard to the unitive state, this being the only conceivable manner in which transcendent consciousness – now no longer qualifiable as 'individual', that individuality being a consciousness defined by ephemeral, relative and contingent experience, both of the world and of itself as something other in the world.
Junayd, an early Sufi Master: "The phenomenal, when it is joined to the Eternal, vanishes and leaves no trace behind. When He is there, thou art not, and if thou art there, He is not".
To speak of 'realisation', 'enlightenment' and so on, is an apprehension of the Infinite, the Absolute, the Real.
The nature of this vision is such that the finite (individual) nevertheless originates in, and is sustained by, the Infinite. It escapes the illusory limitations of its own finitude into the Infinite: The experience of the Infinite, of Absolute, the Real, can only be infinite, absolute and real when there is no distinction between the experience and the experiencer.
The individual is veiled by the fact of its own imagined existence, and by the fact that there is no common measure between that ant the Real. It cannot be that the illusory realises the Real, or that finitude realises the infinite, contingency realises the Absolute. Darkness never becomes light, although light shines in the darkness.
Ibn Arabi says: "When that is extinguished which never was—and which is perishing—and there remains that which has never ceased to be—and which is permanent—then there rises the Sun of the decisive proof for the vision through the Self. Thus comes about the absolute sublimation (Extinction, 27-28).
That which is extinguished “never was” from the viewpoint of the Real, and even while it possessed a relative degree of existence, its essential nature was “perishing”; while, again from the viewpoint of the Real, that which remains “never was not.”
Thus, what is annihilation from the individual point of view, is not an essential change of state with regard to the Real, but simply the removal of what did not truly exist in the first place – "Naught save the Reality remains"
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