Thanks for the detailed replies.
I wasn't expecting to get any discussion going on this, so I figured my post was simply going to be seen as me just rambling. Where people could read it and think about it, but not necessarily feel compelled to comment on it either way. But now I probably would have used a different word other than "destruction". Or at least went into the idea more. Personally, I like the word "destruction", or better yet "deconstruction", but I can see how these words can have negative connotations attached to them.
For example, two people can both say the exact same thing: "I want to destroy evil". But one person can be going about it by joining every possible good-intentioned activist organization under the sun. While another person can be "destroying evil" by simply sitting in quiet contemplation at his kitchen table. "Destruction" can occur out in the objective world, or it can occur purely in consciousness. (Actually, all of it is occurring purely in consciousness, but that's another thread.
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So if I say "destroy self" or "destroy mind" I don't mean it as some form of mental lobotomy or symbolic castration. That's regression. That's a step backward. I mean it as progression. I mean it as a step forward. To transcend, yet still include. So I guess my previous ramblings above were just me trying to figure out what the process involved to do that. And while trying to think about it, that's where I came up with the employer/employee and rootkit analogies. (Which I agree aren't totally adequate analogies, but I think are still somewhat useful, at least to me.)
I still want to post a more detailed reply to some of the great comments here, but I don't have a lot of time tonight, so I just wanted to try make that distinction about "destruction" first.