You’ve heard it said — the self must go, but what does that really mean? The Sufis called it fana. Passing away, so only the Real remains.
Manly P. Hall reads the wine and the tavern of the Persian poets as symbols. Not drunkenness, but a language for the soul’s ascent. The wine is self-forgetfulness. The tavern is the world, where souls gather and pass. The rose is divine love, and the Beloved is God. For the Sufi, fana is not a doctrine but an experience: the dissolving of the little self into something measureless.
Hall says this is not extinction. It’s not the killing of a person, but the forgetting of one. The face in the mirror, the name you answer to — that is what thins and fades. The desert mystics went looking for ways to be lost. Lost in the sand, lost in love, lost in the Beloved. Because to remember self is pain, and joy comes in forgetting it. Joy in giving, not gaining. In laying a life down, not in picking it up again.
The Sufi’s secret garden is built in the soul, not in the world. An interior paradise, grown by meditation and will. The wine jug is the symbol: self-forgetfulness and union with the infinite. The highest goal is union with the Beloved — the passing away of self into God. Hall draws the same line through the Bacchic rites, the Eucharist, the yogi’s samadhi: all are ways the self is spent, not destroyed.
But something remains. Hall says, even in the highest mystical state, something persists to witness, to return. The drop of water returns to the ocean, but the ocean is not less for it. The self is not annihilated; it stops being separate. The old fear is that this is a loss, a drowning. But Hall answers: the drop had nothing to lose. What looks like dying is a sleeper waking.
Fana is not a vanishing into nothing, but a change of address. The mask falls, and what’s behind it is not absence, but presence — the Real, waiting where you least expected it.