Moving from the Narcissus Myth to the Self in Shams Sonnet

Meeting with the Self and reaching its truth is one of the obvious principles of Progression towards God which has been discussed allegorically, symbolically or in detail in many mystical works. What the mystics state in this regard conforms in some cases to what has been stated about the Self and relative concepts in psychology. In the language of Molana, this matter is expressed via several terms and idioms which associate the myth of Narcissus in mythology. Some elements such as water, spring, burrow, face, meeting, seeing the own image in water, etc and their concatenation in Molana’s sonnet bring this myth to the mind on the surface but, looking at the deep structure and semantic aspects of his sonnets, it seems that the two enjoy different values and are related to the diverse domains of mysticism and mythology.
While paying attention to psychological theories, especially Jung’s ideas, this paper aims to explore the traces of the meeting-with-the-Self experience, the signs and forms of its manifestation, and the process of reaching it and elucidate the borders of these two phenomena that one of them is the negation of Being and God’s witnessing whereas the other is the affirmation of Being and narcissism or, in a word, being attracted by outward things, masks, shadows or, in other words, polytheism, infidelity and neglecting the truth. It is worth-mentioning that Freud’s approach to this myth completely opposes it to the experience of meeting and relative mystical notions, and it seems that Jung’s analysis of several elements of this myth is more illuminating.