Strategies to Deal with the Ego by Emphasizing the Two Concepts of Voluntary Death and Annihilation (Comparative Examination of Rumi and Attar's views)

The concept of self and its struggle with reason and spirit is one of the most important topics of mysticism and reaching the truth. The important issue is that the ego has indicators and functions that challenge the achievement of the truth and make a person regress. For this reason, mystics in their works, while explaining the threats and malfunctions of the ego, provide practical solutions for success in the conflict between reason and ego and have reached their true lover. This article tries to investigate the dysfunctions of the ego from the perspective of Molavi and Attar and the solutions of the article using the comparative method. The main question of this article is: "How did Rumi and Attar explain the bad functions of the Ego and what strategies were proposed to combat it?" The authors' hypothesis emphasizes the fact that Rumi and Attar draw the soul to predatory animals, inviting man to austerity and grooming the soul. The findings showed that the key concept of Rumi to fight against the ego and achieve the truth is "optional death" which three stages are necessary for its occurrence. The same concept is "Annihilation" in Attar's poems, in which the seeker must go through four stages to realize it.