In Poem 13 of Attar's Mokhtar Nameh, the poet explores how Divine grace guides the human soul to discover its true spiritual identity and how self-sacrifice leads to spiritual rejuvenation.

Key Themes

• The Thread of the Self (سر رشتهٔ خود): Attar suggests that the human heart is lost and fragmented in the material world. It is only when the heart encounters a trace of Divine grace (lotf) that it finds the 'thread of its own self' across both the earthly and spiritual realms.
• The Paradox of Spiritual Sacrifice: In Sufism, true spiritual life is achieved through fana (the annihilation of the ego). The poem illustrates this through the metaphor of giving up 'half a life' (نیم جانی) in the path of the Divine, which paradoxically results in receiving 'a hundred thousand lives' back. Self-surrender is thus not an end, but the ultimate catalyst for spiritual rebirth.