In Farid al-Din Attar's The Conference of the Birds, the story of the lover who sits on the ashes of Mansur al-Hallaj serves as a profound allegory for spiritual annihilation (fana). After Hallaj is executed and his body burned for his ecstatic utterance 'I am the Truth' (Ana al-Haqq), the lover stirs the ashes, questioning where the speaker of that truth has gone. The poem conveys that the physical form and even ecstatic expressions are temporal illusions; true reality belongs solely to the absolute, independent Divine (the 'Sun'). The ashes symbolize the ultimate reduction of the ego and the physical self, illustrating that in the face of Divine reality, neither the 'mote' (individual existence) nor its 'shadow' remains, leaving only the Eternal.