The Self as the Supreme Veil

In Section 14 of Kashf al-Mahjub, Hujwiri gathers sayings of the Sufi masters to argue that the nafs (self) is the ultimate barrier between the servant and God:

• Dhul-Nun al-Misri: The hardest veil for the servant is the seeing of the self (روية النفس) and the following of its self-direction (تدبیر). Obeying the self means opposing God's good pleasure, and opposition to God is the root (سرّ) of every veil.
• Bayazid Bastami: The nafs is a quality that finds rest only in falsehood (لا تسکن إلا بالباطل) and never lets its restlessness be spent.
• Muhammad ibn Ali al-Tirmidhi: You wish to know the Truth while your self still persists in you — yet your self does not even know itself, so how could it know another?

Together these sayings establish self-knowledge and the effacement of self-direction as prerequisites for knowing the Divine, distilling the doctrine implicit in the raw passage.