Sufism

The Valley of Poverty and Annihilation, the final valley where the self dissolves

The final valley is described as an erasure rather than an arrival — the self that set out on the journey does not reach the end, it stops existing as a separate thing.

The seventh and last valley in Attar's Mantiq al-Tayr, Poverty and Annihilation, is where the traveling self is finally undone, described through images of an ocean without shore or bottom, into which the drop of individual identity falls and no longer remains distinguishable. Poverty here does not mean material lack but the total absence of independent selfhood — nothing left to call one's own, not even the achievements of the previous six valleys. This is the valley only the surviving thirty birds actually enter, and it is where the poem's central pun pays off: what dissolves here is precisely the sense of being separate from the Simorgh they set out to find. Attar's placement of this valley last, after unity and bewilderment rather than before them, insists that annihilation is not the starting condition of the path but its most demanding and final achievement.

Mantiq al-Tayr (Conference of the Birds)