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A peril in all self-deificatory teachings is that they so easily induce the man, who attains a degree of success with meditation and who believes in them, to clothe himself in a disguised arrogance of the ego and a deceptive communication or union with God. In The Spiritual Crisis of Man, I briefly mentioned the Muhammedan mystic Al Hallaj who had fallen into this peril. I could have added that an Egyptian master in the same Sufi Order, Abu Al Mawahib, who lived in the fifteenth century passed the following comment upon him: "Had Al Hallaj attained the reality of self-annihilation (fana) and the fullness of its meaning he would have been saved from the error he incurred through saying, `I am He!'"

-- Notebooks Category 25: World-Mind in Individual Mind > Chapter 1 : Their Meeting and Interchange > # 77