pantheism
From a negative perspective, pain can cause a person to become
decentered leading to personal disintegration. A good example of dis-
integration is the Jewish figure Job, although not at the end of the
narrative. Thus the powerful feelings induced by pain can affect a
person’s capacity to perceive and know reality. Pain also leads to
psychological dissociation and can trigger very compelling emotions,
which often become objectified and projected onto objects. But pain
can also act as a mediating factor that makes the acquisition of reality
possible. Along with these types of positive results, pain also pos-
sesses the ability to transform a person. Among the Kaguru people
studied by the anthropologist T. O. Beidelman, pain is an essential
feature within the context of ritual that transforms a person and
enables that person to verify an invisible reality, which suggests that
pain is equated with certainty. Pain is also related to imagination in
the sense that easing of pain is related to cultivating social imagina-
tion. During the Sun Dance, the pain experienced by a Native
American Indian is an appropriate example because the Indian’s flesh
is severed by breaking free from the leather thongs previously inserted
under his back or chest muscles, signifying being released from igno-
rance. This painful experience also stimulates a native’s personal and
social imagination and gives one an insight into what he should do
with his life.
Further reading: Beidelman (1997); Glucklich (2001)
PANTHEISM
A conception that is related to the relationship between God and the
world. In pantheism, God is conceived as not merely immanent within
the world, but God is also identical to the world, which is contrary to the
theistic view of the wholly transcendent nature of God. When the world
exists in God this represents a panentheistic position in which all reality
is a part of God. Examples of either pantheism or panentheism are often
discovered among poets and mystics.
A good example of pantheism in the Hindu tradition can be discovered
in the thoughts of Rāmānuja where the world represents the body of the
ultimate reality or Brahman, which is also transcendent. It is Neo-
Platonism and its notion of emanation that provides the influence that
shapes many Western and Arabic thinkers, such as al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā,