and the cold, and what does not. This capacity to distinguish between what benefits him and what harms him is the very reality established by the Law and by religion.

Whoever thinks that a person can reach a point at which the two are always the same has fabricated a lie and has gone against what sense-perception makes necessary. It is true that at certain moments a person may be overtaken by something—such as drunkenness, fainting, and the like—that distracts him from feeling some things; yet for his perception to vanish altogether while life still remains in him is impossible. Even the sleeper has not lost his sense of feeling: in his dream he sometimes sees what delights him and at other times what distresses him. The states referred to as isṭilām (being overwhelmed), fanā’ (annihilation), sukr (ecstatic intoxication), and the like only involve an absence of