The fullest meaning of the intellect and its universal function is to be found in the ma‘rifah or gnosis, which lies at the heart of the Islamic reve… - Hossein Nasr

If human beings were not to live below the human level, but realized the full possibility of being human, they would grasp intuitively the truth of the assertion of the primacy of consciousness. Their own consciousness would be raised to a level where they would know through direct intellection that the alpha and omega of cosmic reality cannot but be the Supreme Consciousness which is also Pure Being and that all beings in the universe possess a degree of consciousness in accord with their existential state. They would realize that as human beings we are given the intelligence to know the One Who is the Origin and End of all things, who is Sat (Being), Chit (Consciousness), and 􀄃nanda (Bliss), and to realize that this knowledge itself is the ultimate goal of human life, the crown of human existence, and what ultimately makes us human beings who can discourse with the trees and the birds as well as with the angels and who are on the highest level the interlocutors of that Supreme Reality who has allowed us to say “I” but who is ultimately the I of all I’s.

The Quran, like other sacred scriptures, associates knowledge and understanding with the heart, and the blindness of the heart with loss of understanding, as for example when God, after complaining of man’s not learning the appropriate lessons from earlier sacred history, asserts, “For indeed it is not the eyes that grow blind, but it is the hearts, which are within the bosoms, that grow blind” (22:46). This blindness of the heart so characteristic of fallen man is also described by the Quran as a hardening of the heart. “But their hearts were hardened, and the devil made all that they used to do seem fair unto them!” (6:43). Also, ““Woe unto those whose hearts are hardened against remembrance of Allah. Such are in plain error” (39:22). Furthermore, the Quran identifies this hardening of the heart with a veil that God has cast over the heart of those who have turned away from the truth. “We have placed upon their hearts veils, lest they should understand, and in their ears a deafness” (6:25); also, “And We place upon their hearts veils lest they should understand it, and in their ears a deafness” (17:46).

Through the downward flow of the river of time and the multiple refractions and reflections of Reality upon the myriad mirrors of both macrocosmic and microcosmic manifestation, knowledge has become separated from being and the bliss or ecstasy which characterizes the union of knowledge and being. Knowledge has become nearly completely externalized and desacralized, especially among those segments of the human race which have become transformed by the process of modernization, and that bliss which is the fruit of union with the One and an aspect of the perfume of the sacred has become well-nigh unattainable and beyond the grasp of the vast majority of those who walk upon the earth. But the root and essence of knowledge continues to be inseparable from the sacred for the very substance of knowledge is the knowledge of that reality which is the Supreme Substance, the Sacred as such, compared to which all levels of existence and all forms of the manifold are but accidents.