In the End Will be Consciousness: Farghani on the Ontology of the Soul – William C. Chittick
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 Ānanda (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.
Consciousness and Being in Islamic Philosophy
If some historians have downplayed or sidestepped the identity of consciousness and being in Islamic philosophy, this may be because they have paid little attention to the literal meaning of the word wujūd, which is the standard Arabic term for being or existence.
Dictionaries tell us that the verbal meaning of wujūd is to find, uncover, discover, and perceive—which are surely modes of consciousness.
By settling on the word wujūd as the preferred term for being, the Muslim philosophers were recognizing that any existent thing must be found and perceived, which is to say that it must be the object of consciousness.
In other words, they understood—and often made explicit—that wujūd in the sense of being cannot be separated from wujūd in the sense of consciousness.
