Seen from the perspective of a variety of theistic traditions, this ["the indissoluble bond between the intellect and objective reality" that is a "kind of love" and "a kind of adherence of the will and mind to something inexhaustibly desirable] is nothing less than the reflection of absolutely reality within the realm of the contingent. It is bliss that draws us toward and joins us to the being of all things because that bliss is already one with being and consciousness, in the infinite simplicity of God. As the Chandogya Upanishad says, Brahman is at once both the joy residing in the depths of the heart and also the pervasive reality in which all things subsist. The restless heart that seeks its repose in God (to use the language of Augustine) expresses itself not only in the exultations and raptures of spiritual experience but also in the plain persistence of awareness. The soul’s unquenchable eros for the divine, of which Plotinus and Gregory of Nyssa and countless Christian contemplatives speak. Sufism’s ishq or passionately ardent love for God, Jewish mysticism’s devekut, Hinduism’s bhakti, Sikhism’spyaar—these are all names for the acute manifestation of a love that, in a more chronic and subtle form, underlies all knowledge, all openness of the mind to the truth of things. This is because, in God, the fulness of being is also a perfect act of infinite consciousness that, wholly possessing the truth of being in itself, forever finds its consummation in boundless delight. The Father knows his own essence perfectly in the Mirror of Logos and rejoices in the Spirit who is the “bond of love” or “bond of glory” in which divine being and divine consciousness are perfectly joined. God’s wujud is also his wijdan—his infinite being is infinite consciousness—in the unity of the wajd, the bliss of perfect enjoyment. The divine sat is always also the divine chit, and their perfect coincidence is the divine ananda. It only makes sense, then—though of course it is quite wonderful as well—that consciousness should be made open to being by an implausible desire for the absolute, and that being should disclose itself to consciousness through the power of the absolute to inspire and (ideally) satiate that desire. The ecstatic structure of finite consciousness—this inextinguishable yearning for truth that weds the mind to the being of all things—is simply a manifestation of the metaphysical structure of all reality. God is the one act of being, consciousness, and bliss in whom everything lives and moves and has its being; and so the only way to know the truth of things is, necessarily, the way of bliss.
