Sri Aurobindo
Essays Divine and Human
Writings from Manuscripts. 1910 – 1950
Man and the Evolutionary Process
52
Our life is neither an accident nor a mechanism; it is not a freak of some wide-spread self-organising Chance, nor is it the result of a blind unaccountable material Necessity.
What we call Chance is a play of the possibilities of the Infinite; what we call Necessity is a truth of things working itself out in a Time-sequence of the Infinite.
It [our life] seems indeed to be born from a cosmic Inconscience which, pushed somehow towards world-building, does what it can or does what it must but in either case knows nothing of itself or of its own action. Yet is there a meaning in these workings, a conscious intention; our life is led by the will of some secret Being, secret perhaps within its own phenomenon, towards the solution of this packed cosmic Mystery, the unrolling of a willed and mighty Enigma.
What we see in and around us is a play of God, a “Lila”. It is a scene arranged, a drama played by the One Person with his own multitudinous personalities in his own impersonal existence, — a game, a plan worked out in the vast and plastic substance of his own world-being. He plays with the powers and forces of his Nature a game1 of emergence from the inconscient Self out of which all here began, through the mixed and imperfect consciousness which is all we have now reached, towards a supreme consciousness, a divine nature.
This we cannot now know; our eyes are fixed on a partial outer manifestation which we see and call the universe — though even now we see and know very little of it or about it, know 
perhaps a few of its processes but nothing fundamental, nothing of its reality, — and an inner partial manifestation which we do not see but experience and feel and call ourselves.
Our mind is shut up in a cleft between these two fragments and tends to regard it as the whole of things and the only tangible and real existence.
It is so that the frog regards himself and his well. But we have to grow out of this frog consciousness and exceed the limits of this well. In the end we come to perceive that we have a truer and divine being of which our petty personality is only a surface and corrupted output, a truer and divine Consciousness in which we must become self-aware and world-aware discarding our present fragmentary and bounded mental vision of self and things.2
The term of our destiny is already known to us; we have to grow from what we are into a more luminous existence, from pleasure and pain into a purer and vaster and deeper bliss, from our struggling knowledge and ignorance into a spontaneous and boundless light of consciousness, from our fumbling strength and weakness into a sure and all-understanding Power, from division and ego into universality and unity. There is3 an evolution and we have to complete it: a human animality or an animal humanity is not enough. We must pass from the inadequate figure of humanity into a figure of the Godhead, from mind to supermind, from the consciousness of the finite to the consciousness of the Infinite, from Nature into Supernature.
*
This is no vaulting imagination, but the inevitable outcome of our still unfulfilled being and incomplete nature, a necessity of the evolutionary world-urge: because things are what they are, this too must be. For things are what they are, but not what they were; they cannot remain for ever what they are, but must grow into what they can be and shall be. And what they shall be can be nothing less than the exceeding of their present imperfection, the fullness of what they have only half become; but it may and must be something more than that, they must grow into their own concealed reality, their nature must reveal what is now concealed, their real self.
The perfection of species or of types is not what is aimed at; the type is often perfect [within its] limits, for it is the limits that make the type; the species too can be perfect in itself, perfect in its own variation of the genus and the genus perfect by the number and beauty or curiosity of its variations. But what we see in Nature is that it strives ever to exceed itself, to go beyond what it has yet done. For having achieved in the animal the whole of which animality was capable, it did not in achieving man endeavour to produce the perfect synthetic animal, it began at once working out something more than the animal. Man is to a certain extent a synthesis of several animals; he might even be said to synthetise all, from the worm and the skink, to the elephant and the lion; but as an animal he is terribly4 imperfect. His greatness lies in his being more than an animal and by this new nature he has exceeded the animal and made up for all his deficiencies even in the region of the struggle for life. Comparatively defenceless at first, he has become the master of the earth; he is not merely primus inter pares; he is a sovereign and the others are not any longer, even if they were ever his equals.
Circa 1942
1 [alternative:] play
2 The following sentence from an earlier draft was not incorporated in the final version of this piece:
Our life is a journey towards the bliss of a vaster and happier existence, — not merely elsewhere in a far-off Paradise, but already here upon earth, ihaiva, in the terrestrial life and in an earthly [body].
3 In manuscript cancelled without substitution.
4 [In manuscript:] terrible
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