Sri Aurobindo points out clearly that the “very nature of our mind is Ignorance; not an absolute nescience, but a limited and conditioned knowledge of being, limited by a realisation of its present, a memory of its past, an inference of its future, conditioned therefore by a temporal and successive view of itself and its experience.”
Clearly a mind so conditioned and limited cannot understand nor grasp the vastness or the complexity of the universe, nor the facts of its future, nor the possible “time-transcending eternity.”
In order to know these things, there must then be another power of knowing,–one that is “timeless in essence and can look on Time, perhaps with a simultaneous all-relating view of past, present and future, but in any case as a circumstance of its own timeless being, then we have two powers of consciousness, Knowledge and Ignorance, the Vedantic Vidya and Avidya.”
The difference must be that “consciousness as Knowledge knows its timeless elf and sees Time within itself, while consciousness as Ignorance is a partial and superficial action of the same Knowledge which sees rather itself in Time, veiling itself in its own conception of temporal being, and can only by the removal of the veil return to eternal self-knowledge.”
reference: Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part I, Chapter 8, Memory, Self-Consciousness and the Ignorance, pp. 504-505
Sri Aurobindo Studies 