Sri Aurobindo describes the current state of human knowledge and powers of action as he points us toward the much broader scope of Nature’s systematic development of a wide, multifarious and complex web of powers that represent the ultimate scope of the evolutionary impetus in the universe.
“Intellectual knowledge and practical action are devices of Nature by which we are able to express so much of our being, consciousness, energy, power of enjoyment as we have been able to actualise in our apparent nature and by which we attempt to know more, express and actualise more, grow always more into the much that we have yet to actualise. But our intellect and mental knowledge and will of action are not our only means, not all the instruments of our consciousness and energy: our nature, the name which we give to the Force of being in us in its actual and potential play and power, is complex in its ordering of consciousness, complex in its instrumentation of force.”
It is necessary to take up each of those complex powers of knowledge and action and bring them into full play of their capability and provide the broadest framework possible for development. “That object is to become, to be conscious, to increase continually in our realised being and awareness of self and things, in our actualised force and joy of being, and to express that becoming dynamically in such an action on the world and ourselves that we and it shall grow more and always yet more towards the highest possible reach, largest possible breadth of universality and infinity. All man’s age-long effort, his action, society, art, ethics, science, religion, all the manifold activities by which he expresses and increases his mental, vital, physical, spiritual existence, are episodes in the vast drama of this endeavor of Nature and have behind their limited apparent aims no other true sense or foundation.”
“For the individual to arrive at the divine universality and supreme infinity, live in it, possess it, to be, know, feel and exprss that alone in all his being, consciousness, energy, delight of being is what the ancient seers of the Veda meant by the Knowledge; that was the Immortality which they set before man as his divine culmination.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Book 2, Part 2, Chapter 17, The Progress to Knowledge–God, Man and Nature”
Sri Aurobindo Studies 