Without some deeper significance, the development of life out of matter, and mind out of life is certainly inexplicable. How does inanimate Matter develop Life? How does Mind develop out of Life? What about the expression of the Soul? We are left with nothing to answer this without resorting to a “miraculous creation” by an external all-knowing, all-powerful Creator (which itself brings up any number of inexplicable issues), or we are left with the action of random chance combining together elements and chemicals and haphazardly thereby yielding up ever-increasing forms of Consciousness.
Sri Aurobindo’s provides a solution by his understanding that each form and level of consciousness that evolves out must have been “involved” to begin with. Behind each of these newly expressed levels of consciousness, there is an involved energy that manifests itself when the conditions become appropriate. One can see that when one plants an acorn in the ground, an oak tree will result, if the proper conditions of soil, climate, temperature, moisture are available to allow the development. Scientists studying the process of seed formation and germination eventually have shown that the seed encodes the specific powers and forms of that specific being, whether plant or animal. This is the physical correspondence to the involution of consciousness that Sri Aurobindo is describing.
Sri Aurobindo concludes that “…Nature [is] only the force of self-expression, self-formation, self-creation of a secret spirit, and man however hedged in his present capacity, [is] the first being in Nature in whom that power begins to be consciently self-creative in the front of the action, in this outer chamber of the physical being, there set to work and bring out by an increasingly self-conscious evolution what he can of all its human significance or its divine possibility…” This is the result of concluding that “…the reality of this whole mounting creation [is] a spiritual evolution.”
Sri Aurobindo,
Sri Aurobindo Studies 