The action of the intuitive mind as it views past, present and future is necessarily limited and circumscribed by a number of factors. This action of consciousness is still bound within the framework of the existing actualities that come within its range, and there is therefore a serious limitation in projecting the vision backward or forward in time, due to the constant development and insertion of powers, forces, and actions that carry out the greater will of the universal manifestation, exceeding or modifying radically the situation. This is where the play of potentialities or imperatives come into operation to effect changes in the actualities of the moment. The further one tries to extrapolate or see along a particular line of actual development with the intuitive mind, the more likely it is that error must creep in and deflect the vision of the true situation.
Sri Aurobindo describes the issue: “…it can see only what will arrive in the undisturbed process of the actualities and its vision no longer applies if some unforeseen rush of forces or intervening power comes down from regions of a larger potentiality altering the complex of conditions, and this is a thing that constantly happens in the action of forces in the time movement. It may help itself by the reception of inspirations that illumine to it these potentialities and of imperative revelations that indicate what is decisive in them and its sequences and by these two powers correct the limitations of the intuitive mind of actuality. But the capacity of this first intuitive action to deal with these greater sources of vision is never quite perfect, as must always be the case with an inferior power in its treatment of the materials given to it from a greater consciousness. A considerable limitation of vision by its stress on the stream of immediate actualities must be always its character.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Synthesis of Yoga, Part Four: The Yoga of Self-Perfection, Chapter 25, Towards the Supramental Time Vision , pg. 869
Sri Aurobindo Studies 