As we examine the roots of human activity, the drives that propel humanity forward, we begin to see a pattern which Sri Aurobindo has described in the first chapter of his magnum opus, The Life Divine. He describes there the human aspiration for God, Light, Freedom, Immortality as the hidden wellspring of human growth and development. If we scratch the surface of human actions in the fields of religion or the seeking for and creation of beauty, we see this aspiration at work.
Sri Aurobindo observes: “We begin to see, through the principle and law of our religious being, through the principle and law of our aesthetic being, the universality of a principle and law which is that of all being and which we must therefore hold steadily in view in regard to all human activities. It rests on a truth on which the sages have always agreed, though by the intellectual thinker it may be constantly disputed. It is the truth that all active being is a seeking for God, a seeking for some highest self and deepest Reality secret within, behind and above ourselves and things, a seeking for the hidden Divinity: the truth which we glimpse through religion, lies concealed behind all life; it is the great secret of life, that which it is in labour to discover and to make real to its self-knowledge.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle: The Psychology of Social Development, Chapter 15, The Suprarational Good, pg. 146
Sri Aurobindo Studies 