In this first chapter, Sri Aurobindo begins with the largest possible questions and ideals that are repeatedly posed by the “awakened thoughts” of humanity: God, Light, Freedom, Immortality. These deep and recurrent ideals are constantly met by their apparent opposites in the “normal experience” of everyday life. But they are also affirmed by certain higher experiences, rarely achieved by human beings, but still powerful enough to affect the entire backdrop of human psychology.
The tension between the persistent seeking for Bliss and Freedom, and the relentless daily experience of pain and incapacity, is readily taken as evidence for the invalidity of any such seeking. But Sri Aurobindo suggests that, seen in another way, this tension will be revealed as the expedient method used by Nature to arrive ultimately at a highest and widest harmony of all apparent discords.
He previews the key role a concept of evolution will play in his exposition. Coupled with the idea of a prior involution, the progressive evolution across time of an ever increasing Consciousness - in conditions that initially appear to be its very opposite (inert matter) – will be shown to provide a rich explanatory and synthesizing conceptual model when applied to the cosmos, life, and human beings.
Sri Aurobindo notes that the seeking for a fundamental solution to the problems posed by life survives all periods of skepticism. It gives birth to religions and mysticism, which often take form as superstitions and crude faiths. But denying the truth behind such seeking because of the obscure outer forms it has so far produced, "is itself a kind of obscurantism". Better to accept what Nature "will not allow us as a race to reject", and lift it "into the light of reason", while also not fearing to aspire to whatever higher light of cognition might exceed reason on the grand upward arc of evolution.
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