The purpose of the mind was to awaken the possibility of self-consciousness in creation. With this self-consciousness there develops the sense of an I or an ego individuality. But this self-consciousness is the starting point of a long journey until one discovers the true Spiritual Self passing through successive stages across a number of lives. Initially we mistake the self to be the body, the bodily ego so to say. Then it becomes aware of desires, ambitions, emotions mistaking them to be the self but it is the vital self in man. Climbing further it discovers the mind and takes the mind to be the self. Here the ego individuality is fully formed. The mind has served its purpose of creating an ego individuality with the mind and mental being as the centre. It has helped in the birth of man out of the animal. The need for this transition was to create conscious (mentally conscious) individualities without which the original purpose of the One becoming the Many (divine beings) could not be fulfilled.
By this time through this journey of lives the psychic being has grown and is ready to take the charge of the further evolution of transmuting our mental individuality into divine individuals. This is where the mind begins to resist. It has held the charge for a long and worked to create a man out of an animal. It wants to remain the king until and unless it realises that it is the manager and not the creator. Due to the growing psychic pressure, it also begins to realize that the king who is yet invisible to its ignorant vision is actually benevolent. His coming would not mean the annulment of the mind but its enhancement to new and higher possibilities. Then it begins to aspire and surrender growing in Wisdom and Light.
Without the full play of the mind creation is beautiful but incomplete, half-conscious. It is a mass driven unconsciously by the instinct of the species. With the mind it becomes increasingly conscious until there emerge conscious divine beings leading a divine life in a divine body. So this narrow passage, though stifling and painful, was needed to become conscious and reclaim our divinity. It is just the difference between a perfect machine and a conscious error-prone man. A machine is unconscious and hence its perfection is limited. A man is half-conscious with the possibility of collaborating in the evolutionary process and becoming fully conscious.
About Savitri | B1C1-10 The Response of Earth (p.5)