To Light a Thousand Lamps - The Theosophical Society

Who Will Save Us? / 163
to find his or her own strength, so humanity as a whole
needs time and space to reach maturity through its own
e¤orts. We are much like the adolescent who rejects the
help that is available and then, feeling alienated, seeks foolish
and sometimes destructive means to fill the loneliness.
In consequence, while there is currently an extraordinary
yearning for higher guidance, there is also an astonishing
lack of discrimination as to what is sound and what is
spurious in matters of the spirit.
Today, the winds of Nārada, agent of karma, are toppling
once seemingly impregnable barriers to make way for
long-needed changes in individual and national destinies.*
Every nation, race, and people, indeed every human being
over the globe, is subject to the bipolar force of Nārada’s
Śiva-energy which destroys that it may rebuild. Upheavals
of lesser and greater magnitude occur cyclically to insure
the viability of spirit through shedding and renewal of
forms. This interplay between light and shadow will continue
as long as we are imbodied entities. But there are
cycles within cycles, and the growth patterns of humanity
reveal long periods of seeming quiescence, punctuated by
apparently sudden changes. When such a ‘‘moment’’ of
destiny has matured, we may have an influx of a new type
of humanity on the scene, often accompanied by global
disturbances of a physical as well as psychological character.
In minor degree the waning of the Piscean and the
dawning of the Aquarian age is such a nodal point, where
the struggle between the old and the new is joined. As we
*Cf. G. de Purucker, Fountain-Source of Occultism, pp. 689‒95.