To Light a Thousand Lamps - The Theosophical Society

28 / TO LIGHT A THOUSAND LAMPS
refused to create. ‘‘Let us dwell in the others. Let us teach
them better, lest worse should happen. They did. . . .
Then all men became endowed with Manas [mind].’’
Thus did the third race produce the fourth, whose inhabitants
‘‘became tall with pride.’’ As the cycle of evolution
rapidly moved toward its lowest point in the arc of material
descent, temptations multiplied. It is recorded that a fearsome
battle took place between the Sons of Light and the
Sons of Darkness. ‘‘The first great waters came. They swallowed
the seven great islands.’’ The Sons of Light took birth
among the incoming fifth race — our own — to give it the
needed spiritual impetus, and ‘‘taught and instructed it.’’*
The igniting of our intellectual faculties was a climactic
moment in human evolution. It quickened our awareness
of everything: we became conscious of who and what we
were — self-conscious. Knowledge gave us power: power to
choose, to think, and to act — wisely and unwisely. It gave
us the ability to love and to understand others. It stimulated
the yearning to evolve and expand our capacities. In
the process it gave us the greatest challenge of all: the awakening
of our powers for both beneficence and maleficence,
culminating in a contest between the light and dark forces
in ourselves. When we multiply this by several billion human
souls, we easily understand why there has been and still
is a continual conflict of wills.
During the third great racial cycle or root-race, the
mānasaputras, who united their mind-essence with the
latent mind of those early humans, remained with us as
*The Secret Doctrine 2:16‒21, Stanzas III‒XII.