Stanza VII
1. Behold the beginnings of sentient formless life. First the Divine, the one from the Mother-Spirit; then the Spiritual; the three from the one, the four from the one, and the five from which the three, the five, and the seven. These are the three-fold, the four-fold downward; the “mind-born” sons of the first Lord; the shining seven. It is they who are thou, me, him, oh Lanoo. They, who watch over thee, and thy mother earth.
2. The one ray multiplies the smaller rays. Life precedes form, and life survives the last atom of form. Through the countless rays proceeds the life-ray, the one, like a thread through many jewels.
3. When the one becomes two, the threefold appears, and the three are one; and it is our thread, oh Lanoo, the heart of the man-plant called Saptaparna.
“Mr. Old: You think the physical parents have the power of focusing this life and bringing it into distinct channels.
Mme. Blavatsky: The form is made which, as soon as it is born, receives, or as soon as it begins developing, receives life; just the same as you breathe air unconsciously. Nobody gives you the air that you breathe. Without air you would die, that is all.
Mr. Old: Then you really mean to say that endowment of life is the result of certain physical development which has led up to that stage when the reception of life is a necessity.
Mme. Blavatsky: Most assuredly. You are born, you are formed to come into being, and you live because life is there. You are in life. When you die, it is not that life leaves you; you are in the life. It is you who leave the life, and not life that leaves you.
Mr. Kingsland: Life begins to function and manifest through you.
Mme. Blavatsky: And once that your organs are destroyed, it won’t function. It is like the force in the clock. You wind it up; so long as it is wound up it will work, but once that this force is exhausted – not the force that made it – but once the things has been wound up and runs down, there is an end of it, it cannot function, and this force cannot function where there are no conditions.
Mr. Kingsland: It is more like a tree moving about in the wind. You see the effect of the wind by the tree, but if you take away the tree, the wind is blowing past there, just the same.
Mme. Blavatsky: The three higher principles are the human trinity, the three in one. They do not come to the child from the parents. If somebody objects to this and asks: how about the heredity intellect and its absence? You know, as they said the other time when somebody here thought the heredity the all. I say it is perfect nonsense.
Neither this heredity intellect or dullness rests with the higher ego or Manas at all. Their degrees are dependent upon our physical organism and brain, the size of which, by the bye, does not always go pari passu with the quality of the brain.
Now, some persons will say: “He has got an enormous brain, and it shows the intellect.” Not at all. I have been reading things in the medical books. The pig has a far larger brain than the man, and yet it is not quite so intellectual.
Mr. Old: They say the depth of convolutions, rather.
Mme. Blavatsky: No, they weigh the brain. Such a one has got so many ounces or pounds or tons. I say it is the quality, not the quantity. If the father or the mother were intellectual people, they will sometimes pass by inheritance an organism as theirs was to the child. Thence the son will have the same capacities of receiving into and reflecting in his physical brain the same amount of light from Manas or the mind principle.
But how often do we find stupid sons of intellectual parents, and vice-versa? This is not heredity. Do you understand this? The parents may give by heredity their organism, their convolutions, or whatever it is, the physical material, which will have the same capacity of reflecting the light from Manas as they had, therefore the child will be as intellectual; but Manas is not at all that.
It is always the same, it is omniscient. It becomes dull or stupid only in its personalities and incarnations upon earth. You can’t say of Manas that one ego is more intellectual than the other.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 