Today we will look at the Second Chain but first just a quick recap. To do one round in a chain is a manvantara. That is about 4.3 billion years. To do seven of them is a very long time if you include the pralayas. In the First Chain, the usual pattern was followed, Globes A to G in seven rounds, as will occur in all subsequent chains. However, because all this happened between planes 45 and 47, you would be able to witness none of the action unless you had “eyes to see”. The principle takeaway from this whole chain is that it serves as an archetype for the rest of the whole scheme. Seeds were laid down in this chain, which is destined to flower in subsequent manifestations of our Chain Manu, or Planetary Logos. Remember, this is the Logos’ show. It is the Christmas tree, the baubles are the globes and we are just the glitter stuck to those baubles.
So what is the Seconds Chain composed of? It has two Unity planes (46), two causal planes (47:1-3), two mental planes (47:4-7) and now we also have an Emotional Plane, (48), which serves as Globe D in the globe chain. In the first round, on Globe D, the emotional one, great surging clouds of matter are what you would have seen if you were clairvoyant. In the following round, they became denser, more brilliantly coloured, and more responsive to vibrations, which shaped them into forms, though it is difficult to say whether these forms were vegetable or animal. Thus things with the general appearance of vegetables moved about with the freedom of animals, though apparently with little, if any, sentiency. Sentiency is brain activity if you are not familiar with that word. Not being anchored to physical matter, the lowest matter of the chain being emotional, they were very mobile. Do not equate this emotional world (48) with the unholy mess that is our current emotional world around our planet. Our emotional world is populated with all the wild and negative emotions that we are continually pumping out. On the Second Chain, there was not a lot of emotional activity going on as we would know it. It was in its nascent phase of development.
Much of the work of the chain was on higher levels, a vitalising of subtle matter for future use, showing little effect on the lower forms. Just as now, elemental essence is used to build Emotional and mental bodies. Why is this the case? Because the matter of these worlds is secondary matter, principally. If it is contained in an envelope, tertiary matter has to form the envelope. In the second chain, the Kâma and Rûpa Devas, the emotional and mental devas to you and me, were seeking to differentiate themselves more fully by using these clouds of matter and living in them. They came down, sub-plane by sub-plane; into denser matter, but in this they were not using the human kingdom. This is why our current devas are so much more advanced than us, even if they exist on the same planes as us. They have been practising doing their job for a lot longer than we have. They also evolve along their own hierarchy, taking up more senior positions on subsequent globes. Even at present, a Deva may ensoul a whole countryside. In the Second Chain, such an action was very common. The emotional and mental matter formed the bodies of the Devas and it was changing and intermingling continuously.
Incidentally, permanent atoms of minerals, vegetables and even animals rooted themselves in the bodies of the Devas, growing and evolving by doing so. The Devas seemed to take no particular interest in them; any more than we interest ourselves in the evolution of microbes in our physical bodies. That is until we get diarrhoea. Occasionally, however, some interest was shown in an animal and its capacity to respond increased rapidly under such conditions. Think of it as being a teacher’s pet.
The humanity of the chain lived in close contact with the Devas, who still dominated the evolutionary field, both Kâma (emotional) and Rûpa (mental) Devas influencing strongly, but for the most part unintentionally, human evolution. It is difficult for us to get a grasp as to what kind of being a human in these early chains would have been like. For a start there was no physical plane to experience, the types of restrictions found on Plane 49 and the three-dimensionality that would ensue. Instead, the human monad was exposed to four and five dimensions and whatever that meant for their evolution. We, by the way, also experience these dimensions, when we visit the Emotional World in our sleep and the Mental World on the way back to our causal envelope at the end of an incarnation.
However, something can be said and passion showed itself in many human beings, who had Emotional bodies on Globe D and its beginnings were visible also in animals. Differences existed in the capacity to respond to vibrations sent out by the Devas, but changes were very gradual and progress was slow. Later, when Unity (46) consciousness unfolded, there was communication between the Earth Scheme and the Venus Scheme. In fact, certain entities from the Venus Scheme came to the Earth Scheme in the Second Chain, but whether they belonged to the Venus humanity or were members of the ”Staff” is not known.
Those of us who are now human were in the vegetable kingdom in the Second Chain. Some of us today still seem to be vegetables! In that vegetable life, there was a dim awareness of forces playing upon it and a certain compulsion
towards growth. In some, there was a feeling of the want to grow, a desire to flower, as one might say. In others, there was a slight resistance to the line of growth impressed upon it and a vague groping after another, self-chosen direction.
Some tried to use any force that contacted them. Others tried to push out in a direction which attracted them and were frustrated and vaguely resentful. Thus, for example, one monad, forming part of a Deva, was observed by Leadbeater to be hindered, since the Deva was naturally arranging things to suit itself and not any constituents of their body, which happened to be this monad. On the other hand, from the obscure viewpoint of the vegetable, the Deva’s proceedings were as incomprehensible as the weather is to us in these days, and often as troublesome.
Towards the end of the chain, the more highly developed vegetables were showing a little mental activity, in fact, it is fair to say that they had a baby intelligence. They, being aware of the existence of external animals, liked the neighbourhood of some of those animals and shrunk from others. There was also a craving for more cohesion. This was the result of the downward rush of life into matter of greater density, the Will aspect working in Nature for the descent into those denser levels.
The level of attainment set for the humanity of the Second Chain was the Third Initiation (i3). Those who reached this level entered one of the Seven Paths, one of these, as before, leading to work in the next chain.
The Second Chain is known as the Body of Light, or of Day, and also as the Creative Chain.
Its ”successes”, as it is hoped that there will be successes in each chain, were the Agnisvâtta Pitris, some of whom became the Sixth Creative Hierarchy, and had to deal with the intellectual evolution of Humanity in the fourth, the Earth chain. Just to remind you, these Pitris act like a human template. It is out of their substance that bodies are evolved that monads will later use to incarnate into form. Religious texts speak of “God” modelling us out of clay. Well here, the modeller is also the clay that becomes the eventual template. This whole process is a fascinating story but it would take another series of presentations to do it justice. Today we are focused more on the macro dynamics of what has gone on in our preceding Chains, Rounds and Globes.
The student will recollect, also, that the ”successes” of the first chain, the Asuras, serve as Barhishads, the archetypes, on this, the Second Chain. Those who did not attain full success entered the Third Chain at the round suitable to the stage they had evolved to. Again, this is entering stage left, not at the beginning, but somewhere further down the road of the evolution found on that chain, as conditions ripened for the monads concerned to further their evolution.
In the seventh round of the Second Chain, a considerable number dropped out from its humanity as ”failures,” having fallen too far behind to find suitable forms for them to continue in the Second Chain. They went on later into the Third Chain, as humanity.
The most advanced monads of the animal kingdom who individualised on the Third Chain, began their human evolution on the Third Chain, passing through its lower kingdoms very rapidly and becoming Human. They then led the evolution of the Third Chain until the ”failures” were shunted off stage right, into pralaya. Later those who had fully succeeded came in successively and became the leaders on that and the subsequent chain, our own.
The most evolved from the Vegetable Kingdom of the Second Chain, entered the Third Chain in the animal kingdom as mammals, in the fourth round. The remainder, less evolved vegetables, came in during the first round as animals of the lower types. As has been mentioned, it is in the early stages of a chain that those monads that need more forcing, are brought into the action of the chain. This is to help them catch up and achieve, what is always, the goal for that particular chain. The other kingdoms moved on one stage, as we have seen in this diagram, according to the standard plan, the First Elemental Kingdom being, as usual, supplied by a new stream of life from the Logos.
Fig: Progress of the Kingdoms
So that is a wrap for the whole Second Chain. For us, it was our passage through the Plant Kingdom and it was worth devoting a whole presentation to what was achieved over billions of years. We now start getting into the thick of the action when we look at the Third Chain. See you in the next presentation.