Let us continue from where we left off in the last presentation. Where had we got to? There were several points to note. The first was that when you have a newly formed chain, there are no bodies to inhabit. This applies to all the seven life streams. You may be surprised to hear this. Surely elementals do not need bodies to move into? The question is how do you upgrade? You have to move from the lower to the higher. You need some kind of template to move into. The blueprints came from the Barhishads and they were fleshed out by primitive Moon-men, who entered these blueprints and made them ready for each of the seven life streams to enter them. So it is surprising to learn that rather than evolving up from lower orders of creation to higher ones, it seemed to happen the other way round. If you look at life on our planet today, you may see lower orders of life, like bacteria and fungi and above them, primitive plants. What you don’t see is one of these classes evolving directly into another. This can happen between globes and rounds, but mainly it happens, as already stated, between chains.
The last take-home point from the previous presentation was that the First Round was all about setting the stage for what was to follow. The Manu of this round laid out a set of blueprints for all that was to follow, as per the wishes of the Planetary Logos. To achieve this transition from the Moon to the Earth chain, the First Round has to start one plane of matter higher, on the causal. All subsequent rounds see Globes A and G being on the Mental plane.
So we start this presentation remembering the pioneering work done by those early Moon-men moving through each blueprint, from the lowest elemental up to the human stage. That is why it was mention in the last presentation that the first proton-humans had to recapitulate all the stages of their evolution. They were not doing it for themselves. They were doing it for all the life streams associated with the chain. Having done this on each of the seven planets in the First Round, these animal-men attained humanity for the last time on the seventh planet of the Earth Chain in this First Round. Since then they have rested from that particular and tedious kind of labour because, in the Second Round, they were human from the beginning. But, although they entered the first globe of the Second Round at the level of primitive humanity, it was so primitive that the advance was scarcely a perceptible one.
The directed evolution, on the various rounds of the Earth Chain, of the forms into which these entities entered, was carried out, as stated, by the Barhishad Pitris. Barhishads from Globe G of the Moon Chain, being the lowest class of Barhishads, made the primitive archetypal forms in the First Round of the Earth Chain. Barhishads from Globe F of the Moon Chain constructed the forms for the Second Round of the Earth Chain; those from Moon Chain Globe E built the forms for the Earth Chain third round; whilst the forms for the present fourth round of the Earth Chain were built by Barhishads from Moon Chain Globe D. I think you can see a pattern here.
Coming now to describe what little is known of the conditions of the first round, we find that Humanity on Globe A, at present the causal plane, could hardly be called a human at all. Think of these monads more as a thought. Some day, these monads would be a more coherent collection of envelopes, encasing a physical form. Currently, think of them as infants that will one day develop into adults. The human monad at this time had very little conscious activity.
On Globe B, which at the time was on the mental plane, though in the Second Round, it would become an emotional globe, everything was focused within the mental envelope, with a little development of the emotional envelope.
On Globe C, Humanity had definite emotional bodies, but they were far from perfect. They only had the lowest subplanes of this envelope populated with elemental essences. Higher feelings of love and kindness were not on the menu at the moment. The germ of an etheric envelope was beginning to manifest, but again, not all four subplanes of etheric matter were present.
On Globe D, what would appear to us later as our Earth, humanity had etheric bodies, but they were mere drifting shapeless clouds, though towards the end of the globe period they began to aggregate around themselves gaseous matter as well as etheric material. This sounds like a giant fart. Considering the gases that would have been floating around at the time, it probably smelled like one as well. These proto-humans appeared to be able to absorb all the nutrients they needed from the intensely heated atmosphere.
They seem to have had a succession of manifestations which we may think of as corresponding to races, however, these were only root races, because there were only seven. There was also only one incarnation if we can call it an incarnation, for each individual lasted through the whole race. They multiplied by fission, rather like bacteria. You see again, it was the human stream that evolved the model that would later be followed by the lowest streams of life on our current globe. It appears that the world periods were much longer than they are now, but still, it is not easy for us, with our ideas of what life means, to understand how these primitive humans could have gone about evolving at all.
In the lower kingdoms of nature, some monads in etheric bodies appeared to be trying, if not very successfully, to dream about becoming a plant. The etheric bodies of minerals were formed, but these were not complete, because again, at this early stage, only some of the sub-planes were fully vivified. Add to this the fact that the atoms were more sluggish. What do we mean here? We have talked briefly about atoms containing spirillae. We currently have four spirillae in our atoms. In the First Round, they only had one.
The general condition of the world at this time has been described, but we can add more details. Minerals were more solid than they had been on Globe C because they were largely pelted onto the Earth by the Moon in a molten state. The temperature was above 3,500º C. At this temperature, copper was a gas, not even a liquid. Silicon was visible, but most of the minerals were proto-elements, not elements, and the combinations present today seemed to be very rare. The Earth was surrounded by huge vapour clouds, shutting in the heat and hence cooled very slowly (and you think we have problems today). At the Poles, there was boiling mud, which gradually cooled and after thousands of years, a green scum appeared, probably photosynthetic bacteria, which would become the first plant life in the future. By the end of the globe period, the temperature had reduced considerably to about 500˚C on average, though it remained much hotter in certain districts and others it was at the level of boiling water.
On Globe E there were only three subplanes of etheric matter, not four as there had been on Globe D, the Earth. The humanity, however, had progressed and were much more animated than they had been, though even now their consciousness seemed amoeba-like. Nevertheless, it is clear that Humanity was already beginning, in a blind way, to work both upwards, to make its higher envelopes more conscious and downwards, to densify the lower envelopes. Primitive though everything was, each globe was certainly an advance on that which preceded it. But in all cases, it appears that humanity had not achieved full consciousness on any subplanes of matter in which the monad had been working. What appeared to be happening was that as humanity moved from one globe to the next, each envelope was subdivided and only a fraction of these envelopes were useable.
Leadbeater was unable to tell us much about the conditions to be found on Globes F and G. Remember, at this stage, they were on the mental and causal planes. What can be said is that there, for the first time, was observed the phenomenon of ”failures,”. We know the implications of this from previous presentations. It should be remembered that no matter of the lower planes is ever carried over from one globe to another. Only the monads are carried over and they draw around themselves matter belonging to the new planet and, in the case of physical bodies, obtain these from the infantile vehicles provided by the entities who are already living on the new planet. Where do these entities come from? In round one, from the blueprints worked on by those Moon-Animal men and in later rounds from the failures.
In the First Round, when monads appeared for the first time on the Earth Chain, the human form evolved from the animal, precisely as Darwinian theory suggests. it should be noted that we are talking about the form, not the Moon-men who originally poured themselves into these blueprints. The animating force was a proto-human, but this monad went through all the evolutionary stages below the level of the Human Kingdom, eventually arriving at the human stage on Globe G. There is, however, an important difference between the Darwinian theory and the lessons gleaned from esoteric examination. Darwin’s theory is predicated on natural selection, a very slow process that relies on random mutations of genes. This is not how things happened or are happening today. It is the devas that control evolution and this is described, in some quarters, as “intelligent design”. The objective of this intelligent design is to create vehicles to better suit the evolving monads that will inhabit them. In the present, the fourth round, evolution happened in the opposite direction to Darwinian theories. The process was reversed, the human form existing on the Earth before those of any of the mammals which we now know.
On that bombshell, we will leave it there and continue our study of the Second Round in the fourth chain of our scheme.