Well, we have finally arrived in our round, the 4th, but before we can get to the exciting events that have taken place on our globe in the 4th round, we need to deal with the first three rounds. So let’s begin.
The fourth round is often called the human round because, at its beginning, all the archetypes for every Root Race were brought down and appeared on Globe A. From an examination of these archetypes, it is possible to see what humanity of the future will be like. They will have finer vehicles in every way and will be distinctly more beautiful in appearance, expressing in their forms the spiritual forces they all innately contain.
You will recollect also that in the 4th round, the mineral monads are destined to reach perfection, i.e., the point of greatest hardness and density. This is not exactly unexpected when you consider that our 4th chain is the lowest that the whole scheme will achieve in its overall development. In taking a preliminary bird’s-eye view of the 4th round, there are three important characteristics which differentiate it from the preceding rounds; these are:
(1) A change in the condition of the elemental essences:
(2) The shutting of the door against the animal kingdom and the opening of the door to the Path:
(3) The recapitulation of the first three rounds on the fourth globe (D) our Earth.
We shall deal with the first of these in this presentation, and with the other two in later presentations. On Globe A, in the fourth round, the mental envelope became more fully defined on the lower subplanes. Remember, here we are talking about subplanes 47:4-7. We can say that in this round humanity began really to think. Animals have rudimentary activity in 47:7 and domesticated animals more so. It is this lowest of levels that was beginning to function as it should. However, we are talking about 47:7! This is a low bar. The result at first was by no means good. In the previous rounds, humanity had not been sufficiently developed to originate thought-forms to any great extent and consequently, the elemental essences of the globes had been affected only by the thoughts of the devas, which left everything harmonious and peaceful. Now that humans began to interject their selfish and jarring thoughts, this comfortable condition was disturbed to a considerable degree. Strife, unrest and disharmony were introduced: the elemental essences began to show hostility to us, for, from their standpoint, we were no longer an animal among animals; but an independent and domineering entity, likely to be hostile and aggressive. Now this statement implies that elemental essences were self-activating monads, which they were not and that they had some sort of collective position on their relationship to us; they don’t. But something had changed in us and this led to a change in them. Remember, they are secondary matter and so are only passively conscious. They reflect us and our thoughts, that is all.
The animal kingdom also drew decisively apart from humanity and began to feel fear and hatred towards us.
When the life wave reached Globe C, the incoming monads found, besides the ordinary seed-humanity, another and rather unpleasant race, which is spoken of in The Secret Doctrine as the ”water-men, terrible and bad.” These monads had very poorly developed basket-work causal envelopes. Many of these monads had individualised through fear and hate. They were descended from monads which had been left behind in the previous round, being unfit to make progress and since then, they had been engaged in developing the evil side of their nature. They were amphibious, half-reptile, half-ape, scaly creatures, with a horrible tarantula-like appearance about the eyes and a fiendish delight in cruelty and evil.
When the life wave came around, the incoming humanity soon established itself sufficiently strongly to free itself from the fear of these monstrous savages. It was to resist possible attacks from them that the first fortifications were erected by humanity and it was also to be able to defeat their evil nature that humanity began, first to build primitive cities and to begin to live together in considerable numbers. Originally, they built principally of wood and mud, though sometimes of piles of unfinished stone.
During this period, that of the 4th Race, some of the Lords of the Moon incarnated among humanity and taught them many things, among others the use of fire, which, however, they did not yet know how to produce for themselves. The greater Beings lighted their fires for them and then they kept them perpetually alight. Very early on, a stringent law was made that a public fire should always be kept burning in a building specially dedicated to it. This transition is found today in the Zoroastrian religion founded by Buddha. It was the young girls, who could not as yet either work or fight that were usually left to watch these fires. From this, no doubt arose the first idea of a sacred fire, ever to be kept burning as a religious duty and of the appointment of vestal virgins to guard it, as found in Greece.
Sometimes, however, it happened that from a great flood or tempest or some other catastrophe, a whole district was left for a time without fire and then the people often had to travel far in order to obtain and carry back to their homes this prime necessity. Some bold spirit conceived the idea of obtaining fire in such an emergency from the crater of a volcano and many lives were at one time or another lost in attempting to do so.
The fifth Root-race on Globe C was pale in skin colour and made considerable progress, the basket-work monads developing a complete causal body. They were good, well-meaning and kind, though not capable of any large ideas, of widely spread feelings of affection, or self-sacrifice. At a quite early stage, they began to divide food instead of fighting over it, developing a social feeling to some extent.
Being thus comparatively advanced, they built their houses of dressed stone, though without mortar. They were proud and warlike but had some curious ideas. They appear to have had no initiative whatever and they regarded anything new with horror, as exceedingly immoral and repulsive. No wonder Rock & Roll got a bad reception. They had no perseverance and little reasoning capacity. Everything was done under impulse and nothing was under control. Life moved forward as long as something new was not added to the equation. Yet in many ways they would compare favourably with some races, which exist on the Earth today.
Sixth-race humanity was much further down the road from the previous 5th race. They had considerable amounts of will and determination. They soon dominated the fifth Race, taking up its civilisation and carrying it much further. They succeeded in subduing the whole of the planet and brought it under one rule, although the enormous majority of its inhabitants belonged to the fifth Race. These people had higher developed mental capacity than the previous race and possessed some inventive genius, but it was their tendency to do everything by fits and starts, and not to take up a piece of work and carry it through. Ever had that written on your report card?
There was a certain degree of psychic development among the 6th racers, but it was usually uncontrolled. Lack of control was a permanent characteristic of this 3rd Globe civilisation. Everything was erratic, even though the people were capable in certain ways.
The seventh Race people in turn got the power into their hands, not by force, but rather by superior mental development and cunning. They were not so warlike as the sixth Race and they were always smaller in number, but they knew more in many ways than the sixth. They were coming nearer to modern ideas; they had a more definite sense of right and wrong; they were less fierce and more law-abiding; they had a definite policy and lived according to it. Their supremacy was entirely intellectual, and they possessed to a high degree the ability to combine different elements of thoughts and ideas and work out a new process. This is a major advancement in the capacity development in any monad and one that is often lacking in some societies today. Their social architecture could be described as being ant or bee-like. We saw this before in the 3rd Round when the Manu would direct the lives of all the monads in its charge. Look around you today. Where do you see people who have similar characteristics and people who live an ant-like existence? You see this much more strongly emphasised in fourth, rather than 5th root race monads today.
It was in the 7th Race, also called a Root Race in future presentations, that writing was first noticed as a fairly common accomplishment. They knew something of art, because they had both statues and pictures, though different in every way from ours. They were also the first race that took the trouble to make roads.
We have come on quite a journey, from our introduction into our solar system as mineral monads to becoming human to varying degrees. These degrees were the result of when and on which globe we causalised. Some of us did it on the Moon chain and others during the first three rounds of the 4th, the Earth chain. We have now started to look at the 4th round, our round and we have quickly gone through the first three globes. Finally, we get to our globe in the 4th round. We can now start to look at life and monadic development in much more granular detail. See you in the next presentation.