Hundredth Monkey

Introduction

The first report about the Hundredth Monkey, written by Lyall Watson, said that he based his report on primatologists’ observations of Japanese macaque monkeys on some of the Japanese islands. Scientists had been observing these monkeys for a while, and in 1952 and 1953 they began giving these monkeys sweet potatoes and other foods on the beach. One monkey learned to wash the sand and grit off the potatoes. Soon her mother and friends washed them too. The potato washing spread gradually until 1958 when Lyall Watson claimed something wonderful happened: the potato washing reached a critical mass of monkeys, and every monkey on the whole island then suddenly started washing their potatoes. But, then something more wonderful happened, according to Watson: the potato washing spread to other islands without any direct contact from the monkeys on the first island. Something like a force field of group consciousness was set up, and monkeys who had never seen another monkey wash a potato before started washing potatoes on their own.[i]

Watson said:

One has to gather the rest of the story from personal anecdotes and bits of folklore among primate researchers, because most of them are still not quite sure what happened. And those who do suspect the truth are reluctant to publish it for fear of ridicule. So, I am forced to improvise the details, but as near as I can tell, this is what seems to have happened. In the autumn of that year an unspecified number of monkeys on Koshima were washing sweet potatoes in the sea. . . Let us say, for argument’s sake, that the number was ninety-nine and that at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, one further convert was added to the fold in the usual way. But the addition of the hundredth monkey apparently carried the number across some sort of threshold, pushing it through a kind of critical mass, because by that evening almost everyone was doing it. Not only that, but the habit seems to have jumped natural barriers and to have appeared spontaneously, like glycerine crystals in sealed laboratory jars, in colonies on other islands and on the mainland in a troop at Takasakiyama. [ii]

Watson is claiming the group consciousness of a sufficient number of monkeys washing potatoes set up a force field of some type so that other monkeys who had never seen the behavior started spontaneously doing it too.

ken Keyes Jr.: first modern spiritual author to adopt this metaphor

The first modern spiritual author to adopt this metaphor was Ken Keyes Jr., who wrote a book called The Hundredth Monkey. In the beginning of the 1980s, Keyes was extremely worried about the real possibility of human life on our planet ending as a result of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. Rather than giving in to hopelessness and despair, Keyes became hopeful of a new way of social change based on the Hundredth Monkey story. He was sympathetic to the Oneness worldview underlying the monkey story because he already had a Oneness worldview of human nature. This Oneness view of human nature said that the danger of nuclear war was not caused by the evil Soviet Union, inherent human aggressiveness, or competition between two superpowers for land or influence. Instead, the real cause was an internal state of consciousness within each individual person: we thought of ourselves as separate individuals. The nuclear weapons were only an external manifestation of this internal state of consciousness. He said, “The nuclear nations today have created a total of 50,000 nuclear devices — each of which is an expression of the consciousness of the separate-self… We pay a horrendous price for the separate self — this ‘me-vs.-you’ jungle-type consciousness… Any perception that our lives are an ‘us-vs.-them’ matter is an illusion.”[iii]

Rather than competition between ideologies or land, the problem was our feelings and consciousness being based on a sense of separateness from other people. Keyes said, “Always remember that feelings of anger and hatred and separateness are our only problem.”[iv]

Based on his underlying worldview and belief in the Hundredth Monkey theory, Keyes said that as individuals change, eventually a critical mass of people will be reached and the whole society will have a new, peaceful way of doing things. Keyes said that as individuals change “there is a point at which if only one more person tunes-in to a new awareness, a field is strengthened so that this awareness is picked up by almost everyone!”[v] He said that once this field is created, there is a new “shared awareness of the urgent necessity to rapidly achieve a nuclear-free world.”[vi]

Change will happen once the number of oneness-oriented individuals reach critical mass so that their worldview spreads to everyone, and thus, becomes the dominant worldview.

Other spiritual authors adopt this metaphor

Neale Donald Walsch

Other extremely popular authors followed Keyes’ lead. Neale Donald Walsch, whose ideas are based on the Oneness worldview of New Thought, says that our civilization is in a crisis so severe that we are years, not decades, from collapse.[vii] While Walsch thinks there is an impending crisis, he is also very hopeful. He says that when enough individual people share the Oneness consciousness, a critical mass will be reached which will create a force field of some type so that everyone in society will share this belief. He says that “as more and more people are awakening…that number will reach critical mass, and the so-called Hundredth Monkey theory will play out its effect. That is, everyone at once will know and understand.”[viii] Walsch says that the critical mass is around 3% of all people.[ix] Walsch is such an optimist that he believes this change will not take centuries, but only decades or even just years.[x] [He stated this in 2004.]

The essence of Walsch’s new society is based on the Oneness worldview: that we are all one with God and one another.[xi] In this new society, there will be a shift in consciousness so that everyone will share everything equally, and thus, there will not be a need for private property.[xii] In a really advanced society, there will not even be personal pronouns as there will not even be the concept “yours” or “mine.”[xiii] This Oneness consciousness plays out in other practical ways too. To cite just one example, if people do harmful things, there will not be any punishment. He says that “the idea of punishment is simply not something that occurs to them [people living in advanced societies], because the concept of punishment itself is incomprehensible to them. Why would the One Being want to hurt Itself? Even if It has done something that is damaging, why would It want to hurt Itself again? How does hurting Itself once more correct the damage of the first hurt? It’s like stubbing one’s toe, then kicking twice as hard to retaliate.“[xiv]

Deepak Chopra

The popular author Deepak Chopra also based his ideas of social change on this Hundredth Monkey theory. He says that as we rise in consciousness, our peaceful calmness sends out an energy field that affects those around us.[xv] This idea incorporates both the Hundredth Monkey theory and another related phenomenon called the Maharishi effect in which meditators send out calming vibrations so that crime and terrorism go down in their area. From these related effects, Chopra concludes that a oneness worldview is shown by science to be true: “The reason such results are possible is that intelligence is one…. All reality is shared, and what is reality for one is reality for all. Intelligence is one thing, only expressing itself in infinitely different channels.”[xvi] In his book about evolving beyond war to totally peaceful ways of resolving international conflicts, Chopra elaborates more on this transition by saying that a critical mass of aware, peaceful people will change our society’s consciousness so that peace will become the new norm.

James Redfield

James Redfield, in his extremely popular book The Celestine Prophecy, also mentioned a sudden transformation where society will shift into a more spiritual form of consciousness once a critical mass of people is reached. He says that “once we reach this critical mass, the entire culture will begin to take these coincidental experiences seriously.”[xvii] He does not mention the Hundredth Monkey theory by name, but he is talking about the same idea. In another book, Redfield mentions a related phenomenon as the basis of this cultural shift: Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenic fields.[xviii]

Problems with the hundredth monkey

Unfortunately for the advocates of social change based on reaching some critical mass like the Hundredth Monkey, there are two very basic problems:

The phenomena never actually happened the way that Watson said it did.
It was ineffective in getting rid of the fear of nuclear war as Keyes said that it would.

1. Watson’s original report was a fabrication

Ron Amundson wrote a critique for the Skeptical Inquirer magazine of the supposed science behind Watson’s report of the Hundredth Monkey effect. Amundson looked at the primatologist’s data and showed beyond doubt that the phenomenon that Watson was claiming simply did not happen at all. There never was a time when all the monkeys suddenly started washing potatoes, nor did it spread mysteriously to other islands. Amundson’s evidence was so damning that Watson himself admitted that he was wrong about it. Watson wrote: “I accept Amundson’s analysis of the origin and evolution of the Hundredth Monkey without reservation. It is a metaphor of my own making, based — as he rightly suggests — on very slim evidence and a great deal of hearsay.”[xix]

Watson just made the whole thing up, as he essentially admitted. This points to several major problems with the way people with a Oneness worldview treat science. They are not careful with their basic facts and with making sure that they get them right. Instead, they are so wanting to see Oneness everywhere that they inflate something that possibly could be close to their worldview into something the facts do not support. A related problem was that Watson and others following him assumed that there was no other, less Oneness-oriented way of looking at the situation. So, instead of there being some forcefield of Oneness that caused monkeys on different islands to spontaneously wash the potatoes, maybe there were non-Oneness reasons for the activity (if the activity had been true). For example, maybe another monkey on another island learned it by himself or a monkey could have swam to another island and taught those monkeys. (These monkeys are known to swim between the various islands.)[xx]

2. Historically ineffective for social change

Another major problem is that social change based on the Hundredth Monkey and Oneness worldview does not seem to have worked historically. So, in the 1980s, Ken Keyes, Jr. and his many allies tried to use peaceful Oneness means to stop the threat of total nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. But historically, most people who lived through that time think that President Reagan, pursuing policies exactly the opposite of the peace movement, stopped the threat of total nuclear destruction. Reagan won election to the Presidency by saying that he would build up the United States’ military might to stand tall against the Soviet Union. He tremendously increased our spending on weapons, especially the more advanced nuclear weapons (one of which he called the “Peacemaker”), and the Soviet Union realized it could not defeat us and collapsed. So, it would seem that the conservatives are right and that the “old consciousness” of separate thinking is more effective in bringing about peace than developing a peaceful mindset. (Of course, explaining the downfall of the Soviet Union, like explaining any important historical event, is complicated and open to many interpretations. It is quite possible that Reagan’s martial attitude was not that important in the collapse of the Soviet Union. But proponents of the Oneness/peace worldview need to at least acknowledge that there are reasons why “older consciousness” people think a Reagan-type approach is reasonable and show that Reagan’s way really was not the success many people think it was.)

Conclusion

These criticisms about scientific and historical accuracy bring up a deeper problem with the Oneness worldview. People who advocate this worldview think developing a Oneness Consciousness will solve everything, and so they neglect qualities associated with separate individual consciousness. Thus, they neglect careful scientific research, accurate checking of facts, and wide reading that results in awareness of other people’s ideas and works. Worst of all, people with a Oneness worldview are so much into thinking that time is not real and that the past does not exit, that they neglect our culture’s past. Thus, they have no idea why our culture has developed the positions it has (beyond the idea that our culture is into separate thinking because it is materialistic and shallow), and so they cannot help our culture develop a new worldview.

Copyrighted 2009

footnote

[i] Ron Amundson, “The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon,” Skeptical Inquirer, vol. 9, 1985, 348-356. [Can also be found online: http://www.uhh.hawaii.edu/~ronald/HMP.htm]

[ii] Lyall Watson, as quoted in Amundson.

[iii] Ken Keyes, Jr., The Hundredth Monkey, 2nd edition (Coos Bay, OR: Vision Books, 1984), p. 124-5.

[iv] Ken Keyes, Jr., p. 133.

[v] Ken Keyes, Jr., p. 17.

[vi] Ken Keyes, Jr., p. 18.

[vii] Neale Donald Walsch, The New Revelations: A Conversation with God,(New York: Atria Books, 2002), p. ix.

[viii] Neale Donald Walsch, Questions and Answers on Conversations with God, (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc., 1999), p. 240.

[ix] Neale Donald Walsch, Tomorrow’s God: Our Greatest Spiritual Challenge, (New York: Atria Books, 2004), p. 17.

[x] Neale Donald Walsch, Tomorrow’s God, p. 215.

[xi] Neale Donald Walsch, Questions and Answers, p. 195.

[xii] Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God: An Uncommon Dialogue, Book 3 (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc., 1998), p. 287 & 294-5.

[xiii] Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God… Book 3 , p. 306-7.

[xiv] Neale Donald Walsch, Communion with God, (New York: The Berkley Publishing Group, 2000), p. 151.

[xv] Deepak Chopra, Creating Health: How to Wake up the Body’s Intelligence, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), p. 213-220.

[xvi] Deepak Chopra, p. 217.

[xvii] James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy, (New York: Warner Books, 1993), p. 8.

[xviii] James Redfield, The Celestine Vision: Living the New Spiritual Awareness, (New York, Grand Central Publishing, 1997), p. 63-4.

[xix] Lyall Watson in the Fall 1986 issue of Whole Earth Review, as quoted in Robert T. Carroll, “hundredth monkey phenomenon,” accessed online at http://www.skepdic.com/monkey.html.[No pages numbers]

[xx] Amundson.