The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist’s Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics….
by Eliezer Sobel
Summary
From Publisher’s Weekly: “While a romp through the New Age is not everyone’s cup of tea, novelist, publisher and editor Sobel (Minyan) does a fine job making his 30-year quest for spiritual awakening widely identifiable with a funny, clear-eyed account that takes readers around the world and through a gauntlet of gurus, shamans, workshops and retreats, not to mention sex and drugs (legal and otherwise). Sobel’s twin assets are his willingness and his sense of humor, both apparent from the start in his encounter with a guru named Ram Dass, whose first instruction to Sobel is to take off his pants ("So I did"). Other episodes include Primal Therapy training with a teacher who rents his office space for porn production, the “est” training that teaches people to accept reality as it is (and then rope everyone they know into the program), and tours through Jerusalem, India and Brazil. Sobel’s spiritual journey doesn’t provide any answers (these days, the title on his business card is “Human Being") but provides lots of engaging, regular-guy perspective on modern man’s confounding array of ancient and contemporary fulfillment schemes.
Excerpt
There was once a famous population of Japanese monkeys--the irrepressible macaca fuscata--living on the island of Koshima in 1952; incidentally the year I was born. Scientists provided the monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand, and observed that they generally seemed to relish the new treat in spite of a certain unpleasant grittiness. One day an enterprising young primate named Imo discovered that if she took her potato down to the water’s edge, she could rinse off all the dirt and enjoy a much tastier meal. Imo taught her mother and playmates the trick, and gradually, over the course of six years, one monkey after another adopted the practice.
Then in 1958, a remarkable event occurred: the number of potato-washing monkeys reached what is called a “critical mass,” and suddenly, not only did the entire monkey population on Koshima Island start performing the new procedure, but all of the monkey populations on neighboring islands spontaneously began washing their potatoes as well!
“The Hundredth Monkey” became the name futurists used for this unusual phenomenon, and they extrapolated from monkey-experience to show that this is also the way the human community makes dramatic, collective paradigm shifts into new ways of thinking, being and behaving. Once a critical mass of people have transformed their essentially materialist world-view to a spiritual one, for example, the entire population of the planet will spontaneously choose to come along for the ride. The dirty sweet potato of being a self-centered, acquisitive, power-hungry creature, blindly bent on the destruction of life as we know it, will be gently washed in the stream of loving-kindness, peacefulness and the desire to serve God and humanity, ushering in a Golden Age of peace and prosperity for all people.
***
Fat chance. Not with the likes of me around. I am the 99th Monkey. If you don’t get me, you don’t get your critical mass, and it screws up the whole works. I seem to be single-handedly holding back the Great Paradigm Shift of the Golden Age through my simply continuing to be a resistant little putz most of the time. My apologies.
(If it makes you feel any better, I recently heard somewhere that this whole story about the monkeys and the potatoes is not true, that it didn’t really happen that way at all. That really annoyed me, considering that I’d just based a whole book on it.)
I met Ram Dass, my first spiritual teacher, in 1975 in New York when I was 23 years old, several weeks after completing the est training in Boston, which was several months after having spent one and a half years screaming my head off in Primal Therapy. I was desperately trying to cure myself of being me, a futile pursuit that would continue for three decades, and would take me all around the world to meet shamans, healers and gurus, stay in ashrams and monasteries….
Reviews
Colin Wilson: "Funny, beautifully written and often extremely moving and thought-provoking."
David A. Cooper: "A must read for anyone interested in the phenomenon of spiritual growth in the west."
Paul Krassner: “Balancing between wisdom and absurdity, a generous contribution to countercultural history.”
Author's Biography
Eliezer Sobel was awarded the prestigious Peter Taylor Award for his novel, Minyan: Ten Jewish Men in a World That Is Heartbroken, and is also the author of Wild Heart Dancing.He was the Editor of The New Sun magazine in the late 1970s, the publisher of Wild Heart Journal, and his articles, short stories, and poetry have appeared in the Village Voice, Yoga Journal, Tikkun, Quest, New Age Journal, and many others.He has led intensive creativity workshops and retreats at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, the Open Center in New York City, and similar venues around the United States. Sobel lives in Richmond, Virginia.