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A
Key To The World
Situation:
The 100th Monkey Effect
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1952 WAS A SPECIAL YEAR
THE 100TH MONKEY EFFECT BEGAN IN 1952: Something started in
1952, which was accomplished by 1958, which had never been noticed
before.... the 100th Monkey Effect.
HUGE GLOBAL UFO SIGHTINGS IN 1952: 1952 was about the busiest
year ever for the sightings of UFOs in the atmosphere of our Earth. Was,
perhaps, friendly ET giving humanity - via an obliging species of life
on Earth - a helpful hand in under-standing how consciousness and change
function?
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THE 'COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS'
AND THE '100TH MONKEY' EFFECT
The following is from 'Lifetide', by
Lyall Watson.
Book Club Associates, London, 1979. Pages 155-158.
"..... This might imply that the essential conflict is between the newer
parts of the forebrain and the more primitive parts in the mid and hind
brains. Between the mammalian and reptilian memories. And in a sense
this is probably correct, but I doubt that it is possible or even
necessary to isolate the command centres of the opposing forces in any
spatial location. The war is between the old selfish instructions and
the new self-awareness. Between genotype and aspects of the phenotype.
Between the needs of the replicators to keep on doing their thing, which
is replicating, and the desire of the organism for identity. The battle
lines are drawn between orders and ideas.
Where the two coincide, a truce is declared and progress takes place by
leaps and bounds. But where they disagree, skirmishes are fought in the
no man's land of the mind and ambivalent we, with all our special
strengths and peculiar frailties, are the result. I believe the seeds of
this conflict are sewn in every cell by the presence there of nuclear
DNA and factors connected with the contingent system. And that just as
the presence and pattern of a number of cells behaving in a certain way
can produce sensations such as sight or sound, so the mere existence of
contingent factors in sufficient numbers in certain critical
configurations could account for their recent intrusion in evolutionary
affairs.
There is a biological analogy which makes this process clear.
IMO - THE FIRST MONKEY
The behaviour of the Japanese monkey Macaco fuscata has been studied
intensely for more than thirty years in a number of wild colonies. One
of these is isolated on the island of Koshimajust off the east coast of
Kyushu, and it was here in 1952 that man provided the monkeys with the
right sort of evolutionary nudge. Provision stations were established at
selected sites in the range of the troop. Normally young monkeys learn
feeding habits from their mothers who teach them by example what to eat
and how to deal with it, and in these macaques the behaviour had grown
to a complex tradition involving the buds, fruits, leaves, shoots and
bark of well over a hundred species of plants. So they approached the
new artificial food supplies equipped with a formidable array of
behavioural predispositions, but nothing in their established repertoire
enabled them to deal effectively with raw sweet potatoes covered with
sand and grit.
Then an eighteen month old female, a sort of monkey genius called Imo,
solved the problem by carrying the potatoes down to a stream and washing
them before feeding. In monkey terms this is a cultural revolution
comparable almost to the invention of the wheel. It involves
abstraction, the identification of concept, and deliberate manipulation
of several parameters in the environment. And, reversing the normal
trend, it was the juvenile Imo who taught the trick to her mother. She
also taught it to her playmates and they in their turn spread the news
to their mothers. Slowly, step by step, the new culture spread through
the colony, with each new conversion taking place in full view of the
observers who kept a constant watch right through all the daylight
hours.
By 1958, all the juveniles were washing dirty food, but the only adults
over five years old to do so were the ones who learned by direct
imitation from their children.
Then something extraordinary took place.
The details up to this point in the study are clear, but one has to
gather the rest of the story from personal anecdotes and bits of
folklore amongst 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....
THE
HUNDREDTH MONKEY
In the autumn of that year an unspecified number of monkeys on Koshima
were washing sweet potatoes in the sea, because Imo had made the further
discovery that salt water not only cleaned the food but gave it an
interesting new flavour.
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 in the colony 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.
The latest news from Japan is that Imo has by no means exhausted her
powers, but has unleashed several additional cultural bombshells.
Another of the foods provided at the stations is wheat, which the
monkeys enjoy but find difficult to deal with once it has blown out of
containers onto the sand.
Imo was only three when she solved this dilemma by picking up mixed
handfuls of sand and wheat and winnowing the grain by casting both into
the sea. There the sand soon sank, leaving the wheat floating free on
the surface where it could easily be scooped up and eaten. At the moment
this sub-culture has spread only to Imo's immediate associates, but it
will be fascinating to see what happens next. I personally wouldn't be
surprised if, in her later years, Imo re-invented agriculture.
The relevance of this anecdote is that it suggests there may be
mechanisms in evolution other than those governed by ordinary natural
selection.
I feel that there is such a thing as the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon and
that it might account for the way in which many memes, ideas and
fashions spread through our culture.
It may be that when enough of us hold something
to be true, it becomes true for everyone.
Lawrence Blair says:
'When a myth is shared by large numbers of people,
it becomes a reality.'
I'll happily add my one to
the number sharing that notion, because it may be the only way we can
ever hope to reach some sort of meaningful human consensus about the
future, in the short time that now seems to be at our disposal.
Lyall Watson, 'LIFETIDE'
'Whatever You Can Do, or Dream You Can
Do, BEGIN IT.
Boldness Has Power & Magic In It' - Goethe
OPERATION 'TELL ANOTHER'
THE WORLD
SOLUTION
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