Macaque monkey like 'Imo', who sparked the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon by washing her sweet potatoes

HUNDREDTH MONKEY PHENOMENON

Posted by Jon King on Jan 02, 2009

Tagged with: conscious ape, critical mass, hundredth monkey, hundredth monkey phenomenon, mystery, myth & legend, unexplained

100th Monkey Phenomenon proposes that when ‘critical mass’ is reached, we all become Conscious Apes!

100 Monkeys And The Conscious Ape!

The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon is today well enough known, and in short propounds the theory that when a ‘critical mass’ number of people adopt a new behaviour, or way of thinking, it is spontaneously adopted by everyone.

The story goes that, in 1952, on the Japanese island of Koshima, a young macaque monkey known as Imo learned that washing the sand and dirt off her sweet potatoes made them taste better.

Other monkeys, including Imo’s mother, began to follow suit, and over the next few years many more monkeys learned to wash their sweet potatoes as well.

By 1958, the legend says, a sufficient number of monkeys – the ‘critical mass’ number – had all learned the trick, and as a result the monkeys on the other islands spontaneously began washing their sweet potatoes, too.

Whether or not 100 was the precise number of Koshima monkeys who learned to wash their sweet potatoes, is uncertain. And it probably doesn’t matter.

The point is that, metaphorically speaking, 100 monkeys came to represent the critical mass number required to trigger the phenomenon, and thus the Hundredth Monkey legend was born.

Translated into human terms, this theory states that when enough people free themselves from the shackles of mundane materialism and start to think in a more liberated, more ‘spiritualized’ way, a new aspect of consciousness will spontaneously awaken in the collective mind, bringing with it a new reality.

At which point we all become Conscious Apes!

How about you? What’s your take on the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon? Have you learnt to wash your sweet potatoes before eating them…???

If so, leave a comment and tell us how they taste…

image source: Wikimedia Commons published under the terms of the GFDL Licence