The Hundredth Monkey

Did anyone ever say, “all roads lead to where you are?” Well, I just did. There is no way I could explain how I got to where I’m going with this blog, but it started with Chris’s blog. I wanted to ask him if he just couldn’t wait to get home and write a poem. And if when he did, it was the most awesome, easiest, poem he’d ever written. I’ve experienced this phenomenon on many occasions. I’ll go hear a great player and for a few hours afterward, possess an ability both technical and artistic that is not normally mine. Then the ability fades and I return to my normal abilities. I’ve noticed this since I was kid, but it never occurred to me that this was common. In grad school, I learned that most of my peers also experienced this phenomenon. It only occurred at a live event, never upon listening to a recording. We decided that there must be some unexplainable something that we learned from hearing and watching the great player that we were able to take back with us and use for a short period. We fantasized that this could have something to do with morphic resonance. Having been in close proximity with someone who could do something better than we could, or who could do something that we couldn’t, somehow made it easier for us to learn or to improve.
This and ideas similar to Jung’s Collective Unconscious have been used to try to explain why discoveries are made almost simultaneously in different parts of the world, why once a large enough group learns to do something, or adheres to a belief, it becomes infinitely easier for the rest of the population to follow suit. While personal unconscious relies on our own experiences, collective unconscious does not rely on personal experiences and as Jung states, is not a personal acquisition.
Well of course there is collective unconscious. Having once been intimately connected to our creator, as members of a fallen creation, we share a collective desire, though unable to verbalized by most, to return to that state of intimacy and be fulfilled.
The hundredth monkey phenomenon became a popular story that was said to demonstrate morphic resonance because as each monkey learned to wash his potato, subsequent monkeys learned more easily. The big kicker was that once a certain number of monkeys had adopted the practice, monkeys on other islands also suddenly took up the habit.
As it turns out, the Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon, was born of research that has been shown to contain many lies and fabricated claims. So without contact, it is doubtful that you will acquire knowledge and ability via some distant person’s acquisition of that knowledge and ability. Nor is there much chance that once enough other people have it, I will have it too. However the facts of the research did show an interesting pattern.
As Elaine Myers noticed, it is a good example of the propagation of a paradigm shift. So the monkeys didn’t suddenly learn to wash their potatoes because so many others had acquired that ability, but the younger ones learned first and transferred that to the desire to wash other food and themselves. The older monkeys never learned the habit. And it wasn’t until the third generation that all the monkeys in the group had taken up the habit as it was demonstrated by their parents. Myers observes that,
the truly innovative points of view tend to come from those on the edge between youth and adulthood. The older generation continues to cling to the world view they grew up with. The new idea does not become universal until the older generation withdraws from power, and a younger generation matures within the new point of view. Until that time, newer alternatives don’t replace older alternatives; they just provide more choices.
I’m struck with the frustration of how slow needed change comes and how quickly dangerous shifts can occur and how deeply the collective unconscious can be repressed in so short a time. Both, within the same time frame.

©2003 rod lewis