A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics, and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments
by Eliezer Sobel
New Age "Asiatic" thought ... is establishing itself as thehegemonic ideology of global capitalism. (Zizek)
Source: mystic bourgeoisie
Prologue
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.
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