The Hundredth Monkey Effect

I appreciate your letting me share the drama of our megaton madness with you.

This book does not deal with petty matters.

It tells how to operate our lives — and our world.

It tells us how to stay alive!

The mess we've brought upon ourselves is a most perilous and challenging one.

The broad picture pieced together here will show you the immensity of the nuclear dangers, the futility of any defense or protection, the power of the new awareness and your role in the unfolding drama.

There is a phenomenon I'd like to tell you about.

In it may lie our only hope of a future for our species.

Here is the story of the Hundredth Monkey:

The hundredth-monkey effect is a phenomenon in which a learned behaviour spreads instantaneously from a certain group of monkeys to all related monkeys once a certain number is reached. Once this threshold is reached, instantaneous paranormal spreading of an idea or ability to the remainder of a population once a certain portion of that population has heard of the new idea or learned the new ability.

Unidentified scientists were conducting a study of monkeys on the Japanese island of Koshima in 1952.

These scientists purportedly observed that some of these monkeys learned to wash sweet potatoes, and gradually this new behavior spread through the younger generation of monkeys—in the usual fashion, through observation and repetition. Watson then claimed that the researchers observed that once a critical number of monkeys was reached—the so-called hundredth monkey—this previously learned behavior instantly spread across the water to monkeys on nearby islands.

The Japanese monkey, Macaca fuscata, had been observed in the wild for a period of over 30 years. In 1952, on the island of Koshima, scientists were providing monkeys with sweet potatoes dropped in the sand. The monkeys liked the taste of the raw sweet potatoes, but they found the dirt unpleasant. An 18-month-old female named Imo found she could solve the problem by washing the potatoes in a nearby stream. She taught this trick to her mother. Her playmates also learned this new way and they taught their mothers too. This cultural innovation was gradually picked up by various monkeys before the eyes of the scientists.

Between 1952 and 1958 all the young monkeys learned to wash the sandy sweet potatoes to make them more palatable. Only the adults who imitated their children learned this social improvement. Other adults kept eating the dirty sweet potatoes. Then something startling took place. In the autumn of 1958, a certain number of Koshima monkeys were washing sweet potatoes -- the exact number is not known. Let us suppose that when the sun rose one morning there were 99 monkeys on Koshima Island who had learned to wash their sweet potatoes. Let's further suppose that later that morning, the hundredth monkey learned to wash potatoes.

Then it happened!

By that evening almost everyone in the tribe was washing sweet potatoes before eating them. The added energy of this hundredth monkey somehow created an ideological breakthrough!

But notice.

A most surprising thing observed by these scientists was that the habit of washing sweet potatoes then jumped over the sea -- Colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys at Takasakiyama began washing their sweet potatoes.

Thus, when a certain critical number achieves an awareness, this new awareness may be communicated from mind to mind. Although the exact number may vary, this Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon means that when only a limited number of people know of a new way, it may remain the consciousness property of these people.

But there is a point at which if only one more person tunes-in to a new awareness, a field is strengthened so that this awareness is picked up by almost everyone!

Nuclear Power

Your awareness is needed in saving the world from nuclear war.

You may be the "Hundredth Monkey" . . . .

You may furnish the added consciousness energy to create the shared awareness of the urgent necessity to rapidly achieve a nuclear-free world.

"If I knew then what I know now, I never would have helped to develop the bomb," spoke George Kistiakowsky, an advisor to President Eisenhower who worked on the Manhattan Project.

Let's look at the almost incredible nuclear monster we have created in the last forty years on planet Earth.

Herbert Scoville, Jr., former deputy for research of the Central Intelligence Agency warns,

The unfortunate situation is that today we are moving—sliding downhill—toward the probability or the likelihood that a nuclear conflict will actually break out—and that somebody will use one of these nuclear weapons in a conflict or perhaps even by accident.

The only result of a substantial nuclear exchange would be a hollow victory in which the 'winners' would be no better off than the losers.

An all-out nuclear war could make our planet uninhabitable for a million years!

A nuclear war can end the way we live.

It cannot be won — it can only be lost.

Winning equals losing.

The word "war" is too mild to apply to this nuclear craziness. 

Carl Sagan at the Conference on the Long-Term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War stated: 

"We have an excellent chance that if Nation A attacks Nation B with an effective first strike, counter-force only, then Nation A has thereby committed suicide, even if Nation B has not lifted a finger to retaliate." — The Cold and the Dark by Paul R. Ehrlich, Carl Sagan, Donald Kennedy, Walter Orr Roberts, p. 33. W. W. Norton and Co., 1984

Suppose you and your family are rafting down an unexplored river. 

Most of your attention is on steering the raft away from the rocks and keeping it off the banks so that it will not get damaged or stranded. 

Several miles downstream unknown to you lies a huge waterfall that will fling you and your family on the rocks below. 

It is easy to miss the significance of certain signals that are coming to you. 

You have noticed a distant, rumbling background sound. But what does it mean? You can see a mist in the air ahead of you. There's nothing alarming that seems to call for your immediate attention. 

And, besides, you are so busy guiding the raft and keeping it off the rocks that you don't want to think or anything else right now. 

Maybe the rumbling will go away . . . . 

But the distant rumbling is getting louder. 

We can ignore it — or we can use our intelligent minds to inform us of the dangers we must avoid. 

What are the signs and the scientific data that are so easy for us to ignore — but which are giving us a clear warning of a certain catastrophe that lies ahead if we remain on our present course?

In 1954, actors John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead and producer Dick Powell filmed "The Conqueror" on the sandy dunes outside St. George, Utah. We had previously conducted a number of atomic bomb tests in Nevada about 150 miles away. For three months, the filmmakers were breathing the dust laced with radioactive plutonium fallout. Twenty-five years later John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead and DickPowell had all died of cancer.  Of the "220 people in the cast and crew, ninety-one had contracted cancer by late 1980, and half of the cancer victims had died of the disease." —From Killing Our Own by Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon, p. 81, Dell Publishing Company, Inc.,1982. 

The Day We Bombed Utah: America's Most Lethal Secret by John G. Fuller, New American Library, 1984. This book documents the way the government has repeatedly lied to us and withheld documents — even in court proceedings under oath.

In 1970, a pediatrician in Grand Junction, Colorado, noticed an increase in cleft palate, cleft lip and other birth defects. 

The homes of these people had been built with waste rock and sand from a uranium refining operation.

The University of Colorado Medical Center obtained federal funds to investigate this. 

But these funds were cut off a year later. 

Why? 

Navajo Indians who went down into uranium mines in Arizona have died — and are right now dying — of lung cancer, previously rare among Navajos. 

In a recent study, Dr. Gerald Buker pointed out that the risk factor of lung cancer among Navajo uranium miners increases by at least 85%! 

Robert Minogue and Karl Goller of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission jointly wrote on September 11, 1978: 

The evidence mounts that, within the range of exposure levels encountered by radiation workers, there is no threshold, i.e., a level which can be assumed as safe in an absolute sense . . . . any amount of radiation has a finite probability of inducing a health effect, e.g., cancer.—Shut Down, p. 72. The Book Publishing Co.,

In the nuclear honeymoon decades of the forties and fifties, the harmful effects of nuclear radiation on human health were underestimated by as much as ten thousand times!

Nuclear submarine workers at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, are developing cancer at a rate that is double the expected incidence. 

Dr. Helen Caldicott, author of Nuclear Madness, was invited to speak to a meeting of these workers, but only four men appeared. 

They told her that the Navy had threatened them with the loss of their jobs if they came to hear her talk. 

Are jobs more important than life itself?

Nuclear War: What's in It For You? —by Ground Zero is an excellent book that will increase your nuclear awareness. Pocket Books.

In addition to mass action, we must alter the separating mental habits that created the nuclear problem from the start. 

Understanding & Acceptance Can Change Consciousness

Let's examine the change in consciousness that must take place for four billion of us to get along together on planet Earth. 

How we think and feel has got us into this nuclear problem, 

The way to our survival lies in altering how we think and feel. 

We must use the power of our collective consciousness as we learn to focus on peace — and human togetherness. 

We must get behind emotional rigidity, intellectual jargon and logic-tight compartments of the mind. 

We must realize that there are no simple right answers. 

We must stop risking the survival of our planet by demanding that we always get our way. If we always get our way, there is no real negotiation. 

Together we must develop effective understandings based on both sides working together to create mutually acceptable solutions that we can all live with. 

It's our separate-self mental habits that are the cause of our survival predicament. 

The bomb is not the real problem — it's only an effect of our attitudes. 

Our mental habits of understanding events in an "us-vs.-them" perception rather than an "us-and-them" insight are creating a devastating mental, emotional and moral separateness in our minds. 

If the human race can't learn to get along with itself, it will soon exterminate itself. 

A group of our top scientists working in the Manhattan Project during World War II developed the atomic bomb from textbook theory to Hiroshima in only four years! 

What would happen if an equally dedicated group backed by our nation's resources worked together to create a world consciousness of our common humanity and a unity of our human hearts and minds that would make all armaments useless? 

Any problem created by the human mind can be solved by the human mind. 

What's stopping us? 

If you had a highly contagious, often fatal, disease, you would care enough about other people to try to avoid transmitting it. 

Could the expectations and demands that make you feel hatred, alienation and a "me-vs.-them" separateness be considered a disease? 

Such emotion-backed demands are more deadly to the survival of the human race than all contagious diseases added together.

Remember this the next time your mind makes you experience hatred and hardheartedness. 

If we want humankind to survive into the next century, we can no longer afford to transmit the deadly disease of hatred, non-caring and forcefully getting one's was that lead to murder, assassination and ultimately to nuclear destruction. 

Increasingly our minds have put great energy into three forms of separateness that make us create thoughts and actions that result in a lethal threat to our continued life on planet Earth. —No Boundary by Ken Wilber. Center Publications, 1979—a discussion of how our minds create division and separateness

First, your mind is divided against itself. 

You have become self-conscious, self-downing, self-critical, and in too many ways have lost your deeper levels of appreciating yourself. 

Have you sometimes noticed that when you're feeling most separate from someone else, behind it all your mind is just not feeling good about you? 

Secondly, your mind has become divided against your own body. 

Your thinking has obstructed the free flow of your feelings. Your mental activity constantly crowds out your experiencing the aliveness of your body. 

You have neglected your body and instead put your energy into activities involving pride, prestige and that ever-seductive "success" that have not brought you happiness or peace of mind. 

Thirdly, just as your mind has become divided against itself and against the body which houses it, it has also increasingly alienated itself from your four billion cousins that are here and now sharing the planet with you. 

You have lost the bond with Mother Earth herself and all her creatures — and forgotten how we all depend on each other. 

In too many situations we automatically experience people as "them" — not "us." 

These jungle-type habits of mind are dangerous to our species. 

In the millions of years in which our ancestors were surviving in the jungles, it was important for their minds to create an instant "self-vs.-other" perception. 

For animals eat other animals and no species can survive if all of its members are eaten up. 

This instant perception of "otherness" is basic to survival for animals in the jungle. 

We can learn a more effective way to make our lives work. 

We are still creating a "jungle" of our civilized lives by continuing the operation of our "us-vs.-them" mental habits. 

We're all in this together! 

"Love alone, is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves." Teilhard de Chardin

The problem I find in trying to go from the separate-self to the consciousness of my unified-self is that my ego operates under the illusory programming that in order to like or love you, I must like or love everything you do or say. 

I identify you with your thoughts or your actions. 

I lose sight of the fact that your thoughts and actions just reflect your life experiences and your training. 

I may crystallize my mind against what you do or say and fail to notice your good intentions . . . which usually are just like mine! 

Create peace; is good intention — here is where we both can agree....right? 

You just need a more effective way to realize your positive intentions! 

A stereo set is not the record it plays. 

If a record is scratchy, we don't throw out the stereo set. All we have to do is change the record. 

We don't have to reject a human being because we don't like his or her programming. 

We can just make it clear that we like the person — but we don't like a particular action. 

And our thoughts and actions can change because they're not us — in our essence. 

I have the direct experience that in my essence I am something apart from the mental habits that spin out my personality and the current soap opera of my life. 

Thus I can dislike a person's behavior and still feel that this is a human being who like me is just trying to make life work using the programming we picked up when we were young. 

Your thoughts and actions are only a set of mental habits in a state of flux as you evolve from stage to stage of your life's growth. 

All of us have done mean, sloppy and uncaring things that we wish we hadn't done. 

I always hope that you won't identify me with the things that I've done that were unskillful responses to life situations. 

The mind can be trained to nurture a "me-and-you" consciousness in which patience and understanding will compassionately harmonize the flow of our activities so that we all want to help each other work things out. 

We can develop an awareness that things aren't problem-free for me until they're problem-free for you.

This applies equally to relationships between individuals or between countries. 

When I create my experience of you I may forget that you are not your thoughts or actions. 

I don't know you from inside — as I experience myself. 

I may forget that in every important way you are like me. 

You have a human heart that feels pain and warmth, sadness and happiness. 

In your essence and in your intentions you are basically good — just like me. 

An ego is often too ready to treat as important all the differences that my mind notices: lifestyle, skin color, social status, educational background, our differing ideas and opinions and on and on. 

When I continually magnify these outward signs, I create the experience that you are really different from me. 

It's time we begin to realize that you and I are far more alike than we are different. 

We are all fellow beings traveling the road of life together. 

We don't live in isolation. 

We are all interconnected. 

We all live in one world. 

We are affected by a lack of harmony of any type anywhere on the planet — even if we're not consciously aware of it. 

We are not separate. 

What we say and do can affect the well-being of all of us. 

We know that our health may be affected if we live among diseased people. 

What we are beginning to learn is that our peace of mind may be affected if we live among disturbed people. 

Our happiness may be affected if we live among unhappy people. 

Our love may be affected if we live among clashing, unloving people. 

And even the future of our species is in doubt with various nations stockpiling nuclear devices designed to destroy each other.

The nuclear nations today have created more than 50,000 nuclear devices — in an expression of the consciousness of the separate-self. 

Since the future of both you and your family is at stake, turn on the immense resources of your mind.

Find the ways in which you can flow your energy into increasing worldwide awareness that the nuclear bomb mentality must be eliminated.

The strength of our species lies not in sharp fangs or piercing claws.

It lies in our ability to use our minds to cooperate with each other as we play the games of life.

The same powerful minds that created nuclear bombs and intercontinental missiles can also learn how to create human unity and cooperativeness.

We can save the world from people-made disaster — when we set the goal high and add our determination and our persistence.

Be informed, hopeful and energetic.

Be vigilant with your thoughts of peace and love.

Sense your power to lift the mood of despair.

Let your enthusiasm seep in and penetrate the collective consciousness.

It means giving an increasing energy and priority to expanding your own awareness, to communicating with other people who are now asleep, and to withdrawing energy from all thoughts and actions which create human alienation, separateness, destruction and death.

Your energy can tip the scales when you add it to thousands of others' — merging, slowly raising our collective consciousness to the point of power when it makes the all-important difference.

This survival energy spreads far beyond those involved and touches every life on Earth.

The change in you is already taking place.

Awareness.

The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon points out our responsibility and our power.

It is up to every one of us to change the myths that say we have to depend on nuclear energy for power and defense.

We can no longer believe that the safeguards are adequate — or that we are helpless to change the national policies of the governments of our world.

We will replace the myths with knowledge.

Our persistence will relentlessly channel our positive thoughts toward peace and a harmonizing world.

And that starts right here—in my heart and yours—right now.

In this short book you get a glimpse of the miracle of life you can experience...

This rapture of life is your birthright to create and enjoy.

This book can only hope to inspire you to take the next steps in your own development — for your sake and the survival of our species.

This is the most pressing problem we face today.

Everything else in our civilization is of secondary significance.

It is worthy of your full attention as an intelligent, caring, wise and wonderful person.

Like children our egos and minds create the illusion that the ideas in our heads and our desires for "marbles" are more important than feelings of human togetherness in our hearts.

We cannot afford to play such enthusiastic games with loaded nuclear pistols any more...

....the marbles just aren't worth it!

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