 |
The meditation event, organised by Palden Jenkins, concerned how we might set about clearing the log jams of karma which beset the world and thereby heal the conflict, pain and distress that we find it in.
No small task. As Jerry Garcia said of the Sixties 'We thought we could change the world overnight, but then we realised it would take a little longer.' But it is the task we have set before us. What else is there of greater importance?
The Hundredth Monkey
Turning the Wheel
of the Buddha-nature
Introduction
I first became aware of the magical experiment known as Hundredth Monkeying in early 1995 when I received a flyer through the post from Palden Jenkins, the editor of the first edition of “The Only Planet of Choice”. I had met Palden on November 4th 1993, when I had attended a talk that he gave at a Friends’ Meeting House in north Leeds on the subject of extra-terrestrials. I had been interested in the subject of extra-terrestrial contact and channelling for some years, but I had only read about it, and not had first hand experience of the phenomenon, or so I thought.
I must have left my name and address on a mailing list when I bought a copy of “Only Planet” on that occasion. I certainly didn’t expect any follow-ups other than information about new books from the publisher, Gateway Books, and by the time that 1995 came around I had entirely forgotten about that anyway. Right from the start the universe was showing me how small things can lead to incredible developments given time. The metaphor of the grain of mustard seed is apparent here, and indeed the potential for the evolution of the smallest of energies into something significant has for me probably been the most important insight of the whole experience. It is no surprise that the ancients envisioned the paths of our lives as being woven by the fates from threads, representing the diverse influences which act upon us, and which we choose between or integrate into the fabric of our lives.
The ‘Hundredth Monkey’ principle is a concept that has been around for quite a while, based on the work of Ken Keyes, an ethologist who studied the behaviour of primates on islands off the coast of Japan in the 1950’s. Keyes apparently observed a young female washing sweet potatoes in water to clean the dirt off them, and in a similar way separated mixed rice and sand which the scientists gave to them, by throwing it in water and eating the rice which floated. This behaviour was transmitted first to her peers, and then most of the adults on the island through observation, imitation and the reinforcement of finding that this improved the food. The interesting and controversial point which followed is that this behaviour was then apparently observed in primates on other local islands which had not had any contact with the ‘founding’ troupe. This led to the hypothesis by some that an idea could be transmitted through the collective unconscious if a critical mass of those holding the original idea could be achieved, the hypothetical number of one hundred monkeys thereby symbolising this threshold.
This is the basis on which ‘Morphic Field Theory’ or ‘Morphic Resonance’, as proposed by Rupert Sheldrake, is founded. Essentially, once a particular pattern of behaviour has been established in the world, it becomes more likely to manifest elsewhere, through resonance in the Collective Unconscious. This has been shown to happen even with such material level events as crystallisation of compounds in laboratories. It has been found that once this has been achieved in one place, other scientists mysteriously find it easier to do so elsewhere. Apparently the Universe is capable of learning…
copyright © 2011 Claire Rae Randall
copyright © 2011 Claire Rae Randall
