The Myth: 100th Monkey takes its name from the contemporary myth "The Hundredth Monkey". The story was based on scientific observations of monkey colonies in Japan. Off the shore of Japan, scientists had been studying monkey colonies on many separate [+]The Myth: 100th Monkey takes its name from the contemporary myth "The Hundredth Monkey". The story was based on scientific observations of monkey colonies in Japan. Off the shore of Japan, scientists had been studying monkey colonies on many separate islands for over 30 years. In order to keep track of the monkeys, they would leave sweet potatoes on the beach for them to eat. The monkeys would come out of the trees to get the sweet potatoes and would be in plain sight to be observed. One day an eighteen-month-old female named Imo started to wash her potato in the sea before eating it. We can only imagine that it tasted better without the grit and sand; maybe it was even slightly salty. Imo showed her playmates and her mother how to do it, and her friends showed their mothers. Soon the observers saw that all the monkeys on that particular island were washing their potatoes. Although this was significant, what was even more fascinating to note was that when this shift happened, the behavior of the monkeys on all the other islands changed as well. They now all washed their potatoes - despite the fact that the monkey colonies on different islands had no direct contact with each other. The "hundredth monkey" was the hypothesized anonymous monkey that tipped the scales for the culture: the one whose change in behavior signaled the critical number of changed monkeys, after which all the monkeys on all the islands washed their sweet potatoes. The "Hundredth Monkey" is a New Age allegory that gives hope to people who have been working on changing themselves and wondering if their individual efforts make any difference at all in the improvement of the human race or the well being of the planet itself. As a myth the "Hundredth Monkey" is a statement that affirms a commitment to work on something: like ridding the planet of hunger or war - even if the effect is invisible for a long time. If there is to be a hundredth monkey, there has to be a human equivalent of Imo and her friends. Someone has to be the twenty-seventh and the eighty-first and the ninety-ninth monkey before the new archetype can come into being. The hundredth monkey is also a metaphor for what goes on in an individual psyche. In the inner world, doing is becoming. If we repeat a behavior motivated by an
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