I just finished reading a book called The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments.

Intrigued by the title, I purchased the book and read the opening paragraphs to discover what the term The 99th Monkey means.

There was once a famous population of Japanese monkeys -- the irrepressible Macaca fuscata -- living on an island in 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" -- 99, say -- and when the next potato was washed, it caused a tipping point, 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 100th Monkey" became the name New Agers and 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 worldview to a spiritual one, for example, the entire population of the planet will spontaneously choose to come along for the ride.

Fat chance. Not with the likes of me around. I am the 99th Monkey. If you don't get me, you don't get your critical mass, and it screws up the whole works. I seem to be single-handedly holding back the Great Paradigm Shift of the Golden Age simply through my continuing to be a resistant little putz.

After reading The 99th Monkey, I had to give its author, Eliezer Sobel, his due. It wasn't for lack of trying that he finally concludes that he is that pivotal 99th monkey. In fact, Sobel has spent that last 30 years exploring, workshopping, and even teaching all the things that should have propelled him to become that critical 100th Monkey. But during all those 30 years, there was one thing holding him back.

He just didn't believe it: any of it. Oh, he tried. He tried mightily and earnestly. Along the way, he met some of the most famous (and infamous) spiritual teachers in the world and became a disciple to many of them.

I met Ram Dass, my first spiritual teacher, in 1975 in New York when I was 23 years old, several weeks after completing the est [Erhard Seminars Training] in Boston, which was several months after having spent one and a half years screaming my head off in Primal Therapy. I was desperately trying to cure myself of being me, a futile pursuit that would continue for three decades, and would take me all around the world to meet shamans, healers, and gurus; stay in ashrams and monasteries; sit for long hours on meditation cushions; chant in foreign tongues; and live up to 40 days in primitive huts on solo retreat.

I experimented extensively with psychedelic drugs, ancient spiritual techniques and outrageous new ones. I was massaged, shitsu-ed, and rolfed; took hundreds of consciousness workshops, human potential seminars and self-improvement courses; sat with psychics, channels, and tarot readers; experienced Primal, Gestalt, Bioenergetics, Object Relations, generic talk therapies, and anti-depressants. And that's the short list. (The complete one gets embarrassing. Suffice it to say that it includes learning the Tush Push exercise in a Human Sexuality weekend -- you don't want to know -- as well as having an obese female therapist sit on my head at Esalen Institute, so I could re-experience being smothered by my mother.)

The following video actually does give a more complete list as Sobel enumerates his spiritual "misadventures".



Thus begins a very funny and revealing memoir of a man who has spent his entire adult life trying to become something he came late to realizing he can never be: enlightened. In fact, he concludes that no one can and that the irrepressible desire to believe in something larger than ourselves is mostly an exercise in self-delusion.

Yet he is quick to point out that his psychological neuroses, (he was actually diagnosed as being a borderline personality by one psychiatrist) might simply prevent him from achieving that state of being that he - and so many others - strive for.

He has wonderful things to say about many of the people he has met, including Ram Dass, Werner Erhard (of est), shaman and dance therapist Gabrielle Roth and the Dalai Lama, of whom he tells this story of a retreat he had in Dharamsala, India, the home of the Dalai Lama.

At the conclusion of the retreat, the monks arranged for us to have an informal audience with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, in his own living room! We filed in, and His Holiness engaged us in a 90-minute informal question and answer session that was filled with laughter and delight. Afterward, we each approached him individually to have a "moment" and presented him with the traditional white "kata" scarf that he ceremonially placed around our necks.

It was perhaps one of the most profound and wonderful seven seconds of my life. It's as if the Dalai Lama's gaze instantly melted everything within me that wasn't radiantly free and happy. And the sensation wasn't so much that I was looking into the vast empty eyes of a living Buddha, it was the spontaneous awareness that I was looking out through the vast empty eyes of a Living Buddha: my own. It takes One to know One. And that's why he's who he is: he has the capacity to look right into the living Buddha essence within each person that crosses his field of vision. I left the encounter beaming from ear to ear. After we had all greeted him in this manner and had begun to depart, His Holiness stood on his front porch laughing and waving goodbye, just like my grandmother used to do, until every last one of us was completely out of sight.

I like that in a living Buddha.

One of the special features of the spiritual quest is to have this kind of experience. I've read of many instances of moments like Sobel describes. Perhaps the most famous for Westerners is when one of the most infamous exponents of psychedelics in the 60's, former Harvard professor Richard Alpert journeyed to India to explore the relationship between what he had discovered with psychedelics and what Eastern sages have been talking about for millennia.

When he and others met Neem Karoli Baba, who would become their guru, they felt such an emotional and spiritual connection, many gave up everything to stay with him and be his disciples. Alpert himself spent two years with the guru then returned to the United States as Baba Ram Dass and would spend the rest of his life teaching what he learned from Neem Karoli Baba about love and compassion.

Ram Dass is still alive, but suffered a serious stroke - which he has since called Divine Grace - in 1997 that left him somewhat incapacitated and has greatly affected his speech. Still, his intellect is sharp and he continues to inspire with his books and talks.

I want to talk a little about the journey now: especially my own journey.

As someone who has been working full time since I left college, I have found it difficult to attend most of the events I've wanted to these past three years.

First, they are often multi-day workshops or seminars that extend into regular work weeks.

Second, they area seldom inexpensive. Costs can range from a few hundred to over a thousand dollars. And this doesn't generally include lodging costs.

Finally - and I've lamented about this previously here - the fertile heartland of America can be a vast desert when it comes to spiritual gatherings. The West Coast, the East Coast, Santa Fe, Boulder, India: these are where one must often go to meet others on the spiritual journey. So include air fare in the costs of anything one wants to attend and each workshop or seminar can become a rather expensive affair.

Just last year, I estimate that I spent nearly $3000 on just a few of the conferences and workshops I wanted to attend - although admittedly, my trip to Switzerland to participate in the World Psychedelic Forum was as much vacation as spiritual adventure. But you get the idea.

It appears to me that most of those who attend these things fall into two categories. Now I could be way off here, but these are my observations. The first group of people who attend are, let's call them trust fund babies: the idle rich who can afford to spend days, weeks, even months on their own spiritual journey. Often these are the ones who can fly to India or Nepal and spend an extended period of time in an ashram or searching for a guru.

The other main group is made up of self-employed people like psychologists, social workers, therapists and the like who can juggle their work schedules to accommodate these events. Often, it seems, these can present a financial burden to members of this group, yet it emphasizes the commitment they have to their spiritual quests that they can and will do this. I have a massage therapist friend who falls into this group and I know how difficult it can be for her to give up paying clients to attend the conferences and workshops that mean so much to her.

Another observation I've had is that the majority of people who attend these events are women. I don't know what this means. Perhaps it is simply an indication that for one reason or another, they have the time to spare to do these things.

I've talked with a number of women who attend these events and while many are single, there are many married women who attend alone, without their husbands. Many I've talked to have said that their husbands aren't interested in these things, don't understand them and can even be somewhat hostile to them.

This can be difficult because the more one becomes interested in things of the Spirit, the more he or she wants to discuss these ideas with others. This is my case. My wife has no interest whatsoever in any of this and probably the main reason I began this blog in the first place is to have a place I can discuss my newfound interests.

I've often mused on how much more interesting it would be to have a partner who is on the same path; and how fulfilling it would be to attend these workshops and conferences together. But more often than not, spiritual "awakenings" don't happen to couples at the same time, so for most, it can be a lonely journey.

All these things have created a sense of conflict in me that led to where I am today. I, too, feel like the 99th monkey in that the struggle to exist in the everyday frenetic world of 21st Century America has made me feel like something of a failure on this journey.

I've had wonderful adventures in the past three years and have experienced things I never thought I would. I've written about them here and every word I wrote was heartfelt and true to what I have experienced.

There have also been painful episodes associated with this journey, but they too have taught me a great deal about life.

Along the way, I've met some remarkable people and have been impressed with the commitment all seemed to have to their own spiritual quests.

It's very easy in this secular world to ridicule those who have beliefs in things unseen and unknown. I, too, have displayed some of this in my discussion of astrology in Star Treks. I explained how the scientist in me simply can't accept the importance placed on celestial body locations as to how our lives play out.

I'm still of the same mind today as I was when I wrote that post, although I must admit that I never finished the book, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View by Richard Tarnas I started just before I wrote that post. The book, which reads like a college advanced course textbook has, frankly, been difficult for me to get into, so this would be a failing of my own rather than in the book or subject itself.

A few days ago, as I was writing this, I found an article on Reality Sandwich from Eliezer Sobel called Small Moments, Many Times (after which is also a comment by me called The Mighty Almost Always Fall). The article is something of a followup to his book, The 99th Monkey. In the article, Sobel talks about "his beloved old friend and colleague, as well as a mentor at times", Rabbi David Cooper, about whom he says,

I have spent over 30 years exploring and diving into nearly every approach to "waking up" that came down the pike, often going to what some would consider great lengths in my quest. But while I was busy traipsing around the globe collecting exotic spiritual experiences, David was mostly being a disciplined meditator, digging one deep well, as it is said, in contrast to my numerous shallow holes. He would often spend between three and six months of each year on silent retreat, sitting on a cushion, and maintaining an unbelievably austere schedule of arising at two or three in the morning and essentially meditating all day until ten at night, then sleeping for perhaps four hours and beginning again. He would maintain this schedule for up to 100 days at a time.

Beyond his commitment to silent sitting practice, David, like me, was also at times drawn to some extreme experiments on his journey: he did what the Tibetan Buddhists call a "dark retreat," which, like it sounds, involves being in an absolutely dark room for extended periods of time; in his case, 23 days. Apparently, all notions of night and day disappear, the boundary between sleeping, waking and dreaming begins to blur, and one discovers the infinite capacity of the mind to create vast worlds that appear as real. David also did a "homeless retreat" on the streets of New York City, in which the participants were instructed to show up with just the clothes on their backs, no money, food or water, and they were set loose to survive in the city for five days, relying on their wits, grace, and the kindness of strangers.

So if anyone can speak about and exemplify the value of genuine, committed spiritual practice and meditation, it is Reb David. He has more than earned his teacher status, and being 14 years my senior, he has also been at it longer than I have, for about 50 years. At our recent retreat together, however, I heard him say something I'd never heard from him before, and it both startled me and shook me up. After delivering an evening talk one night, he concluded by stating, "And this is the best I can offer this lifetime. These are the highest teachings I've come to after 50 years of practice, and I no longer expect to discover anything radically new or different."

Sobel goes on to say how this statement made his heart sink and he felt demoralized. Did the good Rabbi mean that there was no use trying to attain "enlightenment" in our lifetime? Was all their effort for nought? Sobel goes on.

We all have brief moments of experiencing our lives like that, of breaking through our fog and seeing our present reality (no matter what it is) in all of its hidden splendor. Such inspiring awakenings can occur when witnessing the birth of a child, coming upon an extraordinary vista in nature, experiencing a high after meditating for 20 days, or really anything at all that triggers a spontaneous glimpse of the Vast Silence that we inhabit. Yet we keep bouncing back into the daily humdrum view of life, like a rubber band that is stretched and snaps back to its original form; we always seem to come back to "just this," and it's often a huge disappointment.

That's why I was dejected when I heard David say that what he has already offered as a teacher is as good as it gets. Because I know that he also gets bounced back. In fact, he has advised us to reframe our expectations about attaining some permanent state of enlightenment that never goes away, and to think more along the lines of "Small moments, many times." But most of us persist in hoping for some big, final moment of epiphany from which we never return, saving us at last from this world of suffering and our relentless human minds that seem to be running, and often ruining, our lives.

Small moments, many times.

I mentioned above that I've had my own small moments on this journey: small moments that I thought might portend larger, more permanent periods of seeing through the fog, but they didn't persist. And so at times I, too, have thought, was any of it worthwhile?

But when I go back and read through the posts I've written here, I can feel the enthusiasm I felt during those all-too-brief moments and can only feel grateful that even though they were small moments, they were very meaningful moments.

One of the things I've come to realize only recently is that whereas I used to just let important moments pass as if there will always be another important moment just around the corner, I know that these moments don't come frequently enough and that it is important to "be here now" during those moments.

So even though friendships may end, it is important to remember the small moments that gave those friendships such joy in the first place.

And when one becomes reacquainted with long lost friends, it's important to bask in the joy of that renewal, because ultimately, it is only the love of friends and family that make this crazy life meaningful and worthwhile.

Most religions say that God is Love. But those religions have it backwards. What I've found in my short journey is that Love is God. Everyone searches for God. Yet God exists right there in every person we love. I think that this is the most important lesson I've learned on my journey.

I don't know where my journey will lead me now. I feel that in a sense I have returned to my starting point. I've tasted the fruits of many disciplines and ideas and would have liked more "profound" experiences from them than I found, but I must admit that I started very late in life and perhaps like great artists and scientists whose best work is often done when they are young, in the spiritual area, too, a young and supple brain is perhaps the best environment for important spiritual events to occur. Or perhaps I, like Sobel, simply have too many neuroses fighting for dominance in my mind to allow entrance of (or escape to) other realms of reality.

Yet, I don't regret a moment of my journey and I sincerely hope that I am not done with it. It will be interesting to see where I go from here. I'm at something of a standstill right now. I just don't know where I'm going. Nothing is pulling at me. I feel like I just need to sit back and reflect on where I've been. Maybe by allowing the focus of my third eye to relax, something will enter the field of its special vision.

Om Namah Shivaya!