The 100th monkey

[J.Q.]

Rie's right: the 100th monkey story is a myth, but it is also an effective metaphor for a real evolutionary phenomenon, and not without truth. To give an example: apparently, when a group of lab rats somewhere learns to perform a certain task/develop a certain habit/fight off a certain disease when they didn't know how to do so previously, afterwards the knowledge of the task spreads with near impossible rapidity to the species throughout the world, so that the same experiment performed in another country would take much less time. In other words, it appears that there is, in reality, some sort of subtle connecting energetic link throughout a given species--not just to the intuition of people like us on this forum, but to materialistic science.

Obviously, we're all aware here that mainstream science is simply slowly--though less and less slowly these days--catching up to what the soul knows already. Still, it's nice to see it happening.

So there IS a 100th monkey syndrome--it's just not necessarily 100, and not the story that is used to illustrate it. The story resonates and the term sticks anyway because, like any good myth, it illustrates the truth.