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The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist’s Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments
(http://www.the99thmonkey.com)

In tenth grade I took a book out of the library entitled How To Develop a Million-Dollar Personality. Little did I know that it was the beginning of what would become a 30-year obsession to fix whatever I thought was wrong with me. Perhaps a little Prozac might have saved me a few decades, but it didn’t exist back then, so off I went, embarking on a great quest for answers, for “the truth,” for enlightenment. I went looking for God in all the wrong places and some of the right ones in a somewhat desperate attempt to simply feel better about my very existence here on this rather crazy planet. Years later one of my teachers would declare that “Nobody told any of us we were being born into the lunatic asylum of the universe,” and that to try to be sane in an insane world was perhaps the craziest idea of all!

In any event, I became a human guinea pig for every New Age, human potential and spiritual program I could find that promised deliverance from the personal prison I felt trapped in. I met virtually every major guru and teacher alive today, as well as people claiming to be the “avatar” or messiah of our age. I attended countless intensive consciousness workshops, extended silent meditation retreats, spent months in India, lived at ashrams and monasteries, experimented with ancient spiritual techniques and outlandish new ones. I often went to great extremes in my search, far off the beaten track, from spending 40 days alone in a mountaintop hut with no water or electricity, to taking exotic shamanic potions in the jungles of Brazil during all-night ceremonies; from submitting myself to a Moonie indoctrination camp in the woods of Northern California to doing a ten-day Zen retreat on the grounds of Auschwitz.

My life was so unusual that friends were constantly suggesting I write a book about it, so with The 99th Monkey, I finally did. The title comes from a phenomenon that has been called “The “100th Monkey,” which states that once a “critical mass” of people adopt a particular idea or practice, it reaches what today is often called a “tipping point,” causing a paradigm shift to occur in the entire culture. So once enough people bought iPods, for example, at a certain point they were suddenly everywhere, and now even new cars come with mp3 inputs.

There has been a lot of talk over the years, particularly in New Age circles, of a shift that is presumably imminent on the planet Earth, some sort of “Golden Era of Peace” that will finally deliver us from the hell realm we are collectively living in at the present time. But the belief is that this will only happen once enough of us wake up and stop merely living our lives for ourselves as individual egos and begin living from a higher, connected, global identity.

So my title is tongue-in-cheek: in order to reach the 100th monkey, obviously, you first need to get the 99th guy on board, which is me, and I have such a long history of resisting enlightenment and change, that basically I am gumming up the works for the whole planet! The book is the long history of what amounts to my utter failure to get enlightened. Fortunately, it’s quite a funny and entertaining story, but unlike most spiritual memoirs where the author claims to find a magic answer that makes everything better (and then appears on Oprah to talk about it and become very wealthy!), my book makes no such promise to change the reader’s life. In fact, I tried to convince the bookstores that they should create a new section for my book, alongside Self-Help, to be called No Help Whatsoever!

But my story is no mere lightweight romp through the spiritual supermarket. It chronicles the real struggles of an ordinary human being to get at “the marrow of life,” as Thoreau said before he went into the woods. And while I can’t promise anybody an instant cure or enlightenment, from the feedback I have received, The 99th Monkey does seem to make readers both laugh and cry, be spiritually provoked and challenged in their thinking and beliefs, and at times deeply moved. Thank you.

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