Koshima monkeys, the incredible experience

Ho’oponopono way : Shifting Earth Consciousness

Patrice Julien
3 min readMar 5, 2024

In 1952, on the island of Kojima in Japan, scientists fed monkeys raw sweet potatoes by throwing them onto the sand. The monkeys liked the taste of the sweet potatoes, but found the texture of the sand clinging to them rather unpleasant

The influence of young generations

An 18-month-old female, whom the researchers nicknamed “Imo”, thought she could solve the problem by washing the potatoes in a nearby stream. She taught this technique to her mother. Her playmates also learned this new way of doing things and taught it to their mother too.

This cultural innovation was gradually adopted by various monkeys under the watchful eyes of scientists. Between 1952 and 1958, all the young monkeys had learned to wash sweet potatoes. Only the adult monkeys who imitated their offspring benefited from this improvement. The other adult monkeys retained their habit of eating sweet potatoes without washing them.

How an individual change create a mutation in collective consciousness

Then something surprising happened. In the autumn of 1958, a number of Koshima monkeys were washing their sweet potatoes — the exact number remains unknown. Let’s assume that when the sun came up one morning, there were 99 monkeys on the island of Koshima who had learnt the technique. We can imagine that a little later that morning, a hundredth monkey learned how to wash potatoes.

Then a surprising thing happened!

That evening, almost all the monkeys in the tribe began to wash the sweet potatoes before eating them. The additional energy of this hundredth monkey had created a kind of scientific breakthrough!

But note this: the most surprising thing observed by these scientists was the fact that the habit of washing sweet potatoes then took a leap over the sea… to reach colonies of monkeys living on other islands, and the phenomenon spontaneously spread to the Takasaki yama monkeys on the mainland. They too began to wash their sweet potatoes. This is how the Japanese macaque came to be nicknamed the “potato washer”.

The influence of individual thoughts on reality

This leads us to believe that when a critical number of individuals reach a certain level of consciousness, it is communicated without any contact through space, by a phenomenon known as “morphic resonance”.

Although the exact number may vary, this phenomenon of the “Hundredth Monkey” means that it is enough for a critical percentage of subjects to integrate a certain state of consciousness for it to become an integral part of the global consciousness of this species.

From a certain stage onwards, if just one more person realises this awareness and adopts a new behaviour, his or her field of action expands in such a way that this awareness is communicated and tends to become collective!

Isn’t this an interesting line of thought that could encourage us to radically change our attitude to what we see as the problems of our world?

Let’s imagine what happens in global consciousness when somebody get to what the Ho’oponopono adapted by Morrnah Simeona call “Zero state”…

“For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.” (Romans 5:19)

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Patrice Julien
Patrice Julien

Written by Patrice Julien

Patrice Julien & his Wife Yuri run a retreat center by the sea in Miyazu, Japan. Patrice writes Self-Help books and gives trainings in Zen and Ho'oponopono.

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