The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics, and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments [Paperback]

Eliezer Sobel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1, 2008

Suffused with a unique brand of irreverent humor, this account recalls the autobiographical explorations of the most significant alternative communities, ashrams, gurus, shamans, and consciousness-raising seminars of the past 40 years. Serving as a human guinea pig for many of the most popular cutting-edge, New Age, human-potential, and spiritual experiments, Eliezer Sobel recounts intercontinental adventures in India, Israel, Brazil, and Haiti. From Primal Therapy to the Dalai Lama, this perceptively witty analysis includes brushes with cults, wild experiments with sex and psychedelics, and encounters with visionary gurus and contemporary madmen.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

While a romp through the New Age is not everyone's cup of tea, novelist, publisher and editor Sobel (Minyan) does a fine job making his 30-year quest for spiritual awakening widely identifiable with a funny, clear-eyed account that takes readers around the world and through a gauntlet of gurus, shamans, workshops and retreats, not to mention sex and drugs (legal and otherwise). Sobel's twin assets are his willingness and his sense of humor, both apparent from the start in his encounter with a guru named Ram Dass, whose first instruction to Sobel is to take off his pants ("So I did"). Other episodes include Primal Therapy training with a teacher who rents his office space for porn production, the "est" training that teaches people to accept reality as it is (and then rope everyone they know into the program), and tours through Jerusalem, India and Brazil. Sobel's spiritual journey doesn't provide any answers (these days, the title on his business card is "Human Being") but provides lots of engaging, regular-guy perspective on modern man's confounding array of ancient and contemporary fulfillment schemes.
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Review

“An extraordinary and challenging journey through the contemporary worlds of spiritual exploration and the human potential movement.”  —Rabbi David A. Cooper, author, Ecstatic Kabbalah and God is a Verb

“A generous contribution to countercultural history.”  —Paul Krassner, author, One Hand Jerking: Reports From an Investigative Satirist

“Funny, beautifully written, and often extremely moving and thought-provoking.”  —Colin Wilson, author, A Criminal History of Mankind

"Sobel's utter failure to get enlightened is chronicled with laughter, irreverence, insight and raw truth."  —Gabrielle Roth, dancer, director, and author, Connections

"This book made me happier than most of the spiritual books I read these days. Enjoy."  —Wes Scoop' Nisker, Buddhist meditation teacher, author, and performer

"By all means follow The 99th Monkey down the road apiece that passeth understanding. It looks like big fun."  —Wavy Gravy, author, Something Good for a Change

"Sobel's humor and self-deprecating manner make this journey a fun one. . . . In the end, Sobel is really like anyone else on this earth, which is why the book is so endearing and encouraging."  —Rain Taxi

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Santa Monica Press; 1 edition (February 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159580028X
• ISBN-13: 978-1595800282
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #881,060 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Eliezer's first novel, Minyan: Ten Jewish Men in a World That is Heartbroken, was selected by National Book Award winner John Casey as the winner of the Peter Taylor Prize for the Novel. His memoir, The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments documents Eliezer's three decades on a spiritual search that took him all over the world, a path on which he "utterly failed to get enlightened." He was the Editor and Associate Publisher of The New Sun in the '70s, and more recently, the Publisher and Editor of The Wild Heart Journal. His first book, Wild Heart Dancing, was a do-it-yourself, guided creativity retreat based on his intensive workshops at Esalen Institute. Eliezer is also a certified teacher of the 5 Rhythms™ movement-as-meditaiton practice developed by Gabrielle Roth. He lives in Richmond, Virginia with his wife Shari Cordon and their three cats.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A frank and funny collection of stories., July 3, 2008

By 

Lynda Lippin (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics, and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments (Paperback)

"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."

Most people of the hippie/new age/spiritual enlightenment seeking ilk have heard the infamous legend of the 100th monkey. Scientists who were studying monkeys on Koshima Island in Japan in 1952 introduced the sweet potato as a new snack, which the monkeys loved even though it was always covered in sand. One day Imo the monkey got the brilliant idea of taking her sweet potato to the water and washing off the sand, making the snack even yummier. She taught this trick to her family members and soon it spread. In 1958 the number of potato washing monkeys reached a critical mass (99, they say) and suddenly every monkey of Koshima and the neighboring islands began spontaneously washing their potatoes. So if humans work this way, an idea spread to that 99th human monkey would quickly and spontaneously spread to the population at large.

Now, you would think that with all the great spiritual movements and teachers out there over the past several decades that the world's population would have gotten past materialism and greed and onto a more enlightened plane of peaceful loving existence. Well, the reason this has not happened is Eliezer (Elliot) Sobel, the 99th Monkey.

Not that Sobel hasn't tried, mind you. The 99th Monkey is a frank and funny collection of Sobel's encounters with just about every major consciousness raising movement, written as editor of The New Sun magazine in the 1960s, the Wild Heart Journal, and as a freelance journalist. But what is great and refreshingly different about this book is that Sobel ends these encounters basically unchanged and unfazed.

What encounters he has! Through Sobel we get to meet Ram Dass, Hilda Charlton, Gabrielle Roth, Rabbi David Cooper, Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Muktananda, Asha Greer, and the Dalai Lama. We get to travel to India, Israel, Auschwitz, Big Sur, Nepal, and Brazil. We experiment with LSD, Ecstasy, Daime, mushrooms, marijuana, and every anti-depressant on the market. We laugh, we scream, we trip, we cry, we vomit, and we refuse to drink the water used to cleanse the guru's sandals. And we go through primal scream therapy, EST, Landmark Forum, Moonie initiation, Daime rituals, yogic meditation of varying forms, sexual therapies of many kinds, and good old western psychotherapy.

Oh, Sobel does learn one great lesson in the end. After hearing the refrain of kindness from one spiritual teacher after the other he goes to a lousy therapy session with his wife.

"He wanted to see us regularly, at $150 a pop. We left his office and in an epiphany, we both realized that we could save $600 a month if we just tried to be nicer to one another. It definitely works."

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars That's my boy!, July 9, 2008

By 

Max A. Sobel "The author's Dad" (New Jersey) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics, and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments (Paperback)

I'm the father of this genius, and so I am absolutely without prejudice! How could you not love such a person who had the good sense not to tell us about many of these escapades while he was living through them. I have enough grey/white hair as it is! I think that living Eliezer's life vicariously (+ a little help from up above) has allowed me to almost reach 85 - and getting ready to reread his book for the 3rd time. It gets better all the time and who knows, maybe I missed something during the first two readings. Seriously, I loved the 99th Monkey and can't wait until I get a chance to read the sequel. Keep up the great work El.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars New Age honesty!, December 6, 2008

By 

M. T. Guzman "squeakychu" (Rockville, MD, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics, and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments (Paperback)

I was calmly reading this book trying to figure out if I liked it or not when I came across these words: "My time at The New Sun seemed to have prepared me to be a bridge between two very distinct worlds: the lunatic fringe and the mainstream normal."

Right away, I felt this book was worth reading. In my world, I have one particular friend who loves the "airy-fairy" stuff, that is to say, whatever is the newest in the New Age or the spiritual realms. My other friends all seem kind of Old World, meaning that they are of the more traditional spiritual world of religion with its own wide range of beliefs and fervors (or lack thereof). I identified exactly with what the author was trying to express.

Although the author began participating in New Age experiences in the 1960's , it was in the late 1970's that he became editor-in-chief of a New Age magazine called The New Sun. That gave him the perfect opportunity to have an "in" with the New Age crowd and become as absorbed in their philosophies as he allowed them to. Reading through Sobel's experiences reminded me so much of the various phases that my special friend would go through as one or another New Age philosophy became the rage and she quickly dove in. I always loved to hear about her experiences, but never wanted to spend my money to partake of them as I felt I didn't need to pay anyone to engage my own spirituality.

This book has proven to be a wonderful way to visit the experiences I missed, for better or for worse, and occasionally to chuckle at some of insights of a fellow Jew. Although not a practicing Jew, Eliezer Sobel's ethnic heritage comes out distinctly and in a very humorous manner throughout the book. Some lines had me laughing out loud.

I really liked the fact that Sobel was not enamored of all of his experiences nor did he pooh-pooh them all either. He looked into each with an open mind, but not a naïve one. I found it a refreshing concept. Basically, it was his honesty in relating his story that I appreciated most.