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

(This autobiographical memoir was released by Santa Monica Press on February 1, 2008.)

Several years ago a Chicago publisher told me that they were very likely going to publish The 99th Monkey, but needed to bat it around a little more, and asked my patience. I called every three months or so to check in, and each time was told, “We really like this book. We’re still talking very seriously about it in our editorial meetings.” After a year of this, I finally demanded a decision. The head editor called himself, and spent an hour on the phone with me, going over in great detail everything he loved and didn’t love about the book—he clearly had read it very carefully and knew it inside out, which was a bit gratifying, at least. But the only thing I remember of the conversation was what he said at the very end, when he summed up his reasons for turning the book down:

“The central character’s story just doesn’t hang together.”

I hung up the phone and actually laughed out loud, despite my disappointment. This was an autobiographical memoir; I was the central character. It was the most quintessential, confounding, Zen-like statement about my life that I had ever heard, and it catalyzed a mini-satori state as I contemplated the utter truth of it: that my story, my very existence, just doesn’t hang together. I couldn’t argue with that.

In any event, The 99th Monkey chronicles my years spent as a spiritual journalist and seeker, serving as a human guinea pig for countless workshops, therapies, gurus, spiritual techniques, consciousness-expanding systems and so forth, and how, though surrounded and immersed in the “Growth Movement,” I utterly failed to grow. The title refers to a well-known story I retell in the Prologue.