The Bigger Picture
The Long Cycles and the Hundredth Monkey
You were drawn to this work at this time for a reason.
Mankind is going through several transitions at once. The planet is changing. We are all evolving. There are many great things on the cusp of happening. To put it simply, it is time for mankind to grow up, spiritually and in a literal sense as well.
This page is about the size of that change, and about how it spreads. Two ideas carry it: the long cycles the whole species moves through, and the hundredth monkey.
The long cycles
As near as I can work out, from decades of research and from my own past life memories, humanity moves through cycles that last about twenty six thousand years.
That is a very long stretch to hold in your head.
It is no secret, to me at least, that our society has reached our current level of science more than once in the past, and bombed itself back into the stone age.
If that sounds far fetched, talk to an engineer about the statues and monuments of Egypt and how they were made. You will soon discover that it is literally impossible for them to have been made without computer aided machinery.
I have a past life memory that belongs in this picture too. It goes back to a time when the ice was over a kilometre thick across parts of Europe. Global warming was a controversy even then. Science of that day was saying there was no way it could ever melt that much ice, that it simply was not possible.
And yet here we are today, heading to a time when ice over anything will no longer be a thing.
I share that one lightly. You can weigh it against your own sense of things.
Where we are in the cycle
My understanding is that we are at the end of a patriarchal age and moving into a matriarchal one.
The age that is closing has been male dominated, and it has brought a lot of chaos with it: wars, conflict, and a whole range of other testosterone driven events. You do not need me to list them. Open any news site.
I first wrote about this back in July 2020, and I asked people then to think about how many women were increasingly leading parts of our society, including whole nations. Look around the world now and you will see it is already happening, and the pace is speeding up.
So what does the change mean?
It means women will slowly become the leaders in society, and men will take second place. It means a more compassionate and more balanced way of living. It means a higher energy world, with a more spiritually based viewpoint. It means a nurturing world.
Personally, I cannot wait. From where I sit it is well overdue.
The hundredth monkey
The second idea is about how a change like this actually travels.
The story comes from Koshima, a small island off Japan, in the 1950s. Researchers left sweet potatoes on the sand for the monkeys there. One young monkey began carrying hers down to the water and washing the sand off before she ate it. Her mother learned from her, her playmates learned, and one by one the habit spread through the troop.
Then, the story goes, once enough of them were doing it, monkeys on other islands began doing it too, monkeys who had never seen it done.
That point is what people call the hundredth monkey. It is the tipping point, the critical mass, where something new stops belonging to a few and becomes part of the whole. Whether it happened on those islands exactly as told, I cannot prove to you. I have watched the same pattern my whole life: something unthinkable in one generation becomes obvious in the next.
I told the full story in a daily post called The Hundredth Monkey, if you would like it at its own pace.
Why these two belong together
The long cycles tell you how big the change is. The hundredth monkey tells you how it happens.
This awakening has been building for centuries, in sparks of human awareness here and there. I believe it has almost reached the tipping point.
Look at the last twenty years alone. We can talk to people almost anywhere on earth with the click of a button. We learn of events as they happen. At times we can get closer to the truth than we could in all the decades before.
With that has come something quieter. We are more aware of lies and scams than we used to be, and there is a growing desire everywhere for the corruption to change. I believe we are heading towards a time when corruption is seen as something to be cleaned out of our societies altogether.
That desire is the collective waking up and asking for better.
Where you come in
You do not have to change the world. Nobody is asking you to convince everyone, fix everyone, or drag anyone along who is not ready.
You only have to be one of the ones who shifts.
When you do your own quiet inner work, when you choose love over fear and nobody sees it, when you sit for your thirty minutes, it adds to the count. You are one more monkey washing the sand off, and you will never know whether you were the hundredth.
You are also, I believe, someone with gifts that will become essential in the years ahead, for yourself, for the people around you, and for people who have not come into your life yet. The Your Gifts page goes into why nearly everybody has them.
There is no coincidence that you are reading this. The Where We Come From page takes the same long view in the other direction, back to the beginning. For now, look at your own life over the last few years and ask what has already shifted in you without your noticing.
If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.
Related pages
Thirty Minutes a Day
The Bigger Picture
The other pages in this set, and where they sit in the Library.
See every page and post in the Contents.
The Members area has songs, Moon pages to print, the Sunday article a day early and a first look at new Library pages.
