Monkey Mind

I first read the phrase Monkey Mind in a column by Herb Caen, the late celebrated columnist for the S.F. Chronicle. His first sentence was ... Monkey mind, leaping from limb to limbo. He then went on to fill a whole column with leaps of thought that were truly acrobatic. Stream of consciousness is a great thing for an artist to possess. Monkey mind is a Buddhist idea of a person who can't stop his mind from going on its merry way, a restless, preoccupied person. It is the exact opposite of the ideal of a quiet mind.

The phrase enters my consciousness now because I watched a documentary about Jane Goodall, the chimp behavior expert and activist. I must declare that chimps are not monkeys. They are in the family of great apes, which includes the gorilla, the orangutan, the bonobo and man. The great apes are just a stone's throw away from us genetically. And watching the chimps easily makes one feel related. Are humans really the smartest of the bunch? This is not such a facetious question. We are, without a doubt, the most accomplished and have the most complex brains. But what do we do with our complex brains?

This idea occurred to me the other day when friends were engaging in idle chatter and I was noticing that it made me tense. It took a few hours of contemplation to figure out why. It turned out to be a justice issue. Here was someone saying nothing intelligent, cementing the idea in my head that she wasn't very intelligent overall, and yet I happened to know that she was thriving in her life - she had a good marriage, had plenty of money, supportive parents, a life she apparently enjoyed. And here I am making very little money, living a forced frugal life, renting instead of owning, not able to afford new shoes, but using my old shoes which were second-hand when I bought them, wearing second-hand clothes not because they're stylish, but because that's all I can afford. I consider myself a reasonably intelligent person. I value intelligence in others. Yet I am by no means thriving. I'm happy, but I don't have the kind of life that affords me a lot of choices.

So who is the intelligent one, really? We don't really value intelligence in our society any more. I feel as if I have become a master candle maker in an age of electric light.

And then there are the gorillas. Gorillas are monstrously strong, but they are vegetarians. I've been thinking lately that they might be a good model animal for the U.S. military. They don't have a very large territory and don't stray far on a typical day. They don't need to kill to survive. They hold their great strength in reserve in case they are attacked by a leopard, which is their only known possible enemy. And even then, the silverback male will put on a display of power before ever engaging, with the idea of scaring the possible predator away. They live a life of peace and ease. If that is not intelligence, what is?

Very few humans live such lives. Our lives are full of monkey mind.

Let me tell you another instance of monkeys in my consciousness. I am a songwriter and musician. I've been doing this for over 30 years. But my job is to buy art supplies, to check invoices to make sure we got what we ordered at the right price, to place new orders, to sell more art supplies. All day long I'm supposed to do this, and all day long there is Muzak playing in the supposed background. Sometimes there are good songs by classic artists. Sometimes there are terribly painfully bad songs which no one in their right mind would ever ask to hear.

But say I were not a music expert. Say I was a monkey expert. Say I'd been studying monkeys all my life. I knew everything there was to know about monkeys. I was an expert on monkey behavior. And the one day, someone unleashes a truckload of monkeys into the store. The monkeys are breaking things and biting people's ankles and scratching at their eyes. Some of them apparently have fleas. I know exactly how to handle these monkeys, how to make them behave - even how to rid them of fleas. But my job has nothing to do with monkeys. I'm supposed to ignore the monkeys and pretend they aren't even there. I'm supposed to go on checking my invoices while what I'd rather be doing is attending to the monkeys. It makes a job seem very mundane when there are monkeys about. Can you imagine Jane Goodall in the wild with the chimps trying to check an invoice? This is how out of place I feel at my job.

And yet the chimps live in large social groups, and have all they need. They are not perfect - they do kill, even their own kind and they do wage wars. But it seems the farther you go away from the human brain, the "happier" the animal becomes. Ignorance is bliss. Maybe monkey mind is the wrong phrase. Maybe monkeys don't do much thinking at all. Maybe they are like Zen masters who simply exist. Maybe it is the human's curse to have developed such a brain as ours, that worries and dreads and plots and schemes and is jealous and insecure and afraid and angry. Maybe Man Mind is the problem. I'll settle for Monkey Mind any day.