Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey

by Jane Goodall

Of course there are always some strong-minded individuals who have the courage of their convictions, who stand out against the group’s accepted norms of behavior. But it is probably the case that inappropriate or morally wrong behaviors are more often changed by the influence of outsiders, looking with different eyes, from different backgrounds.

I would give anything to be able to remember, forty years later, exactly what my thoughts were that night when, after my first shipboard dinner, I finally climbed into my little bunk and lay down, soothed by the gentle, reassuring throb of the engines. But those thoughts have vanished, along with the youth of the girl who thought them.

It is all but impossible to describe the new awareness that comes when words are abandoned. One is transported back, perhaps, to the world of early childhood when everything is fresh and so much of it is wonderful. Words can enhance experience, but they can also take so much away. We see an insect and at once we abstract certain characteristics and classify it—a fly. And in that very cognitive exercise, part of the wonder is gone. Once we have labeled the things around us we do not bother to look at them so carefully. Words are part of our rational selves, and to abandon them for a while is to give freer reign to our intuitive selves.

For we are human-bound, imprisoned within our human perspective, our human view of the world. Indeed, it is even hard for us to see the world from the perspective of cultures other than our own, or from the point of view of a member of the opposite sex.

When I was away from Gombe and plunged into the developed world I found it harder to sense the presence of God. I had not learned, then, to keep the peace of the forest within.

As I have mentioned, there was not much time for consciously thinking about the meaning of life, but every day I was feeling the meaning of life.

Science does not have appropriate tools for the dissection of the spirit.

The “self” that we had to love was not our ego, not the everyday person who went around behaving thoughtlessly, selfishly, sometimes unkindly, but the flame of pure spirit that is in each and every one of us, that is part of the Creator; what the Buddhists call Kernal. That which is loved, I realized, can grow. We had to learn to understand and love this Spirit within in order to find peace within.

I thought about the power for good, the power for evil, that exists in each one of us. What a difference a single individual could make in our gradual progress toward a moral world. Indeed, I mused, every one of us had a role to play. Our contributions were different. Some made a great splashing as they moved through the waters of life and the ripples spread far and wide. Others seemed to sink without a stir—but surely, it was not so, just that the movement of their passage was deep down, creating change that was out of sight. And some, buried silently in contemporary mud, had been dug up afterward with a great swirling of the waters. At all different levels the ripples and currents passed or mingled, and some merged inextricably. With each merging a new force was created, itself as unique as the two beings who forged it. What joys the world would have lost if some of those forces had never been created, and what pain in other instances would it have been spared. Forces released not only by the meeting of minds, but of bodies, too.

Albert Schweitzer wrote: “A man who possesses a veneration of life will not simply say his prayers. He will throw himself into the battle to preserve life, if for no other reason than that he is himself an extension of life around him.”

“As thy days, so shall thy strength be.”