How one woman’s reverence for life reshaped science

Once, when Jane was a little girl, she was struck by a philosophical puzzle of the highest order: where exactly does the egg come out of the hen?

She disappeared for hours. Her family was frightened.

Unbeknownst to them, Jane had gone into the chicken coop. “I crawled after the hen… there were squawks,” she recounted. “I remember hiding in straw in the corner… waiting and waiting and waiting…

“When my mother saw the little child rushing toward the house… she saw my shining eyes… she sat down to hear the wonderful story of how a hen lays an egg.”

At the tender age of four, Jane Goodall had sat still for nearly five hours to satisfy her curiosity about nature’s mysteries—one of many she would unravel over the course of her life.

When Science Found Its Heart

In her twenties, Jane carried that same childlike wonder into the jungles of Gombe. She spent months sitting quietly among chimpanzees, waiting until they accepted her presence and shared with her the gentle rhythms and rituals of their natural lives.

At first, the scientific establishment mocked her methods. She was a young woman without a college degree, using methods of observation far different from theirs. But she kept watching, kept listening, kept believing that the truth of life reveals itself through communion rather than control.

Jane never rejected science. She embraced its discipline, earned her PhD at Cambridge under skeptics who once dismissed her, and brought rigor to her awe. But she refused to let the world’s definitions of knowledge silence her intuition.

“I was also told by these same professors that to be a good scientist, you have to be objective. Therefore, you cannot have empathy with what you’re studying. That is so wrong,” Jane reflected. “It’s having empathy with what you’re studying that gives you those “aha” moments—‘Yes, I think I know why he or she is doing that.’ Then, you can put on the scientific hat, which I learned at Cambridge, which I love, and say, ‘Let me prove that my intuition is right or not.’”

Before Jane, talking about animal emotion or animal culture was seen as unscientific. She argued that emotion itself is a form of data—not “soft” or unscientific, but a vital clue to the inner life of animals. By allowing herself to feel grief when a chimp died or tenderness when a mother cradled her infant, she gave herself permission to recognize emotion in animals as real. The scientific community now accepts emotion, culture, and social bonds as legitimate objects in the study of animals, rather than as behavior stripped of meaning. Once the taboo was broken for chimpanzees, it widened: elephants, dolphins, wolves, horses, and even octopuses were understood to have rich inner lives.

Before Jane, researchers would drop into a site for weeks or months, extract data, and leave. Jane spent years in one place, cultivating trust, watching generations grow, decline, and die. Today, this form of longitudinal field research is seen as essential to understanding the true complexity of animal societies.

As Jane witnessed the destruction of habitats and the suffering of their resident chimpanzees, she stepped beyond her research role to become a conservationist, educator, and advocate. This, too, made her a pioneer in science. Today, scientist-advocates are not only tolerated but celebrated in conservation biology, climate science, and beyond. Jane made it permissible for a scientist to also be a moral voice.

The Soul in All Things

Along the way, Jane was awakening to a deeper, broader consciousness.

In awarding her the Templeton Prize, the Templeton Foundation wrote, “Dr. Goodall’s formative years spent in the Tanzanian rain forest, a rich sanctuary of life, became a classroom to better understand how life on Earth and even human society functions in every corner of the planet. It taught her that life is a continuum, and that every creature, no matter how small, possesses a certain value, and even intelligence.”

“When I was in Gombe, I felt very, very close to a great spiritual power,” Jane shared. “I felt this spiritual power in every living thing. We call it our soul. Well, if we have a soul, then that spark of energy is in chimpanzees. They have souls. And the trees, they have a soul, too. They’ve got a spark of that divine energy.

“I absolutely believe in a greater spiritual power, far greater than I am… and it was very, very strong in the forest.”

In the spring of 1974, Jane visited the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.

“I had wanted to go inside this glorious cathedral ever since reading Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” she explained. “Little did I know just how important that visit would be.

“There were not many people around, and it was quiet and still inside. I gazed in silent awe at the great Rose Window, glowing in the morning sun. All at once, the cathedral was filled with a huge volume of sound: an organ playing magnificently for a wedding taking place in a distant corner. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. I had always loved the opening theme; but in the cathedral, filling the entire vastness, it seemed to enter and possess my whole self. It was as though the music itself was alive.

“That moment, a suddenly captured moment of eternity, was perhaps the closest I have ever come to experiencing ecstasy, the ecstasy of the mystic. How could I believe it was the chance gyrations of bits of primeval dust that had led up to that moment in time — the cathedral soaring to the sky; the collective inspiration and faith of those who caused it to be built; the advent of Bach himself; the brain, his brain, that translated truth into music; and the mind that could, as mine did then, comprehend the whole inexorable progression of evolution? Since I cannot believe that this was the result of chance, I have to admit anti-chance. And so I must believe in a guiding power in the universe — in other words, I must believe in God.”

Her Final Adventure

Recently, Jane was asked what her next adventure was going to be. “If I’d been asked ten years ago, I’d say, oh, into the wild places of Papua New Guinea,” she replied. “But I couldn’t do that now.”

Instead, Jane said, her next adventure would be one that awaits us all: death. “There was a kind of shocked silence and a few titters,” she recalled. “And I said, well, when you die… either there’s nothing, which is fine, or there’s something. And if there is something—which I just happened to feel, although I couldn’t begin to prove it—then I can’t think of a greater adventure than finding out what it is.”

On October 1, Jane began that very adventure.

Jane Goodall entered the world of science as an outsider, guided by her calling. She learned its methods, engaged its stewards with humility and respect, and then, through quiet conviction, helped reshape its norms, inviting science to open its mind to mystery and its heart to soul.

Jane’s extraordinary life journey reminds us that the greatest education arises from an inner and outer dialogue—between the still, intuitive voice of the soul and the structured rigor of the mind. She once said, “Only when our clever brain and our human heart work together can we achieve our full potential.”

That is how transformative leadership unfolds: when intellect and intuition, the seen and the unseen, the outer work and the inner life, become one continuous current of truth and love.

A New Generation of Explorers

At the Mentora Transformative Leadership Academy, we invite college students to embark on their own journey of discovery—one that mirrors Jane’s.

Like her, you will learn to:

• Listen deeply to life’s quiet guidance.
• Challenge the accepted wisdom with humility and courage.
• Integrate inner intuition with outer rigor.
• Transform your field not by rebellion alone, but through reverence, discipline, and love.

Jane Goodall didn’t just transform science. She transformed scientists. She showed the world that knowledge can be sacred, and that the most transformative discoveries arise when we are attuned, both to the world around us and the soul within.

That is the spirit in which we are building the Transformative Leadership Academy: a living university of life. The early application deadline is November 2.

Warmly,
Hitendra

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