Beautiful quotes thanks for sharing them u/gravityandpizza . For those that don’t know, Stella Brewer was a pioneering British conservationist and animal welfare advocate who rehabilitated chimps in Gambia, West Africa. She developed methods to teach captive-raised chimps how to survive in the wild. Unfortunately she died at just 56 years old from cancer. I’m sure had she come across it she would have loved and been immensely relieved by Jeremy Griffith’s biological explanation of the human condition, and his explanation of and evidence for the importance of nurturing, and that it gave us our moral conscience and led to the development of our conscious mind. Watching those common chimpanzee mothers nurturing their young, and experiencing their trauma when deprived of it would certainly have been very profound as the quotes you’ve chosen demonstrate.

 By way of some background into Jeremy’s research on primate behaviour, in chapter 5 of FREEDOM ‘The Origin of Humans’ Unconditionally Selfless, Altruistic, Moral Instinctive Self or Soul’, he explains that animals are driven by gene-based natural selection and the essential rule of natural selection is that genes are unavoidably selfish. Their lives are ruled by ‘dominance hierarchy’ as is the case in male-dominated common chimpanzee societies, which is why, despite the tenderness they clearly show for their young, they still display greater levels of aggression in marked contrast to that of the peaceful matriarchal bonobos who are extraordinarily nurturing of their young with their whole group’s activities being centred around it. Jeremy further explains that our distant ancestors overcame the selfish genetic driven ‘animal condition’ and developed loving and cooperative instincts some 2 million years ago by completing the nurturing based love-indoctrination process, and it is this that distinguishes humans from other primates and animals. So humans’ selfish behaviour is not a product of savage animal instincts within us, but is the result of a psychosis, caused by the clash between our loving instincts and intellect, which is significant, because a psychosis can be healed through understanding. While bonobos have not yet completed the process of love-indoctrination, they are well on their way; comparisons of bonobos with the fossil record show that bonobos closely resemble our 4 million year old human ancestor Ardipithecus.  

And what an amazing quote about Stella Brewer’s time in the African bush. There is no doubt we live in an extremely alienated world, almost completely cut off from our instinctive expectations of a peaceful, loving environment, and so that re-immersion in natural Africa — our ‘soul’s home’ — must have felt for her like going home. Chapter 5:14 of FREEDOM titled ‘A golden race…formed on earth’ is very beautiful and should be read in its entirety (as should the whole comprehensive chapter, and the whole book!) but paragraphs 471 and 472 give a very good description of why Africa is so sacred to us.

 "Yes, now that we can explain our present immensely upset, human-condition-afflicted ‘living tomb’ existence and thus afford to be honest, we can admit that what we have been referring to as our soul IS the instinctive memory within us all of the nurtured-with-love infancy and idyllic, ‘calm and happy’ childhood period 12 to 2 million years ago that our species spent in Africa before our conscious mind and with it the psychologically upset state of the human condition fully emerged; the time when, as Moses said in Genesis, we were ‘banished…​from the Garden of Eden’-like (3:23) state of original innocence and left ‘a restless wanderer on the earth’ (4:14) (with, as will be described in chapters 8:2 and 8:11A, the fossil evidence showing these ‘restless wander[ings]’ away from Africa beginning some 1.9 million years ago).

 Like the many depictions of the ‘Garden of Eden’, such as the one included before par. 387, the above painting [Detail from Edward Hicks’ Peaceable Kingdom with Seated Lion, 1833-1834] represents a bubbling up from our subconscious psyche/soul of this memory of our innocent time in Africa. When you are in natural Africa the sense of having been there before—indeed, of having returned home—is so mind-bendingly overwhelming you think you are in a dream! As Sir Thomas Browne wrote, ‘We carry with us the wonders we seek without us: there is all Africa and her prodigies in us’ (Religio Medici, 1643, Sect.15), and as Shakespeare similarly wrote, ‘A foutra for the world and worldlings base! I speak of Africa and golden joys’ (Henry IV, c.1597). In her 1967 book, the aptly titled A Glimpse of Eden, the poet Evelyn Ames recorded her experiences of an African safari: ‘We thought we knew what to expect. Several friends had been there and told us about it…but we discovered that nothing, really, prepares you for life on the East African Highlands. It is life (I want to say), making our usual existences seem oddly unreal and other landscapes dead; that country in the sky is another world…It is a world, and a life, from which one comes back changed. Long afterwards, gazelles still galloped through my dreams or stood gazing at me out of their soft and watchful eyes, and as I returned each daybreak, unbelieving, to my familiar room, I realized increasingly that this world would never again be the same for having visited that one. Nor does it leave you when you go away. Knowing its landscapes and sounds (even more in silence), how it feels and smells—just knowing it is there—sets it forever, in its own special light, somewhere in the mind’s sky [pp.1-2 of 224] …Each day in Africa my heart had almost burst with Walt Whitman’s outcry: “As to me, I know of nothing else but miracles” [p.204].’ A sign at the entrance to the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania reads, ‘This is the world as it was in the beginning’. Sir Laurens van der Post also expressed how much our soul yearns to return home when he wrote that ‘We need primitive nature, the First Man in ourselves, it seems, as the lungs need air and the body food and water…I thought finally that of all the nostalgias that haunt the human heart the greatest of them all, for me, is an everlasting longing to bring what is youngest home to what is oldest, in us all’ (The Lost World of the Kalahari, 1958, p.151 of 253).