WIE: You write in your book A Passion for the Possible that "human beings are not constituted to be content with living as thwarted, inhibited versions of themselves. Throughout history and all over the world, people have felt a yearning to be more, a longing to push the membrane of the possible. They have entered monasteries and mystery schools, pursuing secular as well as esoteric studies. They have practiced yoga, martial arts, sports, dance, art. They have left home and family to adventure beyond the ordinary, embarking on visionary and spiritual quests." Are you suggesting that what motivates an individual to pursue excellence in any of those disciplines, be it creative or athletic, is the same as what motivates an individual to pursue spiritual evolution or enlightenment?

JH: I think they come from different levels of the self. I talk about four levels in my work—the sensory, psychological, mythic and spiritual levels. So I would say that more likely what motivates people to pursue excellence is from the sensory and psychological levels, and what motivates them to pursue spiritual realization is more from the mythic and spiritual levels. But that impetus, the great sounding chord that says "it is time to be what you are" is there all the time. This is what I try to communicate in my workshops, seminars and books. The simplest book I ever wrote was A Passion for the Possible, in which I try to lead people into ways of enhancing each of the levels. And all of this works to some extent. But if you're talking about enlightenment, I think it is a balance between all of the levels. At different times in life one level may be more emphasized than another, but above all it is the finding of the essential self that then becomes the orchestrator, the evocateur of these many levels of the self.

WIE: You speak about being "a conscious participant in an unfolding drama," about the personal drama of life as an impersonal event and about our own struggles as equivalent to the challenges faced by heroes in the mythic stories. You also very passionately ask people to act with strength, courage and perseverance, and not to stop in the face of obstacles. In light of this, would you say that you are calling people to live from the realization of what you refer to as the "unitive level," or could we say that you are also calling people to live a life of self—determination or, in other words, self-mastery?

JH: Again, I will not use the term "self-mastery"! I'm calling people to live out of the larger story, out of the capacity of their own destiny. The reason I use the great stories like the search for the Holy Grail and The Odyssey is that these myths help us tap into the extraordinary coding, which allows us to express the deepest truths about ourselves. We can find these deepest truths through realizing that we are part of a greater story. You see, we are storied beings; stories are just flowing through our bloodstream. We are a story at every second of our life, and the stages of our lives are great stories. What I try to do is help people to find these eternal stories that are there. These mythic tales of death and resurrection, rites of passage, quests and discoveries are organic constructs of the deep psyche. And they are there to show us that the story isn't over. A few of us may get stuck, get depressed, get caught up in our own insularities, but when we find the motivating story, then the personal-particular becomes part of the personal-universal and we move on. The yellow brick road unfolds and the journey is before us.

WIE: Would you say that we need to live from these higher levels in order for evolution to take place?

JH: I would say that it's as if we have a million potentials and we tootle and hoot on about twenty of them. Part of my work has been saying, "My God! Look what we've got! Look what's there!" It's not just in our body and mind, as Joseph Campbell thought, but in our very psyche. It's not just cultural, it seems to be structural. It's part of the resonance of the universal story that is activated in us, and when we tap into it, all kinds of potentials begin to unfold. If we are exploring our lives through the larger personae which we have within us, through the greater story, and if we are ultimately spiritually sourced in the ground of our being, we're cooking on more elaborate burners, and the fire is under the crucible of spirit.

WIE: In your travels all around the world, having met thousands of very unusual individuals, who would you say would be the greatest example of self-mastery? Who would you say was the greatest example of enlightenment? And what was it about them that distinguished them from each other?

JH: I wouldn't describe an example of self-mastery, but I would of enlightenment. The most evocative example for me was an old man who I used to take walks with. When I was fourteen years old my parents got divorced, and I was just grief-stricken about it. I took to running down Park Avenue, late for school—I would run from my grief. And one day I ran into an old man and knocked the wind out of him. I picked him up and he said to me in a French accent, "Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?"

I said, "Yes sir, looks that way."

He said, "Well, bon voyage!"

I said, "Bon voyage." And I ran to school. The following week I was walking my fox terrier, Champ, and I saw the old man coming out of a building. I lived at 86th just off of Park Avenue and the old man lived somewhere around 84th and Park.

He said to me, "Ah, my friend the runner, you have a fox terrier. Where are you going?"

"Well sir, I take Champ to Central Park after school. I just think about things."

"I will go with you sometime, okay?"

I said, "Well, sure."

"I will take my constitutional."

Now he was something. He had no self-consciousness at all. He had leaky margins with the world. He had a long French name but he asked me to call him by the first part of it, which to my American ears sounded like "Mr. Tayer." So I called him Mr. Tayer. We walked for about a year and a half, off and on, mostly Tuesdays and Thursdays. He would suddenly fall to the ground and look at a caterpillar: "Oh, Jean, look at the caterpillar! Ah, moving, changing, transforming, metamorphosing. Jean, feel yourself to be a caterpillar. Can you do that?"

"Very easily, Mr. Tayer." I mean, here I was, a fourteen-year-old girl nearly six feet tall with red dots on my face—I felt like a caterpillar!

He said, "What are you when you finally become a papillon, a butterfly? What is the butterfly of Jean?"

"I don't know, Mr. Tayer!"

"Yes, you know, you know. I know you know. Now, what are you transforming into?"

"Well, I think when I grow up I'll fly all over the world, and maybe I'll help people." It turned out to be largely true.

WIE: It certainly did.

JH: "Ah! Bon, bon, bon." And he'd say, "Oh, Jean, lean into the wind!" There are these strong winds off of Central Park. "Ah, Jean, smell the wind! Same wind once went through Jesus Christ."

"Jesus Christ felt this?"

"Yes. Oh, Marie Antoinette, here she comes! Genghis Khan, not so good. Joan of Arc, Jean D'Arc! Be filled with Jean D'Arc! Be filled with the tides of history!" We had all these wonderful games about life: "Jean, look at the clouds, God's calligraphy in the sky!"

He would suddenly stop and look at you, and he would giggle and you would giggle, and he'd giggle and you'd giggle, and then he would look at you laughing and laughing as if you were the cluttered house that hid the Holy One. I would go home and tell my mother, "Mother I met my old man again and when I'm with him I leave my littleness behind."

Toward the end of our walk together one day, he stopped suddenly and he turned to me and said, "Jean, what to you is the most fascinating question?"

And I said, "It's about history, Mr. Tayer, and destiny, too. How can we take the right path in history so that we even have a destiny? My friends at school all talk about the H-bomb, and I wonder if I'll ever get to be twenty-one years old. Mr. Tayer, you always talk about the future of man as if we had a future; I want to know what we have to do to keep that future coming."

He said, "We need to have more specialists in spirit who will lead people into self-discovery."

"What do you mean, Mr. Tayer?"

He said—and this is exactly what he said; I was taking notes because I knew I was in the presence of greatness—"We are being called into metamorphosis, into a far higher order, and yet we often act only from a tiny portion of ourselves. It is necessary that we increase that portion. But do not think for one minute, Jean, that we are alone in making that possible. We are part of a cosmic evolutionary movement that inspires us to unite with God. This is the lightning flash for all our potentialities. This is the great originating cause of all our shifts and changes. Without it there is nothing but struggle and decline."

And I said to him, "What do you call it? I've never heard of it. Can something as great as that even have a name?"

"You are right," he said, "it is impossible to name."

"Well, try to name it, Mr. Tayer. I've heard that once a thing is named, you can begin to work with it."

He seemed amused and he said, "I'll try." And then he said, "It is the demand of the universe for the birth of the ultra-human. It is the rising of a new form of psychic energy in which the very depths of loving within you are combined with what is most essential in the flowing of the cosmic stream."

I didn't really understand what he was saying, but I nodded sagely, and I said I would ponder these things, and he said he would also. One day toward the end of our time together—this was actually the last day that I ever saw him—Mr. Tayer began talking to me about the lure of becoming, a phrase that then became a part of my language. And also about how we humans are part of an evolutionary process in which we are being drawn toward something—which he called the "Omega point"—full of evolution. He told me that he believed that physical and spiritual energy was always flowing out from the Omega point and empowering us as well as leading us forward through love and illumination. And it was then that I asked him my ultimate question, the one that I must say has continued to haunt me all the days of my life: "What do you believe it's all about, Mr. Tayer?" His answer is enshrined in my heart. He started by saying, "Je crois"—I believe. "I believe that the universe is in evolution. I believe that the evolution is toward spirit. I believe that spirit fulfills itself in a personal God."

"And what do you believe about yourself, Mr. Tayer?"

He said, "I believe that I am a pilgrim of the future."

It was the Thursday before Easter Sunday, 1955. I had brought him the shell of a snail. "Ah! Escargot!" he said, and then he began to wax ecstatic for the better part of an hour about spirals and nature and art, snail shells and galaxies, the labyrinth on the floor of Chartres Cathedral—which later became a symbol of my work—and the Rose Window and the convolutions of the brain, the whirl of flowers and the circulation of the heart's blood. It was all taken up in a great hymn to the spiraling evolution of spirit and matter, "It's all a spiral of becoming, Jean!" Then he looked away, and he seemed to be seeing into the future and he said, "Jean, the people of your time, toward the end of this century, will be taking the tiller of the world. But they cannot go directly." He used the French word, directement. "You have to go in spirals, touching upon every people, every culture, every kind of consciousness. It is then that the newest in the field of mind will awaken and we will rebuild the earth." And then he said to me, "Jean, remain always true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love." Those were the words that he said to me. Then he said, "Au revoir, Jean."

"Au revoir, Mr. Tayer! I'll see you on Tuesday!"

And Tuesday came and I brought Champ, and Champ whimpered; he seemed to know something. And my old man never came. Thursday, Tuesday, Thursday. Eight weeks I waited and he never came again, because it turned out he had died on that Sunday in 1955.

Years later, somebody gave me a book without a cover called The Phenomenon of Man. And when I began to read it, I said, "My God! That's my pal, that's . . . oh my goodness. . . ." And I went to my friend and asked, "Have you got the cover to the book?" And she gave it to me and I flipped it over and, of course, there was my old man. No forgetting that face! Mr. Tayer had been Teilhard de Chardin.

WIE: That's extraordinary!

JH: He was the most enlightened person I've ever met. He certainly has had a profound influence on my life, on my sense of history and of who and what we are. He was childlike, always in a state of wonder and astonishment. Always in a state of, as I said, leaky margins with reality. There wasn't a question of self because he was so embodied in all things, in all existences. And he saw spiritual and physical energy as utterly necessary to each other. So that's ultimately what I have to say about the whole thing and what I really believe.