Mr. Tayer Texts
Jean Houston is internationally know for her work in the field of human development. She is the author or co-author of many books.
This story, while quite long, is a worthwhile read. It is reprinted from Jean’s Facebook page:
I have another dog story--perhaps the most important story of my life. I call it WALKING THE DOG WITH MR. TAYER
When I was 14 years old, on 84th St. and Park Avenue, I ran into an old man and knocked the wind out of him. This was serious. I was a great big overgrown girl, five feet eleven and 140 pounds of solid muscle developed from my many athletic activities, and he was a rather frail gentleman in his seventies. But he laughed as I helped him to his feet and asked me in French-accented speech, "Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?"
"Yes, sir," I replied, thinking of my unhappiness over the impending divorce of my parents. "It sure looks that way."
"Well, bon voyage!" he said.
"Bon voyage!" I answered and sped on my way. About a week later I was walking down Park Avenue with my fox terrier, Champ, and again I met the old gentleman.
"Ah," he greeted me, "my friend the runner, and with a fox terrier. I knew one like that many years ago in France. Where are you going?"
"Well, sir," I replied, "I'm taking Champ to Central Park. I go there most afternoons to. . .think about things."
"I will go with you sometimes," he informed me. "I will take my constitutional."
And thereafter, for several years, the old gentleman and I would meet and walk together in Central Park. He had a long French name but asked me to call him by the first part of it, which as far as I could make out was "Mr. Tayer."
The walks were magical and full of delight. Not only did Mr. Tayer seem to have absolutely no self-consciousness, but he was always being carried away by wonder and astonishment over the simplest things. He was constantly and literally falling into love. I remember one time he suddenly fell on his knees in Central Park, his long Gallic nose raking the ground, and exclaimed to me, "Jeanne, look at the caterpillar. Ahhhhh!" I joined him on ground to see what had evoked so profound a response.
"How beautiful it is," he remarked. "This little green being with its wonderful funny little feet. Exquisite! Little furry body, little green feet on the road to metamorphosis."
He then regarded me with interest.
"Jeanne, can you feel yourself to be a caterpillar?"
"Oh, yes," I replied with the baleful knowing of a gangly, pimply-faced teenager.
"Then think of your own metamorphosis," he suggested. "What will you be when you become a butterfly. Une papillon, eh? What is the butterfly of Jeanne?"
What a great question for a fourteen-year-old girl, a question for puberty rites, initiations into adulthood, and other new ways of being. His comic-tragic face nodded helpfully until I could answer.
"I. . .don't really know anymore, Mr. Tayer."
"Yes, you do know. It is inside of you, like the butterfly is inside of the caterpillar. " He then used a word that I heard for the first time, which became essential to my later work. "What is the entelechy of Jeanne? A great word, a Greek word, entelechy. It means the dynamic purpose that is coded in you. It is the entelechy of this acorn on the ground to be an oak tree. It is the entelechy of that baby over there to be a grown up human being. It is the entelechy of the caterpillar to undergo metamorphosis and become a butterfly. So what is the butterfly, the entelechy of Jeanne? You know, you really do."
"Well. . .I think that. . ." I looked up at the clouds, and it seemed that I could see in them the shapes of many countries. A fractal of my future emerged in the cumulus nimbus floating overhead. "I think that I will travel all over the world and. . .and. . . help people find their en-tel-echy."
Mr. Tayer seemed pleased. "Ah, Jeanne, look back at the clouds! God's calligraphy in the sky! All that transforming, moving, changing, dissolving, becoming. Jeanne, become a cloud and become all the forms that ever were."
Or there was the time that Mr. Tayer and I leaned into the strong wind that suddenly whipped through Central Park, and he exhorted me, "Jeanne, sniff the wind." I joined him in taking great snorts of wind. "The same wind may have once been sniffed by Jesus Christ (sniff), by Alexander the Great (sniff), by Napoleon (sniff), by Voltaire (sniff), by Marie Antoinette (sniff)!" (There seemed to be a lot of French people in that wind.) "Now sniff this next gust of wind in very deeply for it contains . . . JEANNE D'ARC! Sniff the wind once sniffed by Jeanne d'Arc. Be filled with the winds of history."
Filled with the winds of history, and eccentrically empowered by Mr. Tayer, I was becoming quite a celebrity at Julia Richman High School where I was running for President of the General Organization. What Mr. Tayer with his French mind meant as metaphor, I with my American literalism took as fact. I would wake up in the morning and take great sniffs of Joan of Arc, Shakespeare, Charlemagne, Madame Curie, and Georges Sand, the great French woman novelist whose novels Mr. Tayer had suggested I read. (Years later, the fractal wave of this suggestion brought the actress Judy Davis to several of my seminars to study my movements and demeanor, some of which she integrated into her characterization of Georges Sands in the movie, Impromptu.)
With all these beings inside of me and feeling remarkably polyphrenic, I had taken on a huge variety of activities. In athletics, I was teaching swimming, playing basketball (badly), and fencing (well) on intramural teams. I was directing and starring in school plays, maintaining some my Girl Scout activities (including selling cookies), participating in school debating forums, being a monitor for whatever needed monitoring, heading the Arista society, and occasionally doing my homework. After I won the election for President of the General Organization, my activities increased to include endless school government meetings, column writing for the school newspaper and magazine, involvement in city-wide meetings with other G.O. presidents, and reading the Bible in school assemblies. As I told Mr. Tayer about all these activities, he would shake his head, and say, "Incroyable! Jeanne, you are trying to do all the stages of evolution all at once. I wanted you to become a butterfly, not a continent."
Mr. Tayer himself was diaphanous to every moment; being with him was like being in attendance at God's own party, a continuous celebration of life and its mysteries. He was so full of vital sap and juice that he seemed to flow with everything. He saw the interconnections between things, the way that everything in the universe, from fox terriers to tree bark to somebody's red hat to the mind of God, was related to everything else and how all of it fitted into one Great Story. He wasn't merely a great appreciator, engaged by all his senses; he was truly penetrated by the reality that was yearning for him as much as he was yearning for it. He talked to the trees, to the wind, to the rocks as dear friends, as beloveds even. "Ah, my friend, the mica schist layer, do you remember when . . . ?" I would swear that the mica schist would begin to glitter back. Mica schist will do that, but on a cloudy day?! Everything was treated as personal, as sentient, addressed as thou. And everything that was thou was ensouled with being and thou-ed back to him. When I walked with him, I felt as though a spotlight was following us, bringing radiance and light everywhere. Even the poem that he inspired, "Rolling River," became golden. My English teacher Miss Jones submitted it to National Scholastic Magazine where it won the gold medal the for best poem by a high school student in 1954.
I remember another occasion when he stood quietly by as a very old woman watched a young boy play a game. "Madame," he suddenly addressed her. She looked up, surprised that a stranger in Central Park would speak to her. "Madame," he repeated, "why are you so fascinated by what that little boy is doing?"
The old woman was startled by the question, but the kindly face of Mr. Tayer seemed to allay her fears and evoke her memories. "Well, sir," she replied in an ancient but expansive voice, "the game that boy is playing is like one I played in this park around 1880, only it's a mite different."
"How is it different?" Mr. Tayer asked.
"Well. . . I'd have to show you," she replied.
We noticed that the boy was listening, so Mr. Tayer promptly included him in the conversation. "Young fellow, would you like to learn the game as it was played many years ago?"
"Yeah, sure, why not?" the boy answered. Soon the young boy and the old woman were sharing old and new variations on the game--as unlikely an incident to occur in Central Park as could be imagined.
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Mr. Tayer was the way that he would suddenly stop and look at you with wonder and astonishment--a whimsical regarding of you as the cluttered house that hides the Holy One. I felt myself primed to the depths by such seeing. I felt evolutionary forces wake up in me by such seeing, every cell and thought and potential palpably changed. I felt greened, awakened, and the defeats and denigrations of adolescence and even the departure of my father seemed partly redeemed. I would go home and tell my mother, who was still a little skeptical about my walking with an old man in the park, "Mother, I was with my old man again, and when I am with him, I leave my littleness behind." You simply could not be stuck in littleness when you were held in the lustrous and loving field of Mr. Tayer.
One day, Mr. Tayer stopped suddenly in our walk down the street toward the park. He turned to me and asked, "Jeanne, what to you is the most fascinating question?" A long moment passed, and then I knew the answer. "It's about history, Mr. Tayer. . . and destiny, too, I think. I just finished reading that book you told me about, Human Destiny by Lecomte de Nouy." In fact, I'd been reading many of the books that Mr. Tayer had casually mentioned, Alfred North Whitehead's Adventures in Ideas, Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution, Plato's Republic. "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 whether I'll ever get to be twenty-one years old. And yet, 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."
"We need to have more specialists in spirit who will lead people into self-discovery. Perhaps, Jeanne, you will be one of them. "
"What do you mean, Mr. Tayer?"
"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, Jeanne, that we are alone in making that possible. We are 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."
"What do you call it?" I asked. "I've never heard of it. Could it even have a name, something so great as that?"
"You are right. It is impossible to name."
"Try to name it, Mr. Tayer," I challenged. "I have heard that once things are named, you can begin to work with them."
The old man seemed amused. "All right, I'll try," 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 depth of love within you is combined with what is most essential in the flowing of the cosmic stream. It is Love."
I did not really understand what he was saying, but I nodded sagely and said I would ponder these things. He said he would also.
One day, towards the end of our time together, Mr. Tayer began talking to me about the "lure of becoming" and how we humans are part of an evolutionary process in which we are being drawn towards something which he called the "Omega Point," the goal of evolution. He told me that he believed that physical and spiritual energy was always flowing out from the Omega and empowering us as well as leading us forward through love and illumination. It was then that I asked him my ultimate question, the one that haunted and continues to haunt me all the days of my life, "What do you believe it's all about, Mr. Tayer?"
His answer has remained enshrined in my heart."Je crois. . . I believe that the universe is an evolution. I believe that the evolution is towards Spirit. I believe that Spirit fulfills itself in a personal God. I believe that the supreme personality is the Universal Christ."
"And what do you believe about yourself, Mr. Tayer?"
"I believe that I am a pilgrim of the future."
The last time that I ever saw him was the Thursday before Easter Sunday, 1955. I brought him the shell of a snail. "Ah, escargot," he exclaimed and then proceeded to wax ecstatic for the better part of an hour on the presence of spirals in nature and art. Snail shells and galaxies and the labyrinth on the floor of Chartres Cathedral and the great rose window there, as well as the convolutions in the brain, the whorl of flowers, the meanderings of rivers, and the circulation of the heart's blood were taken up into a great hymn to the spiralling evolution of spirit and matter.
"It is all a spiral of becoming, Jeanne." He looked away, his wan face seeming to see into futures that I could not. Minutes passed. Finally he spoke, "Jeanne, the people of your time towards the end of this century will be taking the tiller of the world. But they cannot go directly (he used the French word directement ) but must go in spirals, touching upon every people, every culture, every kind of consciousness. It is then that the noosphere, the field of mind, will awaken, and we will rebuild the Earth. " He took my hands and looked at me intently. "Jeanne, remain always true to yourself, but move ever upwards towards greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourself united with all those who, from every direction, every culture, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge. Ah, so much I wish I could live to see it."
"See what, Mr. Tayer?"
It seemed that he didn't hear my question. Instead, he seemed to already be seeing something else. He seemed to be in ecstasy. He began to talk, in faltering but eloquent spasms of speech. "All around us, to the right and left, in front and behind, above and below, we have only to go a little beyond the frontier of sensible appearances in order to see the divine welling up and showing through. See, over there, in that cherry tree, in that rock, in that child. By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us, and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas in fact we live steeped in its burning layers."
Mr. Tayer continued to speak about everything--war, pain, beauty, death, rebirth. He told me the present chaos was not the end of the world but the labor pains of a new Earth and a new humanity coming into finished form. At the end, his voice dropped, and he whispered almost in prayer, "Omega . . . omega . . . omega . . ." Finally he looked up and said to me quietly, "Au revoir, Jeanne."
"Au revoir, Mr. Tayer," I replied, "I'll meet you at the same time next Tuesday." For some reason, Champ, my fox terrier, didn't want to budge, and when I pulled him along, he whimpered, tail down between his legs, looking back at Mr. Tayer.
The following Tuesday I was waiting where we always met at the corner of Park Avenue and 84th Street, but he didn't come. The following Thursday I waited again. Still he didn't come. The dog looked up at me sadly. For the next eight weeks I continued to wait, but he never came again. It turned out that he had died suddenly that Easter Sunday, but I didn't find that out for a long time.
Years later, when I was in graduate school, someone handed me a book without a cover called The Phenomenon of Man. As I read the book, I found it strangely familiar in its concepts. Occasional words and expressions loomed up as echoes from my past--metamorphosis, noosphere. When later in the book, I came across the concept of the Omega Point, I was certain. I asked to see the jacket of the book and looked at the author's picture. I recognized him immediately. There was no forgetting or mistaking that face. Mr. Tayer was Teilhard de Chardin, the great priest-scientist, poet, paleontologist and mystic, and during that lovely and luminous year, I had been meeting him outside the Jesuit rectory of St. Ignatius, where he was sometimes living at the time. I like to think that just as I partially replaced my father in my companionship with Teilhard, perhaps he saw in me the daughter he never had, the one he could talk to, even though he was being crucified by his Church. For those were the years when he was forbidden to publish anything of his giant spiritual and scientific vision, could not teach, mentor other priests, or discuss his larger work.
Years later, as one of the founders and Vice-President of the American Teilhard de Chardin Society, I told the story of my walking the dog with Mr. Tayer to a group of elderly Jesuit priests. One old man came up to me and said, "I know all about you!"
"You do, Father?" I responded. "How does that happen?"
"I was Father Teilhard's housemate at the Jesuit rectory in those years, and I used to ask him where he was going on those afternoons when he came back from working at the Wenner Gren Foundations and immediately went out again. He told me he was meeting with this jolly large young girl, and now I see that she was you." Thus I met my earlier fractal self.
But I also met the themes that have informed my whole life and work. Teilhard’s luminous question about how the caterpillar me would morph into a butterfly has sent me flying all over the Earth looking for the emergent selves of our human becoming. In over 100 countries, and with hundreds of thousands of people the world over, in seminars and workshops, in research and in books, in consultancies for the United Nations, working with the poorest of the poor and the most needy of cultures, including the inhabitants of the White House I have tried to listen for and evoke the magnificence that is innate in our human condition. Always, I try to evoke the butterfly , the higher form that is trying to emerge in this, the most important time in human history.
Teilhard said "We are being called into metamorphosis into a far higher order, and yet we often act only from a tiny portion of ourselves.” This call for the higher order, what I call the Possible Human is what my work is all about. We are in the time of grow or die, the potential metamorphosis of self and society. Let us discover the means of rising out of the cocoon and becoming what we need to be.
When I was about fourteen I was seized by enormous waves of grief over my parents’ breakup. I had read somewhere that running would help dispel anguish, so I began to run to school every day down Park Avenue in New York City. I was a great big overgrown girl (5 feet eleven by the age of eleven) and one day I ran into a rather frail old gentleman in his seventies and knocked the wind out of him. He laughed as I helped him to his feet and asked me in French- accented speech, “Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?”
Yes, sir" I replied. “It looks that way."
“Well, Bon Voyage!” he said.
“Bon Voyage!” I answered and sped on my way.
About a week later I was walking down Park Avenue with my fox terrier, Champ, and again I met the old gentleman.
“Ah." he greeted me, “my friend the runner, and with a fox terrier. I knew one like that years ago in France. Where are you going?"
“Well, sir." I replied, “I’m taking Champ to Central Park."
“I will go with you." he informed me. “I will take my constitutional."
And thereafter, for about a year or so, the old gentleman and I would meet and walk together often several times a week in Central Park. He had a long French name but asked me to call him by the first part of it, which was “Mr. Tayer" as far as I could make out.
The walks were magical and full of delight. Not only did Mr. Tayer seem to have absolutely no self-consciousness, but he was always being seized by wonder and astonishment over the simplest things. He was constantly and literally falling into love. I remember one time when he suddenly fell on his knees, his long Gallic nose raking the ground, and exclaimed to me, “Jeanne, look at the caterpillar. Ahhhh!” I joined him on the ground to see what had evoked so profound a response that he was seized by the essence of caterpillar. “How beautiful it is", he remarked, “this little green being with its wonderful funny little feet. Exquisite! Little furry body, little green feet on the road to metamorphosis." He then regarded me with equal delight. “Jeanne, can you feel yourself to be a caterpillar?”
Oh yes." I replied with the baleful knowing of a gangly, pimply faced teenager.
“Then think of your own metamorphosis." he suggested. “What will you be when you become a butterfly, une papillon, eh? What is the butterfly of Jeanne?” (What a great question for a fourteen-year-old girl!) His long, gothic, comic-tragic face would nod with wonder. “Eh, Jeanne, look at the clouds! God’s calligraphy in the sky! All that transforming. moving, changing, dissolving, becoming. Jeanne, become a cloud and become all the forms that ever were."
Photo was not included in story
Or there was the time that Mr. Tayer and I leaned into the strong wind that suddenly whipped through Central Park, and he told me, “Jeanne, sniff the wind." I joined him in taking great snorts of wind. “The same wind may once have been sniffed by Jesus Christ (sniff). by Alexander the Great (sniff), by Napoleon (sniff), by Voltaire (sniff), by Marie Antoinette (sniff)!” (There seemed to be a lot of French people in that wind.) “Now sniff this next gust of wind in very deeply for it contains.. . Jeanne d’Arc! Sniff the wind once sniffed by Jeanne dArc. Be filled with the winds of history."
It was wonderful. People of all ages followed us around, laughing—not at us but with us. Old Mr. Tayer was truly diaphanous to every moment and being with him was like being in attendance at God’s own party, a continuous celebration of life and its mysteries. But mostly Mr. Tayer was so full of vital sap and juice that he seemed to flow with everything. Always he saw the interconnections between things—the way that everything in the universe, from fox terriers to tree bark to somebody’s red hat to the mind of God, was related to everything else and was very, very good.
He wasn’t merely a great appreciator, engaged by all his senses. He was truly penetrated by the reality that was yearning for him as much as he was yearning for it. He talked to the trees, to the wind, to the rocks as dear friends, as beloved even. ‘Ah, my friend, the mica schist layer, do you remember when...?” And I would swear that the mica schist would begin to glitter back. I mean, mica schist will do that, but on a cloudy day?! Everything was treated as personal, as sentient, as “thou." And everything that was thou was ensouled with being. and it thou-ed back to him. So when I walked with him, I felt as though a spotlight was following us, bringing radiance and light everywhere. And I was constantly seized by astonishment in the presence of this infinitely beautiful man, who radiated such sweetness, such kindness.
I remember one occasion when he was quietly watching a very old woman watching a young boy play a game. “Madame", he suddenly addressed her. She looked up, surprised that a stranger in Central Park would speak to her. “Madame,” he repeated, “why are you so fascinated by what that little boy is doing?” The old woman was startled by the question, but the kindly face of Mr. Tayer seemed to allay her fears and evoke her memories. “Well, sir,” she replied in an ancient but pensive voice, “the game that boy is playing is like one I played in this park around 1880, only it’s a mite different." We noticed that the boy was listening, so Mr. Tayer promptly included him in the conversation. “Young fellow, would you like to learn the game as it was played so many years ago?”
“Well. . .yeah. sure, why not?” the boy replied. And soon the young boy and the old woman were making friends and sharing old and new variations on the game—as unlikely an incident to occur in Central Park as could be imagined.
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Mr. Tayer was the way that he would suddenly look at you. He looked at you with wonder and astonishment joined to unconditional love joined to a whimsical regarding of you as the cluttered house that hides the holy one. I felt myself primed to the depths by such seeing. I felt evolutionary forces wake up in me by such seeing, every cell and thought and potential palpably changed. I was yeasted, greened, awakened by such seeing, and the defeats and denigrations of adolescence redeemed. I would go home and tell my mother, who was a little skeptical about my walking with an old man in the park so often, “Mother, I was with my old man again, and when I am with him, I leave my littleness behind." That deeply moved her. You could not be stuck in littleness and be in the radiant field of Mr. Tayer.
The last time that I ever saw him was the Thursday before Easter Sunday, 1955. I brought him the shell of a snail. “Ah. Escargot." he exclaimed and then proceeded to wax ecstatic for the better part of an hour. Snail shells, and galaxies, and the convolutions in the brain, the whorl of flowers and the meanderings of rivers were taken up into a great hymn to the spiralling evolution of spirit and matter. When he had finished, his voice dropped, and he whispered almost in prayer, “Omega ...omega. . .omega.." Finally he looked up and said to me quietly, "Au revoir, Jeanne”.
“Au revoir, Mr. Tayer,” I replied, “I’ll meet you at the same time next Tuesday."
For some reason. Champ, my fox terrier didn’t want to budge, and when I pulled him along, he whimpered, looking back at Mr.Tayer, his tail between his legs. The following Tuesday I was there waiting where we always met at the corner of Park Avenue and 83rd Street. He didn’t come. The following Thursday I waited again. Still he didn’t come. The dog looked up at me sadly. For the next eight weeks I continued to wait, but he never came again. It turned out that he had suddenly died that Easter Sunday but I didn’t find that out for years.
Some years later, someone handed me a book without a cover which was titled The Phenomenon of Man. As I read the book I found it strangely familiar in its concepts. Occasional words and expressions loomed up as echoes from my past. When, later in the book, I came across the concept of the “Omega point." I was certain. I asked to see the jacket of the book, looked at the author’s picture, and, of course, recognized him immediately. There was no forgetting or mistaking that face. Mr. Tayer was Teilhard de Chardin, the great priest-scientist, poet and mystic, and during that lovely and luminous year I had been meeting him out side the Jesuit rectory of St. Ignatius where he was living most of the time.
I have often wondered if it was my simplicity and innocence that allowed the fullness of Teilhard’s being to be revealed. To me he was never the great priest-paleontologist Pere Teilhard. He was old Mr. Tayer. Why did he always come and walk with me every Tuesday and Thursday, even though I’m sure he had better things to do? Was it that in seeing me so completely, he himself could be completely seen at a time when his writings, his work, were proscribed by the Church, when he was not permitted to teach, or even to talk about his ideas? As I later found out, he was undergoing at that time the most excruciating agony that there is—the agony of utter disempowerment and psychological crucifixion. And yet to me he was always so present—whimsical, engaging, empowering. How could that be?
I think it was because Teilhard had what few Church officials did—the power and grace of the Love that passes all understanding. He could write about love being the evolutionary force, the Omega point, that lures the world and ourselves into becoming, because he experienced that love in a piece of rock, in the wag of a dog’s tail, in the eyes of a child. He was so in love with everything that he talked in great particularity, even to me as an adolescent, about the desire atoms have for each other, the yearning of molecules, of organisms, of bodies, of planets, of galaxies, all of creation longing for that radiant bonding, for joining, for the deepening of their condition, for becoming more by virtue of yearning for and finding the other. He knew about the search for the Beloved. His model was Christ. For Teilhard de Chardin, Christ was the Beloved of the soul.
Years later, while addressing some Jesuits, a very old Jesuit came up to me. He was a friend of Teilhard’s—and he told me how Teilhard used to talk of his encounters in the Park with a girl called Jeanne.
Jean Houston
Pomona, New York
March, 1988
