"I think the time we're living in is really fascinating because we're definitely on the edge of a precipice," he says. "We're going to go off the precipice one way or another. The question is, how are we going to land? Are we going to be braced for the fall? There's no question that right now everything you look at, all the basic constituents of life--air, water, food, companionship--none of those seem to be having much luck. Everything is poisoned, and it's all poisoned from greed. I think our inability to communicate with each other and everything that's happening in the world is all a symptom of our greater inability to deal with nature appropriately."

Born 36 years ago as Woodrow Tracy Harrelson, he's known and loved by many as Woody, i.e., someone simple and somehow pure. Hanging with him that afternoon in Sante Fe as he went on about what he's looking for and what the whole world needs, it's so easy to believe the dream, as if under the spell of the desert itself. Sante Fe is one of those special places filled with counterfeit transcendence--a New Age marketplace for things that cannot be bought and should never be sold, a land filled with seekers searching for meaning in a culture of kitsch. Beneath a sun almost as unrelenting as the media spotlight that illuminates every detail of all things Woody, Harrelson laughs about how his lifestyle has caused people to label him a flake. He confesses that it bothers him that, for the simple fact that he's outspoken, he's lost some of the immense popularity that accompanies his beloved celebrityhood.

Woody Harrelson has not come to the desert to be healed. He's there doing what he does best: acting. The Hilo Country is among the five films he's completed since last year's triumphant The People vs. Larry Flynt, and it just happens to be in Sante Fe. For thousands of years, seekers have traveled to the desert to find enlightenment, including the one named Jesus, to whom Harrelson spent his youth praying. But the problems Harrelson has with the human condition and the ways in which he seeks to transcend them seem very much a manifestation of this modern moment. Sure he may get in trouble for scaling the Golden Gate Bridge to protest the logging of the Headwaters Forest in Northern California, the last unprotected redwood forest in the world, or for planting industrial hemp seeds in Kentucky to promote hemp as an alternative fiber source, but he only wants to respond to that great spiritual void, the void our society fills with precisely the mass star worship that constitutes his fame.

A man with a mission, Harrelson's ideas are so compelling and his plans so truly out there, I could have easily forgotten the specific purpose of our visit: to talk about his role in director Michael Winterbottom's Welcome to Sarajevo, a brutal cinematic portrait of war. In truth, Winterbottom's historically based allegory of the ideological battle between personal beliefs and the social forces of apathy, fear and cynicism resonates deeply with Harrelson's ongoing activism. With Harrelson's star power and the fire power of actual footage documenting the military atrocities perpetrated by the Serbs (which Harrelson likens to those of Nazi Germany--"The only difference being that of scale"), Welcome to Sarajevo fits neatly into Harrelson's expanding filmography of controversial and disturbing movies. The kind of political engagement that this movie argues for is akin to the emergent Woody Harrelson persona, in terms of the choices he makes in life as well as in acting. "After I saw The Money Train I guess I'd done Kingpin in the interim I said I'd never do anything that wasn't meaningful to me," he explains. For Harrelson the seeker, however, meaning is not a set fact from which one proceeds but rather an elusive understanding derived from experience. "I was really interested in what was going on in Bosnia," he recalls, "but I had the typical American awareness of it, which meant I didn't really know what was going on. The way the war was portrayed by the media, it was hard to tell. [The media] painted a picture of their own conflict over there as one that has been going on for thousands of years, and who knows who's right or wrong. Of course, getting over there, it's pretty clear who's right or wrong."

For a Texas-born, Ohio-raised good ole boy, Sarajevo seems to fill the gap between the church of Harrelson's youth and his current spiritual quest. Given that the war in Bosnia was fueled by the forces of religious intolerance, Harrelson asserts that "organized religion is one of the most destructive forces on the planet. Certainly more people have been killed in the name of God than anything else, but what is really frightening is how relatively easily it happened there." As to how far he has strayed from his former calling to be a priest, Harrelson is very clear: "I've long since stopped adhering to any organized religion. It still comes down to that same symbol: a symbol of wealth, of money and power," he says. "I used to be a pretty religious type. I went to a Presbyterian college with a Presbyterian scholarship. I've hung out with ministers and actually got to be, for a time, on the inside with them. They would be like, `You know, that guy's worth a hundred million dollars.' Their concern is for what's in the collection plate."

No matter how central a star and consistent a player he may be in the spectacle of American film and television, Harrelson's open display of radical politics, alternative living and outrageous acting roles is endearingly marginal. In a medium of liars, in a world of heartless and greedy corporations, who among us could not have a soft spot for someone who actually addresses life with such an honest, open and generous heart? Perhaps it matters less what he says or does than that he speaks his mind and acts with conviction. He has always been the Everyman, and not because he is just like us--for he is certainly not--but because we can somehow identify with him. It is in this age of mass alienation that Harrelson has become the Everyman because he is so different. Sure he's a bit of a nut, but he brings personal idiosyncrasies onto a human level we can all relate to.

From the romantic outsider of Cheers or Larry Flynt to the nihilist outsider of Natural Born Killers and the existential outsider of Sarajevo, Harrelson's career has normalized such characters, creating a charismatic portrait of personal estrangement in the face of this century's consensual reality. "I think we should all have a natural inclination against authority right now, and if we don't, it's just because we're sheep," he contends.

Filled with rage, disillusion, impractical optimism or just pixilated oddity, the roles Harrelson takes on embody some basic incompatibility with society--a condition he's dealing with in his own personal life. "Sure I feel at odds with it," he says. "I just don't think it makes sense to be a part of the program. It's a Monopoly game: There's the really rich guys who own Boardwalk, Park Place and Marvin Gardens, and their intention is to keep making money. That whole attitude is really destructive." Acknowledging that his strategies of civil disobedience are engendered by the same sort of widespread societal rage that accounts for the Oklahoma City bombing or the mythic violence of Natural Born Killers, he notes, "It's all about dissatisfaction with the way things are." His insistence on remaining positive allows no room in his heart for terrorism, but he allows that "rage is a symptom. The disease is precisely that: dis-ease. We're a race that's living in perpetual dis-ease. Happiness is not going to be a monetary endeavor. It is only the degree to which you can relax."

Seeking relaxation and political engagement simultaneously, Harrelson's path of transpersonal evolution is a curious mix of radical 60's collective involvement and me-generation 70's narcissism. "My focus is on myself right now. I'm not going to stop what I'm doing environmentally. I'm going to be doing that full-time soon," Harrelson enthuses, hinting at his eventual abandonment of acting. "But I'm still at the stage where I'm taking care of myself because I don't want to be just this guy consumed with anger. I need to address the environmental work, which must be done with love. So how do you become a loving person? We've unlearned that. If you're not a child, you've pretty much lost it." For Harrelson, trying to "make myself as full of life and love as a child" has become a question of diet. A vegan for almost 12 years, Harrelson now eats only unprocessed living foods, which consists of fresh fruit, vegetables, nuts and grains, explaining, "We're taking all this dead stuff into our bodies, and only life is going to give life. We're a physical manifestation of something spiritual, and if you want to get back to the spirit, you have to go through the physical."

Spending his days eating just right, with hours of mountain biking, sit-ups, push-ups, tai chi, yoga, acupuncture and massage, along with an intense work ethic of nearly continuous moviemaking, Harrelson's notion of relaxation is outright frenetic. Looking forward to returning to his home and family in Costa Rica soon after wrapping up in New Mexico, Harrelson's ambitious plans for the future indicate just how committed he is to his belief that "activists are the most heroic people on the planet right now." Having set up an organic food distribution service, Yoganics, and an oxygen bar in the works in L.A, Harrelson is also set on taking the idea of home schooling one step further by setting up a school in Costa Rica where, among other things, "they're going to learn yoga everyday."