If you meet a person of developed being, of real presence, you feel something in their presence, it makes you quiet, you become yourself, if only for a moment, in their presence. That’s what we need: real people. “Mankind,” says Gurdjieff “is asleep”. We need people who are waking up. Ideas are important, they are necessary, theoretical clarification is very good, it’s happening in Tradition—Frithjof Schuon is the expositor, my friends Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Huston Smith—these people provide us with very important theoretical things, ideas. Some academicians are beginning to wake up to it a little; Most have no real idea about the importance of Schuon partly because he seems so imperious—which he is, but it’s worth it. What he brings is so powerful, so beautiful. But it's people: that’s what’s needed. When I meet them I have to feel their being, which often includes a mysterious level of compassion coming from them, not just insistence on ideas and official allegiance to an official tradition.