Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

THE SENATE INITIATIVE 149

to emigrate to America where, as a leading western authority on Zen, he was to exert a considerable influence on the 1960s generation of young people who were themselves seeking new ways of relating to each other and the world around them in the ranks of what came to be known as the counter-culture. In the mid-1930s, however, it was Mitrinovic who exerted an influence over Watts:

... the atmosphere of Mitrinovi¢ fascinated me—his humour, the power of his eyes and voice, his secretive and night-owl habits, his oracular way of writing (under the pseudonym of M. M. Cosmoi), and his exotic tastes in art and literature.

Another group member had become involved with New Britain while at university and eventually encountered Mitrinovic on a visit to London.

All he said seemed both exciting and imaginative and also right and reasonable. I felt sure in my heart that I had found what for so many years I had been looking for and almost expecting.

Such was his enthusiasm that after leaving university he decided against taking a job in order to work full time for the movement, planning to live for a year off his savings.

After that I had no idea what would happen. But during the early months of 1935 it became obvious that the political movement was dissolving away and that DM was even encouraging this. I was disappointed, because it was a political movement which I had joined and to which I felt I had dedicated my life.

However by that time DM had opened up to me such wide horizons of other sorts that I felt great confidence in him personally and in the rightness of what he wanted todo...

Gradually all DM’s work with us came to be concentrated on the notion senate. He had undoubtedly been working on this notion with those closest to him, but there came a time of extending this working to a wider circle of peoplein fact to any of those from the New Britain groups who were prepared to stay with him into the new phase. So what happened at that time was a narrowing and reduction of political activity towards social state and a widening and extension of that activity which DM saw as a necessary condition for making social state possible. I did not at first fully understand this, and only worked it out as time went on, but some of those who had worked with him before New Britainin whom I had great confidence—saw it quite clearly.3