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

178 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

or ‘aggressive impartiality’ because they feel as strongly about the integrity of the whole as they do about the interests of the group in which they are involved.

The Three Revelations

Those who are going to try to hold the balance in society and in a world order must have some criterion by which to judge and on which to base their actions at any time. As indicated above, Mitrinovic considered that the organism was the only model which could provide such a criterion. Every organism differs from every other in the detail of the relationships involved in it, but traditionally from the beginning of human thought the pattern of triunity has been that which has been the most basic portrayal of organic wholeness. Mitrinovi¢ maintained that this threefoldness was verifiable in actual life in the triunities of the three major systems in the human body, the metabolic, the nervous and the respiratory and circulatory systems; in psychology in the three functions of will, thought and emotion; and in the family of mother, father and child. This threefoldness operates not only in simultaneity, as in the human body, but also in succession. Father, mother and child exist simultaneously as family, but the family came into existence in succession.

In the past most expressions of this basic triunity had dealt only with the three aspects either in simultaneity, like the Vedanta philosophy, or in succession, like the Hegelian dialectic. Only the Athanasian Creed presented the three Persons of the Trinity both in simultaneity and in succession. In The New Age Mitrinovié had treated the Athanasian Creed as the basic statement of the morphology of organism. But all these expressions of triunity had been either philosophical and abstract or, as with the Athanasian Creed, religious and mythological. Mitrinovi¢ was looking for a way of stating triunity both in simultaneity and in succession which was modern, critical and historically verifiable. This he found in the notion of three major world views which he formulated as Three Revelations. Each of these world views had been predominent during successive periods of history. Each was still adhered to by sections of humanity around the globe. Each was distinct yet complementary and equally valid—each focussing on a necessary aspect of the whole human truth.

According to Mitrinovié the First Revelation was that perspective on the world characteristic of most of the pre-Christian religions. It was the view of the world as an organic unity within which humanity had its appointed