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

THE FINAL YEARS 181

that truth depends on the point of view of the observer, and that even the ‘eternal’ truths of mathematics are founded on man-made fictions. The notion of a reality which transcends mankind, whether it be God or matter no longer serves any human purpose. As Mitrinovi€ wrote in The New Atlantis quarterly,

The time has arrived for the West to lose this fear, the infantile and immature fear of the Divine... For our materialism is unworthy superstitution and is child of fear of the Best, of the Truest, of Divinity and Perfection. It is due to us that we should lose the Fear of God and that we should stop our glorification of matter. For we, humanity are the Measurers also, and essentially. We are not only measurable objects.®

Man (Anthropos) was thus to be taken as the centre and starting point for all thought and knowledge. Not only should our future science be based on the morphology of the human organism, but we must give up the illusion of an objective truth and a reality beyond human experience. This was not to say that truth is purely individual and subjective. Mitrinovi¢ believed that we had reached a stage in our human development when we must learn to share our subjective experience, and that from this sharing of our different truths we would gradually, by a process of approximation, go towards a common human truth. The criterion of this truth should be that it makes human life richer and more meaningful.

It is clear from Mitrinovié’s treatment of the three revelations and other aspects of his thought that he viewed human history as passing through a number of developmental stages. He occasionally likened these to the different phases through which the individual human being passed in the course of life. Thus, ancient Indian thought maintained that each life went through two major phases—pravritti and nivritti, meaning going forth and going down respectively. C. G. Jung adopted a similar perspective, portraying the first half of life as essentially extroverted and the latter half as fundamentally introverted. The imagery that comes most readily to mind is of the life of the individual as a tapestry. During the first half of life the many threads of different colours are spun as the individual ‘goes forth’ into the world, embarking on new ventures and pursuing different projects. At a certain point in life, however, the decision needs to be made that the time of spinning new threads has drawn to a close, the time is ripe for the task of weaving the different threads into a coherent and meaningful pattern—the phase of introversion or ‘going down.’

From this kind of perspective it can be seen that the transformation from spinning new threads to weaving the existing ones into a consistent pattern is a fundamental turning point in the life of the individual. Mitrinovi¢ believed