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

THE EXILE 53

owner of one of the bookshops which Mitrinovic frequented in the vicinity of the British Museum.

As for Mairet, whilst in France he had been deeply impressed by his reading of Rudolf Steiner’s study of the German mystics which Mitrinovic had given to him. He returned for extended leave over Christmas 1917, eager to resume his studies under his personal teacher. Mitrinovic, however, quickly tried to impress upon the enthusiastic Mairet that philosophy was nothing if it could not be translated into a way of living. The aim, as he had written in “Aesthetic Contemplations,” was “to change theory into practice and into practice introduce theory.” Mairet was later to recall the episode:

We were in his little study with the window overlooking the street. Most of the walls were darkened by brimming bookcases. There were books all along the mantleshelf, piled on the table. “Look now,” he said, pointing to a row of large volumes on the floor, ranged against the wainscot, “there is the whole of the philosophy of Solovyov. There he has said everything that needs to be said. It remains only for us to do it. Is not that the purpose of philosophy? How can it be anything else but to learn and to know the total truth about what we are and what we want to become... We want men and the world to be better... It is evident then that the work cannot begin until everyone has better ideas and thinks differently. But this we cannot do unless we feel differently, and that is not possible unless we become different beings . . . Change of being is not impossible; only very difficult. For you must go back and begin at the very beginning; you must find the being that always was, and is and always will be, not only in your self but in every self whatever. This is something everyone knows because he is it; but its name is the great impregnable secret; the name by which no-one else can call you, or me. To all others I am ‘Mr. Mitrinovic’ or ‘you’; only to myself am I ‘I.’ This ‘I’ is each one’s private name for what philosophers call “subject of consciousness” . . .

To be an T’ is to be a living centre of the universe, each one of which is looking at the same ‘everything, but each from his own separate place in space andtime . . . That is the one simple truth about this infinitely complicated existence.

That is the truth we all know, but that everybody forgets .. . You remember only that you are Mairet who is at work, or is eating and drinking or reading and smoking: you forget that, at the same time, you are a centre of the universal consciousness—which is divine. However hard you try you cannot keep this in mind. Perhaps fortunately, because you might mistake the way to do it and go mad like Nietzsche. You cannot do it alone. You may possibly—just sometimes—attain something of this remembrance, this divine anamnesis, together with one other person. A ‘you’ and an ‘I’ may become a ‘we’—spiritually. And these two persons could become three: then they could incorporate others,