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

86 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

had found the ‘master’ he had been seeking: “after Gurdjieff’s first visit to Ouspensky’s group I Anew that Gurdjieff was the teacher.” But if Orage had found his master, he also discovered that the regime at the Chateau was a Strict and demanding one.

My first weeks at the Prieuré were weeks of real suffering. I was told to dig, and as I had had no real exercise for years I suffered so much physically that I would go back to my room, a sort of cell, and literally cry with fatigue. No one, not even Gurdjieff, came near me. I asked myself, ‘Is this what I have given up my whole life for?’

The loss of Orage was undoubtedly a deep disappointment to Mitrinonvic. Not only had he lost a personal friend and intimate associate, but an important and influential patron. He was also disappointed in Orage himself, the way in which his friend was prepared to submit himself to the will of another, apparently without question. When he heard that Orage had been set to work as a garden labourer he is reported to have remarked, “If he had said ‘no, he would not have needed a master . . . He could have been one himself.”>

For Mitrinovic the age of world leaders, rulers, masters and gurus belonged to the past. The key process of the age was the assumption by individuals of responsibility for their own lives in alliance with others. Through his involvement with the Blutbund initiative, he had become disillusioned by the proven inability of the great personages of science, philosophy and the arts to cooperate together for the sake of world peace. He had determined henceforth to work with any individual who would join as co-worker with him in an initiative for a new order of humanity. Just as any organism grows from a small seed, so he believed that the movement towards Universal Humanity must start with individuals who were prepared to commit themselves to one another in open and equal alliance. Philip Mairet and Helen Soden had been amongst his first recruits. Valerie Cooper was another. She was later to record the first occasion on which she believed she managed to grasp something that Mitrinovic had said:

It was this, ‘It is no use attempting to reform anything in the world. Everything is too wrong. What should happen is that a body of thought should arise between the artists, priests and scientists, which could in time take its place beside the world power. And then, as this body of thought grew stronger, it could reach over the seas and join with similar bodies in other countries.’ Later I knew that was his way of describing to me the Senate Conception.®