Edit: This blog post is a quote by Arnold Mindell. After posting I learned he passed away that same day. Below the quote I now have added some words in honor of him and of how he has influenced me. What a positively childlike elder!
“Wholeness could be really exciting. We will be present in the workplace, not only as money earners, but as real people, as citizens of our town, state, nation and the world, supporters of the environment – including the psychological and spiritual that so profoundly affect our spirits.
[With wholeness] we will be involved in how our company invests its money and utilizes the time it has to give to the community. We will insist that the business is itself a member of the community, that business prospers only if the community does, that the barometer of its success is not dollars but its vitality as an organ in the larger social body.
Best of all, we will get bored with making only those on top the evil ones. Given the chance, we know we can be just as evil.”
– from “Sitting in the Fire”, book, 1995
Arnold “Arnie” Mindell was a pioneer in big-group conflict processing and often involved “unseen” dimensions of the human experience like intuitively sensed urges – welcoming these into expression in the form of what he called “ghost roles”. If you are familiar with constellation work and representation, it’ll be familiar to you.
Arnold Mindell was ahead of his time and it’s hard to separate him and his work from his wife Amy and hers – they did so much as a pair and also separately. Today, we are familiar with the term “privilege” and phrases like “check your privilege”. Arnold Mindell called it “rank” and 30 years ago, in “Sitting in the Fire” he wrote:
- “Rank is like a drug: the more you have, the less aware you are of how it effects others negatively.”
- “People who belong to groups that once outranked others want to be treated as individuals once their power is lost.”
- “Rank-conscious people know that much of their power was inherited and is not shared.”
- “Some of your messages and signals are intended; others are unconscious [‘double signals’]. Double signals, as long as they are not made conscious, make mischief and upset relationships.
Instituitions also send double signals, for example The U.S. characterizes itself as a democracy and sends out the primary signals of equality and goodness. And its secondary signals tell a different story: other countries experience the U.S. as dictatorial and dominating. They cannot understand why the U.S. has supported the decimation of native and African Americans and why it supports repressive regimes around the world. Yet most white Americans are not aware of their country’s repressive and dominating policies. When they travel abroad, they are surprised to be met with hostility. They are amazed to discover that people in other countries think of them as pushy, insensitive and arrogant.” - “Democracy, or sharing power, requires awareness of rank, not only in politics, but in face-to-face interactions. Everyone has both more and less rank than someone else. The trouble is, most of us are aware only of the rank or power we [see in others].”