THE SEARCH FOR EXPANDED CONSCIOUSNESS : With the person-centered approach

THE SEARCH FOR EXPANDED CONSCIOUSNESS
With the person-centered approach


The last paper I wrote (Natiello, 2003), addressed a pending, global paradigm
shift, and opened with the following quote:


We are in the midst of an amazing global event that is centuries in


the making: the awakening of the global mind, the emergence of a


higher form of life in human evolution. (Ashok Gangadean, 2001)
I alluded to the kinds of persons who might usher us through such a shift, and said that
genuine dialogue was an essential component of that movement. In this paper, I am
suggesting to person-centered practitioners that we have the knowledge, research and
understanding to contribute significantly to the ‘awakening of the global mind’, and that
many of us have already joined the ranks of scientists and social pioneers who are
fostering the development of expanded consciousness

I will rely mostly on anecdotal evidence to illuminate the process of expanding
consciousness, because, ironically, residing too much in one’s theoretical head tends to
inhibit that very possibility.


A professor who wanted to know about Zen visited a master who


Poured tea for his guest, but kept pouring until the visitor cried, “Stop!



Stop!” It is running over!


Indeed, said the master, like yourself!”


As long as you are brimming over with opinions and theories


There is no way to show Zen to you. (Franck, F. 1976).

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My History with person-centered groups

I attended my first person-centered group in the Adirondack Mountains in 1977.
That group was facilitated by Carl Rogers and a staff that included Natalie Rogers,
originator of experiments with large groups using the tenets of the person-centered
approach. There were over one hundred participants who came from various places in the
world as well as the U.S. We met for sixteen days in the Adirondack Mountains at the
former Vanderbilt Camping estate that housed the National Center for Humanistic
Education.

It was an astounding, chaotic, and unsettling meeting that yielded events that
many of us called ‘miraculous’. I was genuinely transformed by the experience, yet found
it difficult to describe to curious friends and family. The following year, and for a number
of years after that, I became a staff member, with Carl Rogers and other facilitators, of
large groups that drew participants primarily from the East coast of the United States.
Each group was remarkable in its own right, but, again, participants found it difficult to
explain what made these meetings so life-changing. Most of them indicated that they had
“learned more than I’ve learned in my whole life.” Still, they had difficulty expressing
their learnings and understanding why their experience was so powerful. I was puzzled to
hear continuing reports of mystery and magic rather than any logical explanation for the
transformative quality of these groups.
The Indepth Learning Program in the person-centered approach. In 1980, two
person-centered colleagues and I, in conversation with Carl Rogers, developed a process
where serious students of the person-centered approach could gather to experience and
reflect on its theory and practice. We were careful to remain true to the tenets of the

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approach: 1) We stated the purpose of the project and provided learning resources, but,
beyond scheduling dates for ten weekends during each year, we did not guide/direct the
meetings or establish the curriculum; 2) We entered the program as much as possible, as
co-learners rather than experts or ‘teachers’; 3) We established a climate that was
pervaded by the three conditions (congruence, empathy, and unconditional positive
regard); 4) we trusted the actualizing tendency of the group as a whole, and every
individual in it, to find our way into deepened understanding of person-centered theory
and practice. In other word, we were committed to the consistency between the theory of
the approach and our community learning process.
The results were amazing—chaotic sometimes, but transformative. We saw many
things that baffled and delighted us. For example, our staff met a day before each
weekend to clear out any issues or unresolved feelings between us or in our lived
experience outside. Consistently, those same personal/interpersonal issues surfaced later
in the community among learners. It was almost as though they had attended our staff
meetings, so eerily were they picking up our ideas, language and feelings. Sometimes, as
a group, we reached a state of astounding cohesion and unity. We referred to those
periods of cohesion as ‘moving into our group mind’. That state-of-being would hold up
until some crisis erupted to fragment it. Once we had dealt with the crisis with openness
and courage, the group would move to a higher level of functioning. Again and again,
these exhilarating times would reoccur, in which people would speak for one another,
have simultaneous insights, reach profound depths of empathy. Our decisions would
become increasingly creative and even brilliant, replacing the conflict and power
struggles that characterized the decision-making process in early stages of the group.

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There were often paranormal experiences which all members shared, but none could
explain.
During the second year, I did a qualitative study of the program to see if I could
discover more about the power, intensity, and collective intelligence that occur in these
groups. I conducted non-directed, indepth interviews at the beginning and the end of the
year-long program with twelve learners chosen for diversity in age, educational
background, and professional experience—psychologists, educators, retirees, medical
professionals, homemakers. The interviews went on for several hours, and I began each
one by asking “Can you describe the nature of learning/knowing that has occurred here
for you?”
There were two kinds of learning that participants described. The first and most
intense, I call tacit, wholistic, pre-reflective or, organismic learning/knowing. Recurrent
themes about this learning/knowing emerged consistently from interviewees: 1) it
arrived when the learner was relaxed and in a receptive state; 2) it was self-appropriated;
3) it involved the whole person with intellect, emotions, physiological shifts; 4) it was
concerned with deep, pervasive, personal meaning rather than facts, concepts or
information; 5) it strongly affected behavior, values, attitudes, and the self-esteem of the
learner; 6) it involved an actual change in consciousness and subsequent behavior.
Learners had great difficulty in articulating these learnings. They said things like
“I could paint it but don’t know how to talk about it.” ”I have no words that can
communicate what I know.” “See that beautiful butterfly? That expresses what it was
more than anything I can say.” They consistently pointed to the climate and the absence
of authority, the deep, non-interruptive quality of listening, the safety and trust within the

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group, the willingness to stay with conflict until it was resolved as the important
characteristics that facilitated this kind of learning. They expressed disappointment
sometimes that there wasn’t more rational, intellectual learning in the program that they
could articulate and express, but the tacit learning was a source of intense exhilaration
and considerable personal change for each interviewee.
It is this tacit knowing and its powerful creativity that is now being recognized in
many arenas as evidence of the expansion of consciousness, creative consciousness,
collective intelligence or group mind.
Sedona Large Group. In 1998 six experienced person-centered practitioners
convened a large international group in Sedona with the stated purpose of reflecting on
and understanding the phenomena that characterizes the person-centered groups we had
all experienced. There were approximately 60 participants from around the world, and no
designated facilitators.
I did not learn anything new there, but the recurring phenomena that
characterized these meetings led me to search the literature of systems, chaos and
complexity theory to see if I could bring some order and understanding to the person-
centered group experience. Those theories, I believe, lend coherence and meaning to
some of the mysterious occurrence of collective intelligence and group mind that often
characterize the person-centered process.
Systems and Chaos Theories
Okay, here comes a crumb about those theories, encapsulated into an impossibly
small, inadequate explanation. If it doesn’t make sense, just skip over it. Getting too
immersed in your intellect will fragment your wholeness, and inhibit the flow of

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consciousness we are discussing anyway. I am just putting something here so that you
will not be tempted to discount the entire discussion. It is easy to find more information
in the books, articles and websites at the end of the paper.
Pioneers in systems, quantum, and chaos theories have an entirely different world
view than the Cartesian or Newtonian model on which many of us model our lives. They
believe that all life and all change is composed of oscillating energy rather than the
shifting or reordering of separate components or building blocks. If such a world view is
correct, it makes sense that when the usual barriers (authoritarianism, objectivity, rules of
behavior, ‘me-ness and you-ness’, etc.) that our society has relied on to curtail (control)
chaos and disorder, energy will heat up and intensify. It is in the accelerated exchanges of
energy (Illyia Prigogine calls them perturbations) that living systems can eventually
explode and transform into a higher order. Change, according to this world-view, is not a
linear process but rather depends on the dynamic stability of energy; living systems
derive their essential properties from the exchange of energy within and between all
systems rather than from the properties of their parts. Wholes are greater than the sum of
the parts, and the ‘wholes’ bear little resemblance to the parts. (For example, in
describing an important happening in a person-centered group, describing the behavior of
individuals involved throws no light at all on the identity of the whole group at the
outcome of that event. Something more than the participation of each individual is
happening all the time—something that is difficult to identify by dissecting the process).
The environment, say these theorists, is critical to the sustenance and development of
the group. It, too, is a living system within and around which energy is constantly
exchanged. Thus, the crucial role played by climate (to which person-centered facilitators

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pay meticulous attention). Self-transcendence is the tendency of living organisms to reach
out beyond their present state. In interaction with the environment and other energy
systems, such a tendency creates new structures and patterns of behavior. The human
mind is an essential component of the dynamic of self-organization and
transformation….a living subsystem in its own right. Awareness is one of its properties,
and this property is called consciousness. Many agree that consciousness is the emerging
focus of human evolution during this period of history (Natiello, 2000, pgs. 134-136,
Rogers, 1980, pp. 203-204).
The study of systems, quantum and chaos theories lends credibility to the
expanded sense of consciousness that seems to mark person-centered (and other) groups.
In these groups, I believe, with the integrity of the climate preserved, “defenses fall away,
openness, fluidity, interrelatedness, and, thus oscillations within each subsystem and the
larger whole increase. Persons touch depths they have never approached before. They
become less inhibited, more fully-functioning and interconnected. Their behavior is
increasingly spontaneous and creative. Unity, connectedness, and a sense of oneness are
enhanced” (Natiello, 2000, p. 137). And, of course, with the familiar boundaries erased
and development of shared consciousness, the issues of staff would become common
property; the whole (the group) would become greater than the sum of its parts (the
individuals); the intensity of energy would increase and, thus, lead to unpredictable
changes in the system. “Aha,” I say to myself while engaging in this search, “things are
beginning to make some sense at last (although I still do not claim to know the ‘truth’!).
Now I was hooked on continuing the process of discovery. Part of that search was
to reread Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, David Bohm, Krishnamurti, Rudolf Steiner, Carl

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Rogers, and the current researchers of consciousness some of whom are Juanita Brown,
Otto Scharmer, Tom Callanan, Rupert Sheldrake, and others. In the work of these
pioneers are many insights into the phenomena of person-centered groups.
Although the appearance of collective wisdom/expanded consciousness that we
are finding in the person-centered groups seems to resist explanation in rational, logical
terms, indeed, it does exist. It was the reputation of the famous scientist, David Bohm
that gave credibility during the 1980s to the study of thought and consciousness and their
connection to new models of reality being posed by modern physics. By ‘thought’ Bohm
meant not only the products of our conscious intellect but also our feelings, emotions,
intentions and desires (Cayer, 1997, p. 43). His well known conversations with the
Indian mystic, Krishnamurti, revealed a potential for a new kind of conversation that
could conceivably transform “not only the relationship between people, but even more,
the very nature of consciousness…...” Bohm called these conversations, ‘dialogues’.
(Hamilton, 2004). He understood that most of the problems between human beings arose
from the unexamined, memory-laden cultural presuppositions and ideas that we carry into
our discourse, and that prevent us from having meaning-filled exchanges on matters of
importance. If we could drop pre-conceived ideas and learnings, said Bohm, and get
unstuck from our intellect and memory, we could participate in a ‘pool of common
meaning’ where change and growth is far more likely to happen.
Even before David Bohm’s arrival on the consciousness scene, and, during the
last two decades especially, the acknowledgement of collective wisdom has proliferated.
Here are some examples of what people are beginning to accept:


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*PierreTeilhard de Chardin said, “We are …..moving towards some new critical
point that lies ahead – a harmonized collectivity of consciousness equivalent to a
sort of super-consciousness……the Omega Point”
*Otto Scharmer (head of an MIT Leadership project). “What’s new today in the
world is that now the first and most accessible gateway into deeper spiritual
experience is not individual meditation but group work. What happens is …..
that you tap into this deeper process of awareness and consciousness as a group.”
*”I think it comes down to Grace,” Juanita Brown explains. “You can set the
conditions that make it more likely for that ‘magic in the middle’ to happen, but
you can’t predict that it will happen……”
*Tom Callanan, project officer from Fetzer Institute, says, “Good conversation
doesn’t just involve getting the best people in a room and saying, ‘Let’s talk.’”
Occasionally, an unexpected intimacy and vulnerability would emerge between
the participants. But often the groups struggled to find cohesion. At times,
something magical would occur.
*The Fetzer Institute initiated a project to look for ways to increase the
effectiveness of their dialogues and deepen understanding of this
group wisdom. One of their questions was, “What was the experience of
‘magic’ that emerged when the groups they studied were at their best.”
“What was the mysterious’ intelligence that seemed to emerge when these
groups reached the unity of group mind?”
*Rupert Sheldrake and his theory of morphic fields where one treats the whole
flock of geese as if its in a field, the field of the whole group. A morphic field

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organizes systems where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Once
created, collective fields impact on other groups engaged in the same activity and
all break through to new knowledge or capacities. (These citings in Hamilton,
2004).
The italics in this section are mine. I highlighted them because it was a relief to
see that these scientists, philosophers and sociologists use words like magic, mysterious,
and grace. I believe that what makes the phenomenon of expanded consciousness so
confusing and inarticulate, is that its explanation depends on a different world view than
the one most of us hold. To understand it requires a “change of mind”, a new way of
seeing. Enough of us know, however, that when people gather in groups, where certain
conditions are facilitated, a kind of collective wisdom is generally predictable. That
wisdom, collective intelligence, or group mind may be capable of birthing a new social
or spiritual order of evolutionary proportions.
Facilitation of the Collective Wisdom
Although there is no final word on what collective wisdom is, there is plenty of
agreement that it exists and is a powerful force for change. There is a good bit of
consensus among the people working with and researching expanded
consciousness/collective wisdom about how to facilitate it. The few instructions are
simple but very challenging, with only slight disagreements about the minimal amount of
structure to impose. The instructions are strikingly similar to the conditions posed by Carl
Rogers as enhancing healthy human development.
Bohm suggests beginning a group with 20 or more people. My 30- plus years of
experience in groups teaches me that the group can be smaller and still achieve

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