ARTICLE

Cultivating Consciousness
Carl R. Rogers’s Person-Centered
Group Process as Transformative
Androgogy

Maureen O’Hara
Saybrook Graduate Schools and Research Center

The case is made for the need for a new educational praxis that can cultivate the lev-
els of consciousness necessary to succeed in the new emerging global contexts. The
work of Carl R. Rogers is discussed as a transformational pedagogy. In particular, his
work in large person-center community group processes during the past 15 years of his
career is described where rapid growth in individual consciousness levels and group
consciousness occurs. Elaborated are various configurations of individual and group
conscious and how they are related to each other. Also considered is an extraordinary
consciousness state observed within groups where high levels of individual conscious-
ness and high levels of group consciousness are aligned. Some facilitative attitudes that
may create the enabling conditions for consciousness alignment are described.

Keywords: group process; transfomative learning; person-centered approach;

Carl R. Rogers; conscious group

Here then is my theoretical model of the person who emerges from therapy
or from the best of education, the individual who has experienced optimal
psychological growth—a person functioning freely in all the fullness of his
organismic potentialities; a person who is dependable in being realistic, self-
enhancing, socialized, and appropriate in his behavior; a creative person who
is ever-changing, ever-developing, always discovering himself in each suc-
ceeding moment of time.
—Rogers (1983, p. 295)

Author’s Note: This article is adapted from a keynote speech prepared for the
World Congress for Psychotherapy in Vienna, Austria, in July 2002.

Journal of Transformative Education Vol. 1 No. 1, January 2003 64-79

DOI: 10.1177/0095399703251646
©2003 Sage Publications
64
 Cultivating Consciousness 65

Rogers’s Transformative Agenda

During his 60-year career psychologist and educator, Carl R. Rogers intro-
duced several core concepts about helping relationships that have since become
the sine qua non of all effective psychotherapy, counseling, and education—
whatever the orientation. His message was straightforward and refreshingly de-
void of the technical language so characteristic of much psychological writings
before him. The message was that the simple and widely shared human capacities
for empathy, genuineness, and unconditional respect for the other, along with a
deep faith in people’s natural capacity for self-healing and growth, can be relied
on to bring about transformative effects in people and their relationships.
This simple hypothesis was tested and validated in virtually every situation
where one human being meets another—counseling, psychotherapy, education,
business, conflict resolution, community development, family process, and med-
icine for the purposes of growth and healing.
Although these days best known as for his contributions to the fields of psy-
chology, counseling, and psychotherapy research, in the late 1960s and 1970s
Rogers had an immense and permanent influence on the field of education. He
was keenly aware that the scope of problems emerging in the world were beyond
the reach of individual counseling, no matter how effective. What was needed, he
believed, was a new way of being; a new level of consciousness on a cultural scale.
He recognized that if this new way of being was to become a reality, we would
need entirely new ways of educating children and adults. He saw his work explic-
itly as a contribution to the field of transformative education and drew parallels
between his ideas about student-centered education and the emancipatory “ped-
agogy of the oppressed” of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (O’Hara, 1989; Rogers,
1977). He was impatient to identify an effective pedagogy by which person-
centered principles might be used by educators within and outside the formal
educational institutions to facilitate the development of higher levels of con-
sciousness in individuals and within larger systems.
Here I wish to consider the work that during the past 15 years of his life was
to become his overriding passion—the question of the applicability of his work
in large, unstructured person-centered group encounters. In particular, I wish to
explore Rogers’s proposition that if we are to succeed in building a sustainable
global civil society, we will require forms of consciousness, habits of mind, com-
binations of mental capacities, attitudes, and values that so far are very rare. I
would like to suggest that person-centered groups—reframed, renamed, and up-
dated for a new generation—should be considered effective sites for new kinds of
social learning wherein these new ways of being might be acquired. I want also to
explore the possibility that under some circumstances, individual and group con-
sciousness can be so aligned as to provide access to states of expanded conscious-
ness that may be pointing the way to evolutionary possibilities.
66 Journal of Transformative Education / January 2003

Radical Change

We are living in times of unprecedented change, profoundly and permanently

affecting the way we live, the environment, who we are as human beings, and,
above all in these times of weapons of mass destruction, how we must relate to
each other in our relationships and communities across the globe.
No one is exempt from the onslaught of change. In rural villages in Africa to
skyscrapers in Europe, people of all walks of life are now being called on to man-
age the intended and unintended consequences of not just one mind-bending
revolution, but hundreds occurring at the same time. Changes in life patterns that
used to occur over generations now occur within a lifetime or, in the case of
events like the attack on the World Trade Center, in the space of an hour. As Dee
Hock (1998), the inventor of the VISA card, put it, “Fasten your seat belts, the tur-
bulence has scarcely begun. Unless evolution has changed its ways we are facing
an explosion of societal diversity and complexity hundreds time greater than we
now experience or can yet imagine” (p. 4). What Hock did not say is that unless
evolution has changed its ways, it works by favoring those adaptations that im-
prove the chances for survival and eliminating those that do not. Consciousness
unsuitable or maladaptive for the new world reality will have to change or be-
come extinct.
The success of the industrial 20th century was built on a worldview that was
developed in the 18th and 19th centuries. The patterns of mind or consciousness
that emerged at that time, although immensely successful in producing the ma-
terial advantages of industrial society, are no longer adaptive to the complex so-
cial demands of the emerging contexts in the 21st century. It is crucial, then, that
if we wish to improve our chances of making the journey into the future well pre-
pared to succeed in it we will need to identify or develop ways of cultivating the
requisite modes of consciousness.

Affects—Uncertainty in the Face of Disintegration

By now, this picture of pandemic future shock is surely not news, but the scale
of the psychological challenge it will present people and societies with as they try
to cope with it has yet to be taken seriously by psychologists. We have not even
begun to consider what psychological and educational science and practice might
have to and need to be in the emerging contexts of the future if we are to meet
the human challenges of the emerging world.
Whatever will be the long-range outcomes of such profound and pervasive
change, the immediate psychological effects are already radically destabilizing.
The creativity of human beings has resulted in a paradigm shift in which the same
human beings are now scrambling to regain their footing. Our inner worlds of
expectation, mental routines, imagery, and emotions no longer map the worlds
we now inhabit. As the old rules are turned aside but before new norms have yet
to be established, we must now all deal with rapidly rising levels of uncertainty
 Cultivating Consciousness 67

and ambiguity. In a conversation last year about what she perceived to be the ob-
stacles to change in her neighborhood, an unemployed Scottish woman told me,
“In Scotland in school we are trained to look at the world through the rearview
mirror. We are never taught to look into the future. No wonder when things
change it hits you like running into a brick wall.” A Japanese graduate student at
Saybrook Graduate School reported that there is a wider gap in understanding
between today’s Japanese youth and their own parents than between Japanese and
European young people. In many families, he told me, both children and parents
are in emotional meltdown and they have few resources to turn to. In both Scot-
land and Japan, suicide rates have skyrocketed.

Walking in the Land of Uncertainty

Dissonance between the familiar inner psychological landscape and the

changing outer culture creates threat and opportunity. On one hand, a pervasive
sense of dread and the feeling that “things are coming apart and the center will
not hold.” On the other hand, there is an exhilarating sense that within all the dis-
integration and instability might lie immense possibility for transformation and
breakthrough to new levels of consciousness.
In either case, caught between what was and what might be, the level of indi-
vidual and societal anxiety is clearly rising everywhere. It sometimes seems as if
humanity’s only alternatives are to descend into aggressive tribalism and chaos
or, in the name of law and order, to surrender precious civil rights and submit to
militaristic social control or fascistic corporate order. George W. Bush’s war on
terrorism and Saddam Hussein, Le Pen’s attack on immigrants in France, El
Quaeda’s attack on the United States, and Shell Oil’s oppressive interventions in
Nigeria may all be interpreted as examples of these regressive trends.
But those of us who are therapists and educators are privileged from time to
time to encounter the opportunity side of challenge and are reminded of the awe-
some resilience of the human spirit. Through intimate meetings with people
struggling to find their way, we encounter the seemingly boundless capacity for
learning and healing even of those who have lived through unspeakable horror.
We have known clients and communities who do more than merely survive cat-
astrophic crises but actually come through them transformed, better adjusted,
closer to their lived sense of who they are, more in touch with the deeper mean-
ing of their being, and more generous and open-hearted to their fellows. We have
all experienced that when given the right kind of support from some caring other,
even the most bewildering or anxiety-provoking of situations can lead to psy-
chological growth and new orders of consciousness.
This inborn capacity for learning and transformation, this most human drive
to engage with the challenges of existence and overcome them, has brought hu-
man beings from our primate ancestry to our current state, and the likelihood
that we are not finished with this process provides me with the source of my
hope.
68 Journal of Transformative Education / January 2003

Our present situation is calling on us as a species and individuals to undergo

radical change. Business professor Robert E. Quinn (1996) said, “Deep change is
different from incremental change in that it requires new ways of thinking and
behaving. . . . Making a deep change requires walking naked into the land of un-
certainty” (p. 3). This will not be easy.

Changing Larger Systems

By the time I met Carl Rogers in 1972, he was already shifting his focus from
psychotherapy with individuals to transformation in larger social systems. When
as a graduate student I asked if he would help guide my research, he accepted; in
part, he said, because he saw my work in human development and emancipatory
pedagogy as pushing beyond personal transformation into social transformation
and, as he explained, that was where he was heading. He was particularly inter-
ested in the experiential group work in human sexuality, race relations, and ac-
tion research I was doing with college students. Like him, I was convinced that if
social transformations that challenged long-standing and well entrenched atti-
tudes and beliefs (i.e., racial and gender equity) were to succeed, it would take
more than changing laws—it would take changing hearts and changing con-
sciousness. In other words, it would take whole person learning.
I saw in Rogers’s person-centered work a potential tool for making a contri-
bution on the side of hope. In particular, the work in interactive groups appeared
to offer an emancipatory pedagogy through which people might learn how to
“walk naked into the land of uncertainty” and undertake at individual and cul-
tural levels the deep learning required to exist and thrive in times of paradigmatic
change.
It is significant, I think, that experiential process groups (variously named—
encounter groups, personal growth groups, sensitivity training, etc.) developed
during a particularly turbulent era in American and European life. In the United
States, people were challenging traditional power relations and turning core val-
ues and social mores upside down. A new generation—dubbed the “countercul-
ture” by its friends and the “me generation” by its critics—was emerging from the
psychologically repressive 1950s, and they wanted a life that was different from
the stultifying existence of their buttoned-down parents. These were the people
who had spent their kindergarten years diving under school desks in futile drills
for what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. They were people of color who fi-
nally grew tired of the hypocrisy of a society that proclaimed that all men were
created equal yet refused to allow them access to quality education, lunch coun-
ters, and drinking fountains. They were women and sexual minorities who took
on patriarchal White America and challenged traditional mores about gender,
sex, and desire; they were the dreamers, poets, artists, and activists who saw the
military industrial complex and the large bureaucracies of government and edu-
cation flattening every spark of human originality in their paths.
 Cultivating Consciousness 69

Space for Social Learning

From the late 1960s to the late 1970s, process groups were important ingredi-
ents in this countercultural experimentation. They provided a safe space for a
new kind of discourse where people could temporarily set aside their defensive
masks to try out being what they sensed to be their real selves. They could be hon-
est—especially about their emotions and their nonconformist ideas. For a few
days or weeks, they could try on their newfound personal power, freedom of ac-
tion, and expression, without disastrous consequences. In the best groups—and I
think the person-groups were among the best—a tolerant space was opened up
for a new kind of moral conversation about how we should live. The presence of
others who felt differently and who may not necessarily agree provided people
who were experimenting with pushing back the boundaries of old cultural
norms, the necessary feedback by which they might learn how to handle these
new ways of being in community with others.
As a context for social learning, the encounter movement was invented at just
the right time, as hyper-rationalist industrial societies tried to figure out how to han-
dle previously undreamed of degrees of individual freedom and self-expression,
women’s increased role in all aspects of the public sphere, newly acknowledged
ethnic and sexual diversity, and the personal and social consequences of all that.
Although much derision has been poured on these gatherings as “touchy feely”
self-indulgence, the best of these groups were extraordinarily effective human re-
lations laboratories in which a generation undertook the individual growth and
social learning needed to accept the expansion of democratic empowerment to
previously excluded groups, for instance. They also helped people develop a sense
of inner authority and self-mastery that permitted them to function in a changed
world suddenly lacking clear external authority structures. I continue to main-
tain, despite the vitriolic push-back from far left and far right, that this broad-
based social learning has had a major, and mostly positive, cultural impact.
By the 1980s, interest in process groups was in decline. By the early 1980s,
things were stabilizing politically and culturally in the United States and Western
Europe. The Vietnam war was over and many new civil rights were successfully
established, extending power and social inclusion to previously disenfranchised
groups. America and Western Europe became more culturally conservative—per-
haps as a backlash, relieved to have survived the turbulent 1960s without an ant-
icapitalist revolution, and determined not to let the unruly Dionysian spirit out
of the bag again any time soon. The 1980s and 1990s saw the Reagan-Bush era,
the success of the religious right in the United States, and Thatcherism in the
United Kingdom. These were times of rising prosperity—at least for the educated
middle class, the main consumers of encounter groups.
During the same period, psychology experienced a conservative reaction. Af-
ter a wildly inventive era in psychological practice that had lasted from the end of
World War II, by the early 1980s medical science had reasserted its dominance,
squeezing out such innovations as encounter groups and personal growth labs.
Unethical excesses in the human potential movement featured prominently in re-
70 Journal of Transformative Education / January 2003

ports about group work, whereas their benefits got little coverage. Gradually, psy-
chologists and counselors gave up the messy nondirective encounter group in fa-
vor of tidier, more predictable therapist-controlled or “problem-focused” support
groups. Experiments in education were shut down, casualties in large part of the
right wing campaign to vilify any education that asked students to discuss their
values, feelings, or other dimensions of their inner world.
Encounter groups continue to attract participants in settings where uncer-
tainty and rapid change were still the norm. Rogers, for instance, found an en-
thusiastic audience for large groups in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Latin
America, and South Africa well into the late 1980s. Today, in many varied busi-
ness settings, organizational development consultants put a modified version of
encounter groups into service to help workers develop the increasingly crucial
“soft” skills such as interpersonal communication skills, greater self-mastery, and
racial and ethnic diversity sensitivity.
In many turbulent situations where the psychological ground is still moving
underfoot, laboratories for personal and social learning are not regarded as sub-
versive or as indulgent luxuries but as lifelines to survival and a route to success.
It is now obvious that we are back into white water—this time on a far wider,
in fact global scale—and there is every reason to believe that it will continue for
some time yet, perhaps for generations. From whatever vantage point one looks
at today’s challenges—as therapist, educator, business manager, trainer, relief
worker, politician, social activist, or parent—it is also clear that people are as be-
wildered today as they were in the 1960s, and despite improved material quality
of life, many are struggling psychologically.

Rogers the Futurist

Although not often mentioned, along with his many other interests, Carl
Rogers was a futurist—almost from the moment there was such a field. In 1969
he gave a graduation talk at Sonoma State University entitled “The Person of To-
morrow,” in which he sketched the capacities, skills, and attitudes that he believed
would be necessary for success in the future world. By 1973 these ideas had de-
veloped into a well-developed view of what he referred to as “emerging persons.”
He was deeply concerned (and somewhat pessimistic) about the large-scale
changes he saw in the world—he was particularly critical of America’s role in this:
“We have reason to doubt whether our culture can survive. . . . Sometimes it
seems the only question is whether we commit world suicide with the bomb or
simply decay until world leadership is taken over by other hands. It is not a pretty
picture.” He followed carefully and often quoted the writings of such futurists as
Willis Harman, Harland Cleveland, Marilyn Ferguson, Joanna Macy, Walter
Truett Anderson, Joyce Carol Oates, L. S. Stavrianos, Frijof Capra, Ilya Prigiogine,
and David Bohm in his quest to make his work relevant to what he believed to be
the most important task of our generation—creating a new global society.
 Cultivating Consciousness 71

He agreed with the analyses of Harman (1998) and Stavrianos (1976) that the
American modernist industrial culture, based on the ideas of the Enlightenment,
had run its course and was disintegrating. He also agreed with Harman that suc-
cess in the world that was coming into being would require not only changes in
actions and policies but in who we are as human beings—what Harman referred
to as a mind change. Pragmatist that he was, however, he took their theories and
then looked for practical ways to help facilitate that mind change.
Rogers’s vision of the “emerging person” (1969) was framed very much in
North American values of the 1960s and was based on what he saw as the out-
come of successful client-centered psychotherapy and learner-centered education
and what he saw in the people close to him (1977). Looking back on this “person
of tomorrow” with hindsight and the benefit of feminist and cultural critique, we
might not share his enthusiasm for this overly individualistic person; but regard-
less of his Euro-centric bias, the fact remains that with his usual clear vision,
Rogers saw that the world of tomorrow would require a new kind of person and
to produce these people we would need new socializing processes and new peda-
gogies that would enable these qualities to be developed.
He believed person-centered group processes—in particular, the large group
learning community—might provide such a pedagogy (Bowen, Miller, Rogers, &
Wood, 1979). Rogers and his colleagues conducted large-group, person-centered
encounters in many diverse cultural contexts and gradually began to see that
these unstructured, person-centered process groups were in many ways, as Phillip
Slater (1966) had earlier observed, a microcosm of both the threat and opportu-
nity to be found in the disintegrating world. For a detailed description of such
groups, see Bowen et al. (1979), O’Hara and Wood (1984), Rogers (1977), and
Wood (1984). The chaotic beginnings; struggles for power; faltering faith in ra-
tionality; the contradictory demand by participants that leaders show the way but
not impose external authority; the ubiquitous uncertainty, ambiguity, vulnerabil-
ity, frustration, boredom, anger, and disappointment; the desire for quick an-
swers; and the seemingly endless debate and action paralysis all mirror disinte-
grative processes in the world. Although only a simulation (after all, nothing very
great is at stake), feelings are very real, confusion is real, and the confrontation
with the existential realities of life in human community is real. And as the group
process continues, new discoveries emerge:

• the importance that every voice be heard and every person recognized;
• the emphasis on process—not only what is done but how it is done;
• the importance of nonrational and emotional modes of consciousness and ac-
tion;
• the desire—indeed necessity— to participate in the decisions that affect one, not
just receive the dictates of leaders;
• the importance to the many of the one, of a common humanity expressed in a di-
versity of voices;
• the glimpse of the universal expressed in stories that are personal;
• the value of open rather than rule-bound systems, however intelligent;
72 Journal of Transformative Education / January 2003

• the importance of tolerating ambiguity instead of rushing to clarity and closure;

• the willingness to acknowledge feeling and permitting one’s vulnerability to
show;
• the need for communities that will respect each one as persons and where coop-
eration is favored over competition;
• expanding the circle of empathy to include those with whom we disagree;
• the need to respect the natural and social world around us and be mindful of the
balance between human activity and the natural world;
• the recognition that when all is fluid there can be no preset plans, only a sense of
direction and willingness to be open to feedback to change and learn as we go;
• faith in the potential wisdom of the group over that of any one person; and
• the recognition that in chaotic human situations it usually matters much more
who one is than what one does.

Synergistic Creative Process

My interest in person-centered groups initially focused on understanding

more about the relationship between individual psychology and social processes.
What facilitative conditions would enable the emergence of a synergistic creative
process within a group of relative strangers? What interpersonal conditions
would result in the combined efforts of a group exceeding that which would be
predicted by looking at the capacities of the individuals within it? What levels of
psychological maturity are required to reconcile the desire of sovereign individu-
als to realize themselves as unique and free subjects with the urgent societal need
for people to voluntarily make personal sacrifices for the common good? How
can we empathize across boundaries of difference and work together at more
complex levels of organization? Some answers to these questions were reported
(O’Hara, 1997; O’Hara & Wood, 1984; Rogers, 1977).
As our experiences in large groups continued, we began to get hints that some-
thing even more important might be learned. Extraordinary events occurred in
person-centered groups that went beyond individual growth and group dynamic
explanatory frames with which we were all familiar. We began to see that al-
though what we were learning about the value of the large group in promoting
individual growth and the cultivation of higher order mental capacities was im-
portant, experiences occurred in these groups that could not be explained as sim-
ply the sum of collective actions of separate individuals. “At these moments,”
Rogers (1986) described, “it seems that my inner spirit has reached out and
touched the inner spirit of the other. Our relationship transcends itself and has
become something larger” (p. 205).
I began to focus on this “something larger.” It seemed to me that what hap-
pened in the meeting of self-aware, self-responsible, and sovereign individuals
was that this sense of being part of “something larger” may be revealing to us ca-
pacities not well developed, at least by Western societies.
In most of the world’s cultures, there appear two contrasting world views. Peo-
ple are either raised to see reality as a series of dichotomously branching lineari-
 Cultivating Consciousness 73

ties—where what matters is individuation, causality, and difference—or as an

ecology of interconnection of cybernetic networks where what matters is conti-
nuity, harmony, or blending in. In one case (most predominant in Western soci-
eties), individual sovereignty trumps social and ecological harmony; in the other
(widespread in much of the rest of the world), the individual as a separate, con-
scious agent disappears into the service of the interconnected whole. The African
concept of umbuntu (“I become me through you and you become you through
me”) is an example of such a connected worldview. These views of reality have
usually existed in a dialectical relationship to each other. Parenthetically, it is sig-
nificant, I think, that whatever the culture, people who are regarded as the wisest
ones—the sages—almost always propose that the superior mind is the one in
which the either/or dichotomy becomes reconciled and transcended (Kidder,
1994).
In the new world that is emerging, people—not just sages but ordinary peo-
ple—need both views and most certainly the habits of mind, or consciousness
prized in both types of communities. If we could understand how people can be
fully present to themselves as unique and particular, be capable of granting such
sovereignty to others, and at the same time be in touch with and feel connected
within something larger, we might indeed have a vehicle for facilitating a mind
change.

Integral Groups

It turns out that there are certain moments in a group’s life in which an ex-
traordinary level of alignment and attunement occur between individual mem-
bers and the group consciousness. Simplifying the story very much, at such times
we find four distinct but interconnected psychological states are present simulta-
neously.
There is heightened individual awareness. The individuals present become
highly aware of themselves as whole, unique centers of consciousness who can act
authentically as agents and simultaneously as parts—participants in a larger
community.
There is a high level of interpersonal acceptance. Members of the group sus-
pend their assumptions and judgements to become empathically attuned to oth-
ers in the group as equally unique and sovereign coparticipants in the same larger
community. Following the basic Rogerian conditions of empathy, genuineness,
and unconditional respect for the other, and a deep faith in people’s capacity for
self-direction, they create relational norms that permit individual sovereignty and
mutuality. This does not mean that there is no disagreement or conflict, but only
when it occurs there is a minimum of defensiveness and a willingness to hear the
other out and, if warranted, to change.
There is conscious recognition of the presence of the group or community as
a higher order entity with its own direction and purposes. Individuals in the
group care about the community, are in empathic alignment with it (as needing
74 Journal of Transformative Education / January 2003

nurturing), and are willing to give of themselves. They are also willing to go along
with it—not because they are conforming but because they believe that their in-
dividuated aims and the community’s aims are one.
The group as an entity gives up its exclusivity, transcends its own boundaries,
and opens itself to membership, participation, and interconnection in even
higher order entities of which it, too, is but a part. The community takes care of
its own members but/and it also gives itself to the larger world.
In a recent article we have called such groups conscious communities or integral
groups (O’Hara & Wood, 2003).
In the same way that the consciousness of a individual is an emergent phe-
nomenon from the coordination of activities of millions of sensitive cells in the
body, we consider the “organ” of consciousness for an integral group to be the co-
ordinated combined consciousness of their members. When groups can provide
the necessary conditions for each of their members to become fully present to
themselves and each other, the group’s capacity for self-organizing emerges, and
when the individuals also begin to tune into and reflect on the workings of the
whole, we consider that a form of consciousness. At this stage, the group may be-
come capable of exquisitely creative, responsible, and wise collective action that
goes well beyond that of any of the particular individual participants within the
group.
Particularly exciting was the observation, confirmed over and over by its
members, that in an integral group individual sovereignty and consciousness is
not lost or subjugated to the group task but becomes aligned with it. When indi-
viduals find that their own personal and authentic expression provides some
unique and vital element in the life of the group, and where there is coherence be-
tween their inner world and the community in which they live, they experience a
deep sense of fulfillment and joy.
Deep learning by individuals seems to be facilitated by their participation in a
group that is also learning. Participants frequently describe being “lifted beyond
their own personal best” in such settings and reaching higher levels of personal
consciousness. By fully participating in a conscious group and expanding oneself
to incorporate all the seen and unseen realities, individuals are helped to enter a
state of “flow” in which the usual defenses and inhibitions to creativity and learn-
ing are transcended and more of their inner resources become readily accessible
(Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). In such an aroused and expanded state, old fixed pat-
terns of consciousness, cognitive, emotional, and perhaps spiritual commitments
may be unfrozen. When old patterns unfreeze and reconfigure, new learning can
occur at deep, transformational levels.
We observed people in such groups, including ourselves as convenors, gain ac-
cess to deeper than usual levels of awareness, intuition, and extraordinary per-
ception—even psychic and paranormal states of consciousness—beyond ordi-
nary ways of knowing. People in residential workshops frequently dreamed the
same dreams, had premonitions of future events, read each others’ minds,
achieved startling levels of empathy and alignment, found innovative solutions to
problems that appeared unsolvable in other states of mind, were able to play off
 Cultivating Consciousness 75

each other with awesome improvisation and synergy, were adaptable to rapidly
shifting circumstances, and could handle ambiguity and dilemmas with playful
aplomb. Not infrequently, people attained spiritual states not usually achieved
without decades of meditative practice—all this occurs without losing their sense
of self or their personal sovereignty.
One participant described the experience as like “being on some mind altering
drug without the chemicals and without feeling stupid afterwards.” Another,
echoing the spirit of umbuntu, said, “The more you all become fully yourselves,
the more fully myself I seem to be becoming.” We also noticed that at times it be-
comes possible for individuals to read the group’s needs, sensing its direction,
knowing intuitively when it needs resistance and when it needs provocation,
when it needs closure and when it needs to keep things open, when it needs to
confront its tensions and when it needs to comfort them, if it is to reach its most
creative state. Often this knowledge comes as an image, a dream, or a novel asso-
ciation among seemingly unrelated memories. Only rarely does it come in the or-
dinary rational abstractions of psychology.
Elsewhere I have suggested that this kind of attunement goes beyond individ-
ual empathy and becomes relational empathy, where individuals go beyond sim-
ply entering into the world of the other individuals but entering the mind of the
group as a whole (O’Hara, 1997). Experiences in conflicted situations are more
risky but can be similarly extraordinary, taking people to places they might never
have gone in another kind of group. A lifelong racist in South Africa, for instance,
developed empathy for someone she at first despised; political antagonists in
Belfast became comrades in a joint struggle for peace; feminists and antiabortion
activists at a women’s conference found common ground and mutual respect.
We also wondered privately if such new capacities might represent a new step
in the evolution of collective consciousness, where the high levels of individual
expression and creativity achieved through post-Enlightenment European social-
ization could be married with the advanced collective forms of wisdom charac-
teristic of more sociocentric societies to offer capacities that exceed either alone.
After observing conscious communities develop in widely different settings
and under a range of conditions, we realized that if we could understand the re-
ciprocal interplay between individual and collective consciousness and learn the
conditions under which integral groups were more likely to emerge, we might in-
deed, as Rogers hoped, have a pedagogy by which to facilitate in a relatively short
time the achievement of higher level human capacities with which to address the
pressing large-scale systemic problems.

Facilitative Attitudes

Elsewhere we have described in detail what we know of the facilitative condi-

tions for group consciousness (O’Hara & Wood, 2003). There is, in our experi-
ence, no one overriding facilitative attitude but several key attitudes all interact-
76 Journal of Transformative Education / January 2003

ing at the same time that seem to be crucial in nurturing the emergence of con-
sciousness in a group.
In Rogers’s original work, a key component of the core facilitative conditions
for individual growth is empathy. Empathy has since been shown to be the gold
standard for effective facilitation in any growth-focused relationship (Bohart &
Tallman 1999). Empathy is customarily regarded as an individual-to-individual
phenomenon in which one person senses the unspoken or inchoate thoughts or
feelings of another. Our observations show that group or relational empathy is
also possible (O’Hara, 1997).
Another key attitude in facilitators is the willingness to let go of being an “ex-
pert,” suspend assumptions, open oneself up to see things afresh, risk being vul-
nerable, and learn in public. It is also important to be open at least to the possi-
bility that one might be moved by forces beyond one’s ken—whether this is
framed as a spiritual reality or scientific.
It also helps to maintain an existential, here-and-now focus. By engaging with
the concrete existential predicament of the group in the company of diverse oth-
ers, everyone has a shared experience that is real and concrete. By staying focused
in the present, following the moment by moment experiential references in the
context of life in a particular community, members seem more able to let go of
previous mental maps. When they can experience the present with relatively few
preconceptions, people are forced to learn in new and unexpected ways. When
boundaries are softened in this way, new configurations of conscious become
available to the individuals and the group.
It is through open-hearted and authentic surrender to another or others that
we gain access not only to the lived world of another but also to the complex in-
terpenetrated whole that is the emergent creation that we make together. Being
truly open to dialogical encounter is to participate in “the mystery that rises up
before us when thinking ends—to be kept alive by an enigma,” as Levinas said
(quoted in Schmid, 1997). To surrender to a group of people we barely know and
allow our own being to be altered in the meeting is in a psychological sense to die
and be reborn, transformed in the meeting. Deep dialogue risks psychological
death. This is an immense challenge and not a state to be entered into lightly.
Letting go requires a kind of faith. Whether it resides in God, nature, selfish
genes, evolution, immutable laws of physical or biological reality, self-organizing
systems, human creativity, implicate order, or all of the above, it is faith that the
universe is not random and meaningless that enables human beings to move be-
yond themselves. It is through faith far more than logic that people come to be-
lieve that individuals, groups, and communities have intrinsic tendencies to self-
organize and move from disorder toward ever more complex ordered wholes
(O’Hara & Wood, 1984). On the individual level, this may manifest as a confi-
dence that people can be trusted or that shared commitments are worthwhile. On
a group or organizational level, it may appear as a dogged refusal of a small group
to give up on a shared task despite overwhelming odds, or a willingness to make
great sacrifices in the present for the promise of a better future.
 Cultivating Consciousness 77

Faith, like hope, is the conviction that the future is radically open and that de-
spite turbulence and suffering in the present, there are real possibilities for bet-
terment latent in the struggle. Faith is a powerful orienting force, alerting people
to the presence, perhaps hidden as yet, of an evolutionary directionality to exis-
tence that can be trusted. It keeps eyes and hearts open even in the face of adver-
sity. For Rogers, the object of his faith was the actualizing tendency which he be-
lieved was part of the intrinsic vector in all living organisms and the universe.
There are times during person-centered workshops or community processes
that are very difficult and painful. Tempers flare, impasses occur, certainties dis-
solve, chaos reigns, anxiety spirals out of control, nothing interesting happens for
hours or days, vitality ebbs, and people get bored, hurt, or upset. The temptation
is high to individually withdraw from the group efforts and look out for oneself.
It is the presence of people—particularly convenors—who have confidence in the
group’s capacity to transcend its difficulties, who have faith in the Rogerian story,
and who can urge individuals not to depart or withdraw into self-assertive indi-
vidualism that will provide the necessary encouragement to keep the faith and
stay involved with the learning process.
We have come to see conscious person-centered groups or communities as a
pedagogy for transformational learning. These workshops (and processes like
them) appear to provide opportunities for people to first experience and then de-
velop the expanded capacities for individual and collective consciousness that
will be crucial for our survival through the times ahead. When they are convened
in situations where conflict exists—such as South Africa between Blacks and
Whites, in Israel between Arabs and Jews, or in Northern Ireland between
Catholics and Protestants—they provide a means where people can work
through their mutual estrangement to touch a shared humanity.
In our view, the early experiments in cultivating the persons of tomorrow were
a great but only partial success—they certainly changed the culture but left off
too soon. People did become more psychologically minded; more self-sufficient;
learned how to be better parents, managers, and friends; and came to enjoy
deeper and more satisfying relationships with themselves and each other. People
developed to greater levels of psychological capacity and reached higher levels of
consciousness. But the full potential of the conscious group as greenhouses or
learning contexts in which a new kind of relational consciousness could be culti-
vated was not fully recognized by their practitioners.
In the future, there is certain to be dire need for leaders and citizens who can
cope with the never before experienced challenges and opportunities of the
changing local and global contexts. The level of consciousness demanded in this
moment of our evolutionary history goes beyond that which we have inherited
from any of our ancestors. We are in uncharted territory.
In my view, we urgently need new institutional forms for accelerated social
learning that can simultaneously expand individual consciousness at the same
time they could expand group and societal consciousness. At their best, person-
centered groups have many (if not all) the elements needed for such transforma-
tive learning.
78 Journal of Transformative Education / January 2003

I end with a statement by Rogers (1980):

If the time comes when our culture tires of endless homicidal feuds, despairs of
the use of force and war as a means of bringing peace, becomes discontent with
the half lives that its members are living—only then will our culture seriously
look for alternatives. . . . When that time comes they will not find a void. They
will discover that there are ways of facilitating the resolution of feuds. They will
find there are ways of building communities without sacrificing the potential
creativity of the person. They will realize that there are ways, already tried out on
a small scale, of enhancing learning, of moving towards new values, of raising
consciousness to new levels. They will find that there are ways of being that do
not involve power over persons and groups. They will discover that harmonious
community can be built on the basis of mutual respect and enhanced personal
growth. . . . As humanistic psychologists with a person-centered philosophy—we
have created working models on a small scale which our culture can use when it
is ready. (p. 205)

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Maureen O’Hara is the president of Saybrook Graduate School, San Francisco. She
is a noted clinician, writer, and futurist. She has presented nationally and worldwide
at events such as the World Psychotherapy Conference in Vienna, World Future Soci-
ety, and Organizational Development conferences. She is a Distinguished Clinical
Member of the California Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, Fellow of the
World Academy of Art and Science, and Fellow of the American Psychological Associ-
ation.