Prof Max Velmans – “Only Connect!”: A Personal Journey into Consciousness

In celebration of his 80th birthday, this talk will describe some of the major transitions in Max’s own journey from disconnection, and alienation – from feeling “a stranger in a strange land” - to greater connection, one-ness, and “feeling at home”. This journey included potent extraordinary experiences as well as ordinary experiences along with an in-depth scientific and philosophical study of consciousness for over 50 years. In this work he developed Reflexive Monism, an integrative Western understanding of human consciousness as one manifestation of a conscious, self-observing universe that converges closely with the non-dual Integral Vedanta of Ramakrishna, Vivekananda, and Aurobindo. In this talk he will describe one early formative mystical experience along with some of the major intellectual steps that guided his way.

Max is Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, and a fellow of the British Psychological Society and the Academy of the Social Sciences. He was a co-founder and 2004–06 chair of the Consciousness and Experiential Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society. His main research focus is on integrating work on the philosophy, cognitive psychology, and neuropsychology of consciousness, and, more recently, on East–West integrative approaches. He has over 130 publications on these topics, including his books Understanding Consciousness (2000, 2nd ed. 2009), Consciousness (2018) (a four-volume collection of major works), Towards a Deeper Understanding of Consciousness (2017), and the co-edited Blackwell Companion to Consciousness (2007, 2nd ed. 2017). He has been a Fulbright Scholar at UC Berkeley (1984), a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Westminster and Plymouth, and National Visiting Professor for 2010-2011 of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research, Government of India.