The Rise of Consciousness with Edward Kelly, PhD

Where/When: On-line, through ZOOM* and In-Person at Unity of Richmond, 800 Blanton Avenue, Richmond, VA 23221, on Saturday, January 17, 2026, 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon, with Potluck Lunch at conclusion.

Program Title: “The Rise of Consciousness – From Reality’s Bastard Stepchild to Ontological Primacy.” Our 30th Anniversary Program, on January 17, 2026, will feature a talk by Edward F. Kelly, Ph.D., author of numerous scholarly works and Senior Professor of Research at the UVA Medical School’s Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) in Charlottesville. The tug-of-war between spirituality and materialism has been a central issue of Western philosophy for at least 2,500 years, since Socrates and Democritus or even earlier. More commonly referred to today as the mind-body problem (whether mind begets body or body begets mind), the way we choose to answer this question has enormous implications for us, both individually and collectively, on a multitude of levels. Our distinguished 30th anniversary guest speaker, Ed Kelly, has been studying unusual manifestations of consciousness, through the lens of psi phenomena, for nearly 54 years, and has been responsible for several of the most groundbreaking and scholarly works ever published on the subject. Like most in our culture, Ed began his career considering himself to be a scientific materialist or physicalist (to use a more modern term), but his decades long exposure to psi phenomena which could not be explained within materialism was personally transformative. Ed also will address the great shift in perspective now occurring within some important sectors of the scientific community, led by luminaries like himself, as well as physicists like Federico Faggin and Brian Josephson, biologists Denis Noble and Michael Levin, neuroscientist Donald Hoffman, and even Sam and Anaka Harris, all of whom have come in varying ways and degrees to view consciousness itself as the most fundamental reality – from which space, time and matter are merely derivative aspects. Max Planck held firmly to this perspective a century ago, and the rest of us are finally catching up. We are very pleased and honored to welcome Ed back for a return engagement as our 30th Anniversary guest speaker.

About Our Presenter: Edward F. Kelly, Ph.D. is Senior Professor of Research in the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS) at the University of Virginia Medical School. He received his Ph.D. in psycholinguistics and cognitive science from Harvard in 1971 and spent the next 15-plus years working mainly in parapsychology, initially at J.B. Rhine’s Institute for Parapsychology, then for ten years through the Department of Electrical Engineering at Duke, and finally through a private research institute in Chapel Hill. Between 1988 and 2002 he worked with a large neuroscience group at UNC-Chapel Hill, mainly carrying at EEG and fMRI studies of human somatosensory cortical adaptation to natural tactile stimuli. He returned full-time to psychical research in 2002, serving as lead author (with his wife, Emily Williams Kelly, Ph.D., as a co-author) of Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century (2007), then with Beyond Physicalism: Toward Reconciliation of Science and Spirituality (2015), and Consciousness Unbound: Liberating Mind from the Tyranny of Materialism (2021). He is hard at work on a fourth tome now.

* ZOOM (Meeting ID: 865 1815 1952, Passcode: 142841)

About Central VA IONS Community Group: Central VA IONS Community Group is an unincorporated association and a local community group of The Institute of Noetic Sciences, an international association based in Novato, California (www.noetic.org). Central VA IONS is not associated with any religion, religious organization, doctrine or set of beliefs or practices and is open to all. Central VA IONS is entirely dependent upon voluntary donations of its members and friends to support its programs, mailings and other costs, and a love offering is requested at each meeting from those attending in-person or online. Central VA IONS meetings are held each month at locations announced in its program notices and are open to all. Our website is at richmondions.org.

(Meeting ID: 865 1815 1952, Passcode: 142841)