InPresence 0161: Jung’s Underworld Journey – Further Reflections on Peter Kingsley’s Catafalque

Summary

Psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove revisits Peter Kingsley's book Catafalque and its account of Carl Jung's perilous journey into the underworld, framed by an ancient 'sacred contract' between the living and the dead. He argues this idea splits parapsychology into two camps: physicalist researchers focused on psychic abilities among the living, and those who study survival of consciousness after death. Drawing on near-death experiences, mediumship, reincarnation research and psychic healing, he suggests that living only for ourselves may be driving humanity toward self-destruction.

Key takeaways

• 1Peter Kingsley's two-volume book Catafalque claims Carl Jung risked his life journeying into the underworld, following pre-Socratic philosophers Pythagoras, Empedocles and Parmenides
• 2Kingsley asserts, without footnotes, that a sacred contract was formed at the beginning of time requiring underworld knowledge to be reported to the living exactly as given
• 3Ed May, who managed the U.S. government-funded remote viewing program for over a decade, is a physicalist who attributes apparent afterlife communication to 'living agent psi' or fraud
• 4Healer Jane Katra, co-author with Russell Targ of 'The Heart of the Mind,' says she was guided by the deceased remote viewer Hella Hammid to meet Targ, whose liver spots later vanished after intensive visualization work
• 5Vernon Neppe analyzed a reported chess game in which the deceased grandmaster Géza Maróczy, communicating through a medium, played Russian grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi about half a century after his death
• 6Remote viewer Angela Thompson Smith wrote a book about remote viewing aliens; NDE experiencer Elizabeth Krohn co-authored 'Changed in a Flash' with Jeffrey Kripal

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

The very demand that he simply report what was given to him in the underworld exactly as it was given to him means that he now lives in behalf of both the living and the dead. Therefore, never simply for the living alone or for himself alone anymore. Peter Kingsley goes even further to maintain that once you take that step that you're no longer living just for yourself, you become like Christ. You become like a person who is living for others, to give life to the world itself. You are a servant of life, a servant of both the living and the dead, a servant of something much larger than yourself. You're no longer living just a subject of life. You are living, in a sense, an object of life, a life devoted to the objectivity of consciousness itself. Keep watching to learn more. New Thinking Allowed is presented by the California Institute for Human Science, a fully accredited university offering distant learning graduate degrees that focus on mind, body, and spirit. The topics that we cover here. We are particularly excited to announce new degrees emphasizing parapsychology and the paranormal. Visit their website at C-I-H-S dot E-D-U. The New Thinking Allowed Magazine Issue 10 on UFOs and UAP is now ready for free download. And you can also order beautiful printed copies. Go to NewThinking Allowed dot O-R-G. Book 4 in the New Thinking Allowed Dialogue Series is Charles T. Tartt, Seventy Years of Exploring Consciousness and Parapsychology. Now available on Amazon. Thinking Allowed. Conversations on the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. ...

Excerpt from New Thinking Allowed, Oct 16, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.