Postmortem Survival and Analytical Idealism with Bernardo Kastrup (4K Reboot)

Summary

Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup argues that analytical idealism allows for the only kind of life after death that truly matters: the survival of our deepest sense of subjectivity, freed from personal identity, much like waking up from a dream. He suggests that at death our memories and even our skills spill into a wider field of mind, where mediums might pick them up, which could explain evidence for survival without requiring the personal ego to persist. Host Jeffrey Mishlove challenges him with famous cases, including a chess game played through a medium, the spirit healer George Chapman, and the Myers cross-correspondences, and Kastrup weighs each with cautious openness.

Key takeaways

• 1Kastrup's essay on post-mortem survival is slated for 'Consciousness Unbound,' a volume edited by Ed Kelly; his recent books include 'Decoding Jung's Metaphysics' and 'Why Materialism is Baloney'
• 2The 'chess game from beyond the grave': a medium reportedly relayed a game between living grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi and deceased Hungarian master Géza Maróczy; Korchnoi won but praised his opponent's skill
• 3Kastrup says he played three brilliant, purely intuitive online chess games while coming down from a psychedelic experience, and attributes this to reduced dissociation and quieting of the brain's default mode network
• 4Fireman George Chapman allegedly channeled the deceased eye surgeon Dr. William Lang from about 1946 until 2006, and Lang's own family and former colleagues reportedly accepted the communications as authentic
• 5Frederic Myers, author of 'Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death,' was allegedly the source of the 'cross correspondences,' puzzle-like messages received by automatic writers in England, India and the US over about 30 years
• 6Kastrup claims that as a child he psychically knew a Portuguese family secret, and he cites acquired savant cases and Bernard Carr's hyperspace model of consciousness as support for his ideas

Glossary terms

Source

Transcript excerpt

And I would even go as far as to say that because I think death is the end of a dissociative process, the dissociative boundary sort of disappears, I would even go as far as to say that my memories become available to a much larger subjective context. And from there, the contents of what were my memories potentially can be picked up by a medium if mediums are truly authentic, I would imagine that a medium could pick up on what were my memories and are now mental processes dispersed over a much wider field, which in a sense, it would help explain mediumship. How can a medium pick these things up? Well, because those mental contents are now widespread in a layer of nature that escapes physical observation. But a medium, for one reason or another, is capable of picking these things out from this underlying field of subjectivity. 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 cihs.edu. 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 newthinkingallowed.org. 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. Thinking Allowed. Thinking Allowed. Conversations on the leading edge of knowledge and discovery with psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove. Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Today, we'll be exploring post-mortem human survival and analytical idealism, the metaphysical philosophy. ...

Excerpt from New Thinking Allowed, Sep 1, 2026. Rights remain with the original creators. Hear the full episode at the source.