I had this feeling of peace come over me when
I understood that I was going to die and there was
nothing I could do about it.
That was it.
And when I accepted that, this peace settled on me and
I started thinking about my parents and my missing sister
and how I was gonna die.
My guest today is Peter Panagore, a bestselling
author and past keynote speaker at the Annual
International Association for Near-Death Studies.
Peter's had two near-death experiences in his lifetime,
and he'll be sharing with us the details of those today.
Peter, welcome and thank you so much for
coming on the show.
Thank you Rod down there in Australia.
I'm way up in the Northern Hemisphere here.
It's great.
Yeah, we were saying before that anytime I have a guest
on from the States, it means that the future is
definitely coming for you because it's Tuesday morning,
8:30, and it's, what is it, 4 30, 5 30 in the afternoon
it's 6, 6 30 on Monday, six 30 in the evening.
It's pretty amazing, isn't it?
We can do this.
It's crazy.
My first question is, If you wouldn't mind giving us
a little bit of background about your life up to the
day of your first NDE, and then we can go from there.
Sure.
So I was raised in eastern the United States, in the
northeast corner outside a city called Boston.
I was raised Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic.
And my, my mom and my dad and I learned very early
that the churches hated each other and had for a
thousand years, and both claimed to hold the truth.
And so that was a little confusing.
I went to Catholic school.
I was a boy scout.
I was in the ski patrol.
I was a bit of a troublemaker.
A D H D and dyslexic, but I was dedicated to my
interior life by the time I finished high school.
Because when I was a little tiny kid, I had
two mystical experiences.
One when I was five and one when I was six that
set me in a different path.
And then when I was in high school, I, and I wanna say
accidentally, but it's only accidentally took a triple
hit of L s D and had a an end of duality experience.
This is all before my near-death experience.
And so that last thing that happened to me, It was in my
senior year of high school.
And it just so happened that within a couple of
I transformed me and just within a couple of months of
that, my religion teacher, cuz I went to Catholic high
school taught centering prayer at the time was called
contemplative meditation, has a theravive Buddhist root
to it and a contemplative Catholic root to it.
There's a monastery nearby the school that developed
this as a response to the 1960s and seventies young
people discovering the east and studying meditation.
And so they dove into their own roots.
And so my senior high school, after I had this end of
duality experience, I was taught meditation and I dove
into it and I stayed with, I still meditate, but it's
the meditation that saved me psychologically after my
NDE just a few years later.
Wow.
Okay, I just have a question about the triple
hit with the l s d.
Were you alone or was there somebody else
there when that occurred?
No, I was it was something like after second
period at the school
and I was trying to I was trying to hurt myself and
I didn't realize that I took this I knew I took
three hits, but I had no, it was my first time.
I had no idea what I was getting into.
And I had to leave the school for the day.
I convinced one of the brothers.
It was a Catholic school.
I convinced one of the brothers that I was
really sick, cuz I'd actually been really sick.
I'd been to a clinic the week before with something
unrelated that I used as an excuse and I got the brother
to convince the headmaster to let me and a buddy of
mine go for the day because I needed to, because the
school was a day school and it was like three towns away
from where I was and I was in no condition to drive.
So we got out of there pretty quickly, and I tripped pretty
heavily during the day.
And then I had to work that night.
I was on the ski patrol at the local hill.
It was wintertime.
And so I had to show up and be on duty.
And I was skiing with rainbows shooting out of me.
And and it turns out that they were chakras stacked.
I didn't know it at the time, but I had this, the chakras
and the colors, they're all like coming out behind me and
de some skiing down the slope.
And I went off on a side trail and it was evening
cuz it was under the lights.
And so I was off on a side trail by myself freaking out.
And suddenly the hill became a rolling wave.
The whole hill turned into wave forms and all the
trees started swaying.
And every single thing that there was, the trees, the
snow there was a stonewall that was exposed the sky,
everything was shouting.
I.
I am.
I exist.
But it wasn't, it was like a chorus of a thousand
voices coming from the cells of the tree.
Coming from my own cells.
I was the same as everything else.
And it was all this divine voice that had
no sound saying, I am, in this huge roar.
And I understood myself to be the same as everything else.
And that was it was mind blowing.
It totally changed me.
My nickname at school, at my Catholic school
became Peace Panagore, like that the next day.
I'm like, peace man.
Hey, peace.
And and it was not a compliment.
So I wanna ask you about the mystical experiences
when you were young, but I think before I do that I
know people wanna hear about your near death experience.
So could we fast forward to the, when
the first one occurred?
I was, I wa I went off to what'd I do?
I went off to university and then I wanted ex I
went on exchange to another university my junior year.
I was at a state school and I went to another state
school in the United States, in Western United States,
and a place called Montana, which is the Rocky Mountains.
And I went there to ski on the ski patrol and to go
backpacking and Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, go to school too.
And so come spring break, I didn't want to go back home
to Boston because my family situation was difficult.
My sister had run away when I was 14 and made things
very painful at home.
So I was staying away from there as much as I could.
Long story short, this is a high adventure winter
expedition, and I need to let people know that this was not
my first winter expedition.
The year before I had hiked For 91 miles in March along
the Appalachian Trail in western Massachusetts,
which is the state I'm from.
And I had grown up as a boy scout going winter
camping my whole life.
And so I had been a backpacker and a camper since I was
a toddler not quite that young, but pretty young.
We started in my family out into the woods hiking.
And so when spring break came around in 1980,
I was 21 years old.
I didn't wanna go back to Boston and I was already
deep into the high adventure of living out in Montana
and in the mountains.
So I, I found a partner in the outing club to go on a 10
day ice climbing, snow caving back country skiing trip.
And it was his trip.
I was looking for something to do.
It was his trip.
He had this idea, he had just completed his
course as to get certified as a lead ice climber.
I'd been cross, I took a class on cross country skiing
out there at this mountain.
So I was good on my skis and I'd been skiing my
whole life downhill.
So we went, we compared our skills first, and we went into
the deep wilderness in the middle of March with about 10
feet of snow on the ground, and we went snow caving.
So we skied into this place called Mount Assiniboine
in British Columbia.
And we lived in snow caves, so dug 'em out with a
shovel and it was great.
We had, it was really, it was great.
Scary a little bit sometimes, but neither
of us ever lost our head.
We learned about each other.
We learned to trust each other and it was fabulous.
So we skied back out again, and then we were doing this
one day ice climb and this one day ice climb -I'd been
climbing on rocks with ropes and chalks and carabiners
and all this kind of stuff, and I'd done a whole bunch
of that, but I'd never done ice climbing before.
But Tim was certified and there was this internationally
famous wall called lower weeping wall north of
Banff for all you folks who know Western Canada.
So it's, I don't know, several hours north of
Banff and south of Jasper.
And it's right on the Ice Fields Parkway.
So it's easy to get to.
So we parked in the parking lot.
We get all our gear, and Tim owned all the
gear that he needed.
He's from a very wealthy family.
Had the car he was driving was a new car that his dad
gave him for going to school.
So Tim had all the gear.
I had to borrow and find gear that I needed.
And I did.
I found everything I needed except two hammers.
I found one hammer and one axe.
And the axe is significantly longer.
And when you swing that thing, you can
plant that way up high.
And then you can let go of it and dangle there's a strap
you can support yourself on and so you don't have
to grip it the whole time.
But the hammer's just like a little tiny hammer.
And so every time I swung that thing I got a shorter
reach on it and the strap that you that so you don't
drop it cuz it wasn't designed to climb the hammers.
The hammers really for chipping ice and for
putting in ice screws.
And taking out ice screws.
But you can climb with it cuz it's shaped similarly.
And I convinced Tim, we both were nervous about this
cuz we couldn't, I couldn't come up with two axes and I
couldn't afford to buy one.
So we're like can I do this?
And although two weeks leading up to the trip and we
decided that I could do it.
And so I did do it, but the problem was that it slowed
my climb down significantly.
Not only because of the reach on the swing, but because
of the exertion of having to hold onto it and never being
able to relax my forearms.
I did switch arms but the burned out my forearms
very quickly cause I had to keep holding on.
Cuz in ice, in all climbing, you need three points
of contact at all times.
So you need either two feet and one hand, or
two hands and one foot.
And so three points of contact at all times.
So there's always some hand involved and sometimes
it had to be the hammer.
Half the time probably.
All of this meant that by the time we reached the top
of the climb, five or 600 feet, the sun was setting.
And the other teams who had been climbing that day, and
there had been a dozen teams other than us who were gone
except for the final team.
And they were leaving and they're like looking up
at us 500 feet up going, what are you guys crazy?
And but we were stuck.
You can't, it's not like hiking when you go on a
trail and you're going hiking and you're like, ah,
it's raining and I'm tired.
Or the fog came in and, or, I got a bur in
my shoe or something.
You turn around and you go back.
You can't do that when you're ice climbing.
You've got to go up, you've got to finish the
climb so that you can come down on the rappels.
So we knew halfway up the climb that we were
in serious trouble.
Part of being in the ski patrol is being trained
in wilderness first aid.
And so I, I had known that hypothermia and frostbite
were a real possibility because at the mountain I was
working at, there was this weekend where it was, and
I don't know what it is in Celsius, but in Fahrenheit
it was 40 below zero.
That's really cold.
And we were pulling people off the mountain with frostbite
and with hypothermia.
And so it was fresh in my head.
So we got about halfway up and I, I knew we were in
serious trouble, but I could only go as fast as I could
go, and Tim knew it too.
And he was very a good leader.
He didn't pressure me.
He just encouraged me and helped me go as quickly
as I could, and I did.
But by the time we reached the top of the climb,
the sun was setting that last team was leaving,
looking at us crazy guys.
The sunset, the temperature dropped about
30 degrees like that.
The stars came out at 10 million stars of every
color you can imagine.
And so there was enough light to see by, but immediately we
began to have violent shivers.
And every muscle in my body was independently quaking.
So my jaw was clattering.
My hands were shaking, my body's twitching all over
the place uncontrollably.
And we knew that we were in serious deadly trouble cuz
we're five or 600 feet up.
We're in the middle, middle of the wilderness
all night long for the, through the entire night.
Two vehicles went by and one of them, one
of them pulled in.
But I'll get to that story part of the
story in a little bit.
So it's very isolated.
We knew we were on our own and we understood I understood
and told Tim that we were going to die, and if we stayed
where we were and we talked about snuggling in because,
and the wilderness, the first thing you do when you get
lost or you're in trouble is you stay where you are.
You don't keep moving because if you keep moving,
they're never gonna find you.
So you stay where you are.
But we couldn't stay where we were because if we snuggled up
against the mountain together, tried to use our body heat,
we didn't have any body heat, and that we were gonna die
as soon as we stopped moving.
So the only thing that was keeping us warm was moving and
we had drunk all our water.
Fortunately there was ice, ice chips to suck on.
But we had eaten all our food and nobody on, none of the
teams on the climb that day had brought up gear to spend
the night, cuz nobody expected us too to spend the night.
So we were well prepared for the day, except for
my ax hammer problem.
But we were unprepared for the night.
So we decided to press on, and I could tell you the whole
story of the warden showing up because we had signed
into the log and how our, my eyeballs were freezing.
And I couldn't move my lips because my lips were frozen
and I became cognitively impaired because it makes
you make bad choices.
Your brain freezes.
I had frostbite all, I have all my digits,
but I have problems.
I have residual problems my whole life and my hands and my
feet, my face, my whole body.
It was imagine one of those movies or books where they're
climbing in the Himalayas.
It's a lower mountain, but all the terrors and the cold.
It was like that.
And I'll leave out most of the story because you
probably wanna hear about the what happened when I died.
But I will tell you this about it is that the hypothermia
progressed through the night.
We had three repels to go.
The hypothermia progressed through the night and
there was this point at which the I should mention
that cold feels like fire.
So if you've ever put your hands on a burner,
that's what it feels like.
And and my feet were frozen and my hands were frozen.
I'm in pain.
My mind, my brain, my drive was survival in instinct.
And there, there came this point in my night
when I felt like I, I drilled with my willpower
driving forward to survive.
I drilled into this part of my brain that
preexisted my humanity.
It was so deep inside me.
It was animalistic.
It had an animalistic desire for survival.
It had not nothing to do with language, it had nothing
to do with my decision.
I was, my body was making me survive.
My brain was making me survive.
And one of the things, another thing about climbing and
being hypothermic is that, in climbing, you have to
be very intentional about every motion that you make.
You have to plan every move cuz you don't want
to expend extra energy.
When you're hypothermic and on a cliff and it's
a, 500 foot drop, you're very careful about every
motion that you make.
And so we were being exacting and all of that, we could
be exacting in as we lost our cognitive ability, as
we lost our capacity for making good decisions.
And we made a series of bad decisions
throughout the night.
So cut to the chase.
Now we're at the last rappel.
We fought our way across the mountain.
The moon had risen at some point, and so we
had a three quarter moon, and we had more light.
And we're on a ledge the size of a grand piano.
And in the mountain, we're off the ice, there are iron pins,
eped drilled and eped into the mountain with rings, iron
rings on them, and carabiners and straps and a carabiner.
And I was hooked into my harness.
So this was the top of the practice rappel space.
So everybody climb up the face, and then with
these harnesses, you could repel back down as good.
Good.
In the summertime.
Good in the wintertime, because this is the first
time that we were safe from falling all night.
So we're harnessed in here.
I'm I'm clipped in.
We're on the ledge.
Tim.
Tim is to my left.
At some time before dawn my feet were no longer on fire.
I lost the feeling in my feet.
I was in a state of slow moving determination.
And so I took off my gloves and I had the rope
and I put my gloves down.
I was wearing rag wool mittens with leather chaps, which
is, something you did in the 1970s, but you would never
do now cuz there was a lot of technology that developed
shortly after this happened.
So I put my gloves down and I took the end of the rope
and I tied it very carefully and slowly to my harness.
And then I took the other end of the rope and I tossed
it out around the corner.
We had turned a corner on the, on our descent and I tossed it
out around the corner into a dark crag that I couldn't see
cuz it was around the corner.
And I pulled on the rope, and the rope was through another
epoxied iron ring up above.
It's just pull that thing right down, only when I
grabbed it and pulled it, it must have laid into some
kind of rock wedge and it jammed on the very first pull.
I didn't pull it an inch or two inches.
And it's stuck now and I pulled it again and it got
tighter but it's up around the corner and I've only
got one end of the rope.
And so now we're in the situation where salvation
for us was right at the bottom of this rappel.
There's the tent and the food and the stove.
Everything's right down there.
And now we can't get to it because we can't go back
up the climb because I'm wearing crampons and it's
in the dark and I'm not, I don't have a rope to climb.
And plus I've got hypothermia and I couldn't
get the rope free, so I kept pulling on the rope.
But as the evening, as the morning wore on I began
to go through the last stages of the hypothermia.
So I'm gonna, I'm gonna skip all those and come
right to the very end.
When I had this feeling of peace come over me when I
understood that I was going to die and there was nothing I
could do about it that was it.
And when I accepted that, this peace settled on me and
I started thinking about my parents and my missing sister
and how I was gonna die.
And it was going to destroy my family.
Cuz one of the things that happens when someone is
vanishes in your life, whether they vanish, they're gone.
This is like a death except for there's no community
support, there's no memorial service, there's no obituary
in the paper, there's no recognition, there's
only ongoing mourning.
You can't ever move on to the next stage because
there is no next stage.
So it's this elongation of grief.
And I realized that I was dying and my parents who
had this terrible grief would really lose another
child and it would break them, but I couldn't fix it.
So I began to fall asleep and I would fall asleep
and I collapsed to the rock and I'd stand back
up again and fall asleep and stand back up again.
And this last time I stood up, I had tunnel vision,
which is like a big huge circle all around me.
Blackness, just out, just on the edge of
my peripheral vision.
And it closed in really rapidly.
Like, And I didn't understand what was going on.
I was like, what is, everywhere I looked, there
was this tunnel thing.
And as I looked to the front, it went.
And as it started to close down, I thought I must
be falling asleep again.
But it was unusual.
I never fallen asleep like this before, and
then it went out, boom.
And when it went out, I expected to be
asleep, but I wasn't.
I was like, oh, I why am I not asleep?
How, where, how come I'm not in pain?
Why?
Where'd the mountain go?
What, where am I?
And in front of me, where the mountain had been,
there was this hu opening, and this opening was
this enormous blackness.
This, but it was blackness that was, that I could
see the blackness.
It's like when you're in a room and you close, like
the room I'm in, if I shut off the lights, I've got
a, I'm in a room that has darkening shades, if I
could dark room darkening shades, I shut off the lights
it's pitch black in here.
You can't see the darkness.
But in this darkness, I could see the darkness and
I was confused what is this?
I can, I can't understand what's going on and I
don't have any more pain.
And as I'm wondering about what's going on very far in
the distance, a, like a cosmos away, there is a star appears.
A single star, white star.
And a single white star as it appears, it rushes toward
me across this vast expanse.
And as it comes toward me, it fills my vision.
So it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.
And it covers over the darkness.
And as it comes toward me, I'm like, what is going on here?
Communicates to me directly, but telepathically.
And it says to me, I'm taking you.
And I'm not afraid.
I'm not afraid because I don't partly because I'd
had these other two mystical experiences when I was a
kid, and this angelic being was not fearful to me.
And I was like, oh, I was resistant though.
I was like, I don't know what's going on here.
I don't know where you're taking me, but
I'm not going anywhere.
And so I reached down inside myself and I put up a
shield against being taken.
And so it rushes toward me and it communicates
to me, telepathically, I'm taking you.
And I'm like, I'm not going anywhere.
And I'm, and boom, I'm gone.
I just sucks me right into itself.
I'm carried right inside of it.
And it's like a, an orb of energy.
It's a very large orb of energy and I am, I no
longer have a physical form.
I have a light body and my light body is, and I, and
these are all metaphors.
Okay?
It's not made of photons, it's something other than photons,
more real than photons.
But I have a light body.
It's still shaped and looks like a human form.
And I'm inside this angelic being, this orb that's
communicating to me comfort, welcome, intelligence, power.
I had this inc sense that it was the all powerful,
and I had this sense that it was also reduced for me.
That it was this super positioned thing where
it was a limited form of this infinite, but the
limited form was immensely more powerful than me.
And it carried me back up the direction that it came.
And I could see through it, I could see through
it into the darkness.
But as I'm looking into the darkness, I can also
see me and the angelic orb from the outside.
I have a second vision.
A non located non form, but I can see me
inside of it traveling.
And I'm, and my eye, this eye that sees me inside of
it is paralleling the track and I can see me, but when
I look at the eye outside from the inside, this angelic
being, I don't see it.
So I can see me looking at this eye, but I can't see
the eye and I can see that I'm looking at it and I
know that it can't see me.
So I am bi located.
I am both this light being, but I'm also this observer.
And as we traveled back up this route that it had come
down and was taking me back to, I was then unfolded like
a, an opening of a flower and suddenly it opened,
this angelic being opened up and I came out of it and
maybe it expanded into this much larger space, or maybe
it stayed, I don't really know, stayed outside, I'm
not sure what happened.
But I was suddenly inside of a much larger darkness that
was extended the size of the universe in every direction.
And it was complete darkness, but it was also
illuminated darkness.
And I could see vast, a vast distance in every
direction simultaneously.
Like I had 10,000 eyes.
But there was a point at which my vision only saw darkness,
and it was incredible distance away from me.
But there was an impenetrability of, I was not
capable of seeing into this infinity, but I was enormous.
I was 10,000 times bigger than my human body.
And I was a ball of energy.
I was a consciousness.
That was, that my thinking and my knowledge of myself and
my physical form, which is, a misnomer because I didn't
have any physicality at all.
I was something other than a thing, but all of me was one.
My thinking and my energy, myself, I was one thing.
There wasn't like a hand and a brain and my ideas.
My hand and my brain were all one thing.
And I didn't have any hands, and I didn't have a brain.
And I was thinking faster than I'd ever thought
before in my life.
And I was content.
I was finally me again.
I know myself, this is who I've always been.
How did I not know?
How did I forget?
And as I'm in this form, And as I'm looking in every
direction simultaneously, there was this like a
waterfall of light that opened in the darkness.
The darkness kind of parted, and as it parted,
this light showed through.
But it was this I was the size of a mouse and it was the size
of the largest waterfall on earth, and it was enormous.
And it was not next to me.
It came toward me.
And as it came toward me, I experienced a desire
and a passion and a love for it I can't explain.
It was the most beautiful, seductive energy that
I only wanted it.
And it was several things simultaneously.
It was white light and it was 10 million colors.
And it wasn't like flicking between light and color.
It was light.
White light and 10 million colors all at the same time.
And these fragments made up the white light and the white
light made up the fragments, and they were flowing like
iridescence like fish scales, iridescent and glowing.
And there was a solidity to the surface of it.
And, but it was also translucent.
I could see into its depth and I could transparent as
well, I could see through it to a deeper darkness.
And I wanted it and it wanted me.
And so as it approached and I moved toward it with thought,
I touched it with my being.
And when I touched it with my being, I opened and
as I opened it in flowed, and now I was inflated and
surrounded and all these things happened at once.
And I should add this.
I was in a place of no thingness.
There were no things in this place.
There was nothing that had ever been a thing, was there.
I was not even a thing.
I don't know how to describe it, but, so I'm
in this no thingness that is speaking to me love.
It's expanding inside of me and I'm also in timelessness.
And it wasn't just like being in the, now if you practice
meditation, you get to touch into these moments of the
now repeatedly or repeatedly.
This was the now and it was also time forward and time
passed and time inverted and time upside down.
It was all time beyond the linear time that we talk
about, and it was all now.
There was no past and no future.
It was all in the moment.
And so all these things happened to me
simultaneously, and I've ordered them in a story and
I've given them language.
That's what, so after all this happened, I, my
life changed radically.
I went to I didn't take the professional course I was
gonna take into architecture and graduate school.
I went to divinity school and I studied mysticism in
order to try to figure out what had happened to me.
So I created language to talk about it.
I found language.
So there's, I'm in timelessness and I hear
my name being called, but it's not Peter.
It's the Peter is, as I understand myself now,
is just an expression of this timeline.
I am not this thing.
I knew myself as an eternal entity soul, and I knew as I
was being called into being.
So this voice is inside of me and it surrounds me and
I can't see it, but it fills me and it's calling my name
into being, it's speaking my soul into existence
as it has for eons and eons, always in the now.
And it showed me the origin of my soul self.
It showed me the I was like a singular photon and a
field, an energetic field of photons that were infinitely
deep and wide and broad.
But I was separate from them.
I was outside of it, but I was super positioned with it.
I was connected to it.
I was a portion of this infinite being of light,
and it was always calling me into existence.
And as it's calling me into existence, I understood
the structure of the cosmos because I was
connected to the creator.
I understood that I was being created.
I understood that creator creates everything always
in the now and is unlimited power and intellect
and kindness and love.
And I was, I as this soul this fragment of the fullness
of the light was also the light, but I was somehow
reduction, a reduction of it.
And then I saw my, the, my next soul level down
where I was like a big, huge, long tale of life.
And in through this long tale of life from my
origin always being called into being to the most
recent incarnation, Peter.
They were these little, they were lives that I had
lived, and all of these incarnations that I had lived
were all simultaneous to me.
And I could see that none of them were the fullness of me.
All of them were these tiny little slivers that
they were more, more like injected into my oversoul
as a needle as opposed to being the thing itself.
And as I was shown this, I could see these lives and I
was shown, I asked to be shown to look inside, and I could
see I was inside a human being and I was on a dirt road and
it was hot, and there were palm trees and I was with a
bunch of people and there were people walking on this road,
and it was I dunno a thousand years ago or something.
And I was seeing through this person's eyes, and
they were my eyes because I was inhabiting them.
And then I was pulled out of this person and I was put
into a, some kind of creature.
And I've long thought this creature might have been
an animal of some kind, but I don't know whether
I was even on earth.
I was looking through a different set of eyes,
but not human eyes.
And so everything I saw was shaped differently
with different colors, and I had no idea what I was.
And I was pulled back out again and I could see
that I'd never been any of these, even though I had
lived them and was living them from my point of view.
And as all of this is going on, I'm also simultaneously
experiencing the, this divine examination of my most recent
human life where I can see I'm being called into being.
I still have the same experience of always being
called into being but also I see my human life and
I see that I'm being seen and that there is nothing
that I had done in my as Peter that was unseen.
Every single aspect of me was brilliantly illuminated, no
dark corners to hide anything.
And as I was seeing into my own dark corners, I was went
through a life review and my life review was a hell that
I had created for myself as I had in my life, given away
pain to people intentionally.
And it, it was a chronological experience of being inside
of every single person and every single time that I hurt
every single person being inside of them and seeing
experiencing the pain that I had given them from their
emotional, psychological, chemical point of view.
Simultaneously, I was also inside of my human
self experiencing all of the pain that I gave them
from my point of view.
Why I gave it to them, what I was feeling, how I wanted them
to hurt, and the disproportion between these two things.
My, my weak and human, willful intention to cause suffering.
And the, which was teeny, teeny tiny.
But the suffering I caused each time was ginormous
and that all the pain that I had given away had
karmically attached to me, and that it was my pain.
And I understood that the divine lived in inside
of me and experienced all of this with me.
That's why there were no hidden spots.
That's why you could see everything about me.
And it was true for everyone who's, who suffered the
pain that I gave them.
The divine is inside of them as well, and
so knows everything.
And as I'm going through this I realized that the
divine, cuz I had seen the infinity, I had seen the
edge of infinity, the edge of the power of the divine.
The almighty non-gendered, no religion immensity
beyond human capacity for understanding.
Immeasurably pure, immeasurably unlimited.
And I could see my own limitation, my own impurity
was showing me my human self.
And I was ashamed not for what I had done, because it
also showed me that I was only doing what humans do.
This is how humans are.
It's, you don't blame the wolf for killing the lamb
when it's in the nature of the wolf to kill the lamb.
It's just what it is.
And human beings, it showed me all humanity.
And that human beings were just this way.
It's the way that we're designed and therefore
there's this radical equality among all human beings.
Because I could see my own limitation in comparison
to the unlimited.
In my shame, I felt shame, and I felt shame and guilt,
not because of what I had done, which was terrible,
not terrible things, but I had hurt people.
But the real pain came in the comparison to the
purity and the unlimited nature of the divine.
So simultaneously, I saw the radical equality of all
humanity and our brokenness toward each other, which
in my own life now is translated into don't judge
least you be judged to put it in Christian language.
It's, I see the other human as broken as me,
no matter who they are.
And even if they're enemies in my life, and I, I've
lived the professional life.
You live a long enough, people don't like you no
matter what you do, cuz you cross 'em the wrong way.
And I even in the people who were out to get me, I could
only see light inside them.
Doesn't mean I, I liked what they were doing
to me, but I couldn't help but see the light.
So I see this radical equality of all of humanity.
I saw this my own limitation, and I went into this hell
of, I felt this separation from the unlimited.
But meanwhile, this voice was saying to me
the entire time welcome.
I love you.
I have always loved you.
I've always known you.
I have always loved you as you are, even as you
did all of these things.
I love you as you are.
And as I began to listen with the ear of my heart through
the lens of love, all the love I had given away in
my life, all the love that I had accepted in my life,
all was with me as well.
And as I listened with my heart or the ear of my heart
and heard this voice of mercy and forgiveness, I was, I
turned toward it because it's it was like being, A crab on
the beach as a hundred foot tidal wave sucks you right
out and crashes down on you.
There was no like, do I swim and survive?
Or do I just, it's just gonna crash over me.
The light was so powerful.
The love was so powerful that it crashed over me and
I had no resistance to it.
Not that I wanted resistance to it, but the, but it was so
overwhelmingly powerful that I didn't deserve its love.
And it came anyway.
And as I turned toward it, and I made this I don't
wanna say choice to turn toward it because it was, I
couldn't not turn toward it.
It was too powerful, like that tidal wave.
As I turned toward it, I was inflated.
And as I suddenly I turned toward it.
And now my soul self inflates and inflates and
inflates, and I get bigger and bigger and bigger.
And I'm infilled with beauty and love and truth, bliss
joy, adoration, understanding, compassion, knowledge wisdom,
mathematical comprehension, just brilliant awe and wonder.
And I was expanded to the point of almost being folded
back into the infinity itself.
I came to this very edge where, one more drop of
it and I would have become awareness itself again.
So I entered into this state of union where I saw the
truth of myself as a soul, and then I was deflated and I
was somehow able to remember my recent life as Peter and
I could see my parents, and I asked about their suffering.
I said, cuz this voice is saying, come home.
Come home.
It's time for you to come home.
You've seen all this stuff.
Now come home to me.
And I said what about my folks?
They're.
They're gonna suffer.
And as I had this thought, I was swept across heaven.
Now, heaven is not this from my, in my experience,
it's this no thingness.
And it's, it is not separate from this voice that's right
next to me and inside of me.
It is all of this, the divine is all of this.
And it sweeps me across itself and it pokes my head
out, it pokes my head out through the edge of heaven.
Into our universe.
And, but I don't have a head, remember I'm a non thing.
And so I have a, I have an awareness outside of heaven
while 99% of me is still embodied inside the divine.
But I can see I'm being shown the universe.
And as I'm being shown the universe, I see all
of our universe, I see all of the galaxies up
and down and just billions of galaxies and billions
of stars and the space between them and my vision
is directed to the origin.
And so I'm looking at the origin of our universe
and the origin of our universe is this Light that
is pervading everything.
So as this, as there's a darkness that I can't see
into, but there's this light that's coming out of
it and creating all matter.
And as it creates all this matter, all of these galaxies,
it is woven through all of it.
There is light.
I can see light inside all of it.
The light is emanating from the darkness, and there's
no part of the universe that is not made of this.
It's not just stars and planets.
It's all of the material that's in between.
It's the dark matter and the dark energy.
All of it's made of this divine light.
And as it's showing me this, it's also showing the other
universes universe, after universe, it's like always
unfolding, even though as it's powering our universe,
it's unfolding more and more.
And it's all of it is all of these universes
and our universes are just filled with the love
that is incomprehensible.
It's the whole thing is just all this love that
creates all of it and all of this love that creates
all of these universes is aimed right at me.
It's like all of this love is aimed right at me.
And I am the most beloved.
And as I am the most beloved, it says to me, I and the
way that I love you now, I have always loved you
all is, was and shall be well, because of my love.
And my love is as large as the universe.
Larger than the universe is.
And I am.
I am in bliss.
And as this is, as I'm experiencing this, my vision
is shifted back to earth.
And I, I down to our galaxy, down our solar system, and I
can see earth like a hologram.
And I see 7 billion people on it all at once.
Not like A to B, to C to D.
I can see.
Everything all at once and inside of every, and
it's dark, it's live time.
So it's night on half the planet and daylight
on half the planet.
And there are ships at sea and airplanes in the sky,
babies being born, and wars being waged and bank
robberies and kind acts.
Every I can see everything.
And inside of every single human being, there is this
golden fleck of light.
And this golden fleck of light is inside of every, the
heart of every human being.
And nobody can see it because it's all, the whole planet is
covered with this dense fog.
And I can see it, I see this that everybody
is as beloved as me.
So this experience of this belovedness that I was the
most beloved in the whole universe is the truth of
every single person that all of us are the most beloved.
And I see this as clearly as as I understand my own
self and as I see this, I zoom into one person.
I see this ship in the middle of the Atlantic, and
I zoom inside, and I zoom down and I'm inside this
ship, and I'm on this deck.
I'm inside the ship and there's a guy there, and
this guy, I can see this light inside his chest.
He didn't see me.
He's just doing, he is dressed in khaki clothes and doing
his job, whatever it was.
But I see inside him the very thing that's inside of me.
And then I'm pulled back out again.
And as I'm pulled back out again I understand that all
is well and has been well, and will be well, and that because
of this immense love, nothing and no one is ever lost.
There's no lost.
The divine is all there is, and the divine
does not lose itself.
And so I say, No.
And so it shows me my parents' faces and suddenly I see my
mom and my dad and all of the suffering that they had
endured up until that day.
And I, it's not like I see their pain and then I see
these two parallel lives.
I see mom and dad on this track, and mom and
dad on this track and on track a I am not there.
I die.
And I see immense brokenness.
Like the suffering they have now is 10 times worse.
And then I see this other track, track B and I go back
and I see they still have immense suffering, but not
10 times the amount had I died and they'd lost a son.
And then I see their deaths.
Not how they die, but what happens to them after they
die and after they die?
They're just like me, most beloved.
No pain, all healing, all wholeness, all
wellness of all repaired.
And the voice says, no matter what you choose, alls well.
Pick.
And so I think to myself, timelessness, I'm beloved.
I say if I go back to help them not suffer this loss of
a second child, can I come back here to this bliss of
paradise and the voice says, yes, you can come back here.
It's time for you to come home, but if you
choose, you can go back and come back here.
I say, I choose to live my life, and it says,
you want live your life and flicks me out.
And off I go.
And now I'm once again encased inside this angelic being.
And I'm getting denser and denser.
I'm being flown out of heaven.
And as I'm being flown out of heaven, I see
this beam of white light emitting from heaven.
This big, huge, like big, huge laser beam of white light.
And it's next to me and I'm above it, and I'm being
flown and in front of me it goes into this space.
And then there are a million doors, and it's in the center
of these million doors.
And all of these million doors are darker and darker
until they get to the edge.
But brilliantly illuminated the doors closer to the
middle and all of them are live, they're all timelines.
And the voice says to me, choose light.
But choose.
And I have to choose which door I'm going to go in
to get back to this body.
And I choose light, but I choose self too.
I think to myself, I know that I'm being sent back as
a messenger, and I choose how can I be a messenger
of light unless I have flaw, unless I'm a human
being like everybody else.
I, and I wanna be creative and I wanna be a little bit of a
bohemian, and I wanna be this and that and the other thing.
And I, and so I choose a door in an instant with
these very rapid thoughts.
And it's close to the light, but it's not
in the direct beam.
It's off to the side.
And as soon as I make this choice, I'm in that door.
And as I'm in this door and I'm traveling down
this tunnel, still, inside this angelic
being, there are a million doors inside this tunnel.
And every one of these doors is a choice to make.
I can see all the choices and all of these doors lead
to all the other tunnels.
And I could see all of that.
And then I get to the end of my tunnel and there's my
body dangling on the cliff.
And I'm harnessed in and there's the body
only, it's not me.
I don't know.
There's some body there.
And it's harnessed in and it's hanging off the cliff.
And then I am taken out of this angelic being and
stabbed into the center of the, my, this body's chest
and screwed in painfully.
And it opens and I'm poured shoved, stuffed inside, and
now I'm inside this physical form and there's a, there's
this little opening and I can see out this little opening
that's in the heart of this.
And I can see the white light going back into heaven.
I can see the darkness, I can see the angelic being,
and then it just closes.
And now ah, I'm imprisoned.
I'm in I'm imprisoned and I'm exiled.
And my, the brain, that's cuz that's not me.
The brain comes back online whirrs and a boots up again.
And all this flash of pain, this physical pain
that I didn't understand was like, what is this
painful thing that I don't understand anymore?
Cuz when I was dead, pain was forgotten.
It was like, didn't exist.
And now I'm in this painful body and I'm beginning
to hear things and sound comes back and they're
screaming and yelling and my resolves into language.
And I hear, don't die.
And this thing is jostling and I opened the eyes and there's
this face looking at me screaming and yelling at me.
Don't die.
And he's sees my eyes are open.
You're not dead.
You, I thought you were dead.
You were dead.
You, I thought you were dead.
And he pulls me up and he's yelling at me
and screaming at me.
And I don't know, I don't know who I am.
I don't know where I am.
I don't know who he is.
I'm completely lost.
And as he's talking to me, the brain sort of warms up.
And I was like, oh yeah.
I'm ice climbing and this is Tim.
And I'm Peter, and what is going, who am I?
What is this thing I'm stuck inside of?
And now I'm two people.
I'm the one that he the human being, but
I am this other entity occupying the human being.
And at some point he's pull the rope.
And I pull the rope and it comes free.
And we descend and we self-treat in the tent for
hypothermia and frostbite.
And the story goes on from there.
I, it was, We got, we spent a little time in jail.
We totaled the car.
All of this on the way home, just all terrible
things happened.
I ended up with a stutter and I was a new person.
I was not the same person I was before, and I've never
been since I came back.
I feel like I an alien inhabiting a life form.
I was mostly in heaven and I was looking out these
eyes and I was living inside this crude machine that I
was imprisoned inside of a and everything from that
point on, I was an entirely an am different person.
That's an astounding story, Peter.
So how long was it before you felt like you were able
to, were you willing to share that story with other
people, say to your friend Tim or any of your family?
I never told him.
I never told anybody.
I didn't tell.
I told my wife on the morning after we got married.
But I kept it a secret for 20 years.
I didn't tell anybody because I knew enough that
I knew enough that I didn't want to be mistaken to be
insane, and so I masked, I changed my career.
My sister was in graduate school in architecture
at this point.
My dad had a firm outside of Boston and
was a pretty fancy guy.
And I was gonna be an architect my whole life.
My whole life.
I was gonna be an architect.
I was pushing a pencil of the drafting board and why are
you being an English major?
How's I gonna help you?
I was like, I'll write about it.
And doing, drafting for my dad and stuff my whole life
and working in construction swinging a hammer all the
summers, cutting a board and building houses so
I could learn from the inside out, all that stuff.
And then suddenly I came home and I'm not doing that.
And so I went to divinity school cuz I
didn't know what to do.
I needed to study mysticism and I'd had enough cuz
I was an English major.
I'd read about he, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph
Waldo Emerson, the Romantics and the Transcendentalists
who were spiritual people.
And so I knew about the Upanishads and the Vedas
through those folks.
And so I decided that I had to, I needed to find a
peer group, but I needed to do it in such a way that I
didn't, that nobody would know that I was doing this.
So I went to Divinity, I went to Yale Divinity School
and I studied mysticism and I learned contemplation
techniques and came across Paramhansa Yogananda, and
the Yoga Sutras by Patanjali.
And I incorporated Kriya yoga into my meditation life.
And I practiced Hatha yoga and Kriya yoga in combination.
And I did that on the down low.
People knew that I was practicing cuz they could
see me standing on my head, but they didn't
know what I was doing with my breath and my mind.
I, I chose to, I was in such despair.
I was in darkness living in this hell hole of beauty.
There's a lot of beauty here and a lot of good
things, but it's like hell compared to heaven and
full of suffering and pain.
And I, all I wanted to do was go back.
And I discovered in my studies that there's a long history
of mystics in the world and some of them were high masters
and they had techniques of breath and mental focus
that reconnected them.
Or connected them to the divine presence.
And so I went in pursuit of that and I kept that a secret.
So I didn't tell, I didn't tell anybody.
I hid inside the church.
I got talked into becoming a minister.
I was gonna go for a graduate degree and study
mysticism for a doctorate.
But I, the dean of students who let me do this three year
independent study at Yale as my mentor who I also didn't
tell anything about what was going really going on.
She talked to me into becoming a minister and
I decided that I could hide inside the church.
And so I hid inside the church for 20 years and
continued my studies.
I read all of the Nag Hammadi texts and all
the Dead Sea Scrolls.
And I did a lot of research and I dove
deep into my practice.
I even had in my church contract that they had to
let me meditate and do yoga.
And they're like, why are you doing this?
I'm like, I don't, you don't let me do this,
I can't do the job.
And and I did a lot of social services
helped a lot of people.
But it wasn't, there was this huge embezzlement
in this church that I was serving, and it was after
that embezzlement, after they tried to destroy my
career, cuz we, we were finding out the truth and
there people went to prison.
So they tried to ruin me.
But when it was all over, I finally decided it was time
to tell the congregation and the town why I was able to
put up with all the terrible things they did to me for
all the years that they did because they the deacons
asked me, he must have had a lot of faith to put up with
all that we put you through.
I was like, I don't have any faith at all.
I'm not a believer, I don't believe in any of this stuff.
I know what the divine is.
I know that I am beloved.
I know it is my beloved.
And so that's where my strength comes from.
So it, even though I kept it a secret and didn't
tell anybody, it was pretty obvious to everybody that I
was some kind of eccentric.
It's like I was making choices and doing things that other
people just wouldn't do.
Certainly not clergy people.
Yeah, that's pretty common.
There's a lot of people that one, once they've had a near
death experience, they know what they know, and they
know that it's gonna be odd or eccentric to many people
and they just don't care.
That's really the only way you can deal with it, I think.
So I assume that you told your wife first and then
it was the congregation?
I told my wife the day after we got married when
I was still in divinity school, and then I told the
congregation 18 years later,
and then I didn't tell anybody in between.
I told one guy two, I told my best friend and I told this
guy who saw this thing happen.
One of those after effects that I had to explain to him
because it was too crazy.
And he is what was that like?
Okay, I gotta tell you what happened.
So I told the congregation after 20 years, and
then after I did this in my town that week, six
people came up to me.
The woman who owns the fish fry, the woman who is the
physical therapist, the the woman who was a nurse and all
three or four other people in there, they whispered to me.
We heard what happened to you.
That happened to me too.
Don't tell anybody.
And because there was all this shame.
This was back in 20 years ago now, when near, near-death
experience was still unknown.
And I was now out of the closet with it.
And which freed me because I didn't have
to hide it anymore.
I was walking around masking all the time.
Pretending, pretending I was a believer.
That was the whole, that was like the fundamental
thing of the job.
You gotta be a minister, you gotta be a believer,
but I'm not a believer.
I was like, okay, so I don't have to hide that anymore.
And then I got recruited into television and I
started working on local broadcast on two stations
all across our state and part of another state.
And I started working nationally out
in New York City.
And those people able, the TV people I was working
with there found out about my NDE cuz I got drunk
one night and I told them.
We were all out at this party and we're all drinking.
I'm like then this thing happened to me.
I was like, oh God.
And they talked me into writing a book and
becoming public about it.
And that was that.
I don't have one of the after effects of my
near-death experience is I'm pretty fearless about
I know where I'm from.
I know where I'm going.
You can't kill me.
I've been held at gunpoint.
I've been shot at, there's been, I've been involved
in arsons and murders and all sorts of crazy
stuff in my ministry.
That's what I mean when eccentric stuff.
I was like doing things that I didn't mean to do, but I
found myself in the middle of.
And, but coming out of the closet back in 2015 risking
ridicule and my career.
I I was nervous about that, but I did it anyway
cuz every, because I can't help but trust.
I can't all, it's trust it with a capital T.
All I do is trust this divine, everything that I
do, strip away myself, trust the Divine's presence, try to
stand in the crystal stream, try to get out of the way and
clear out the boulders that are in the way of the flow
and let it be what it is so that I can be with it as I am.
And so I came out and then I, so I'm in the hospital bed.
I had, in 2015, I was running 5K every day.
And one day, yeah, I don't feel so great.
The next day I go to yoga class and I'm in
yoga class and I was like, I don't feel good.
And I have a heart attack.
I have a heart attack in class.
I die in the ambulance on the way and I choose
to come back again this time for my granddaughter.
And so I was in and I had a lot of damage.
I live very far.
I live in a rural area and I live an hour and a half away
from the catheterization lab.
And by the time I even left the local urgent care center
to get in the ambulance to go to the catheterization
lab, my golden hour was up.
And then you only get one hour before damage
starts setting in.
And so the doc had told my family that I was
gonna die on the way.
There was nothing to be done.
And I did.
And I chose to come back for my granddaughter this time and
then I'm in the hospital bed.
And the next day, I, a bunch of my friends are there and
my wife and my kids, and I was like, I died yesterday.
And and then the TV station was purchased
by another corporation and my job got canceled.
They told me, you got a year and your job, you're done.
Which we, and the show that I was on.
Okay.
The other thing about this show is 91 years old when it
ended, I was the fifth guy and it started on AM radio and it
was a, it was an institution in northern New England where
I live, beloved institution.
And I had two minutes every morning on these two stations
to tell an inspirational story of love and hope, which I
did thousands of times, news stories and then my job was,
they're like, you, it's over.
And now I'm a new person again.
Every time I have a mystical experience, a near-death
experience, I become back a different person more
intensely, my true self.
And so after this second NDE that had been, I don't
know, pre prepped, I was prepped for it by a series
of previous mystical experiences in between
these two major things.
And I decided I was finally all in and I
was just gonna spend the rest of my life working.
I'd already been spending my life working for God, for the
Allah, for the, for Brahman, whatever you wanna call it.
But now I'm gonna do it in a very public way.
And so that's what I'm doing.
I'm trying my best to get other near-death experiencers
to have the courage to tell somebody or to talk about
it in public because there are tens of millions of us
because after cardiac care came online in the 1960s and
they started resuscitating people and urgent care
centers and hospitals and surgeries and ambulances,
and now at corporations they've got paddles at
corporations and in schools.
There are tens of millions of Americans who are estimated
400 million near-death experiences worldwide.
And we are a phenomenon and we're quiet cuz we, nobody
wants to tell anybody.
Nobody wants to be, it's crazy man.
This guy, he's he's, he sounds like a kook.
Which is why I kept it a secret because I come from
a very educated, highly intellectual family that is..
they were faithful people, they all went to church,
but none of them, they, knew that it was crazy talk.
So I kept my mouth shut until I couldn't
keep it shut anymore.
And now there are so many books and movies and
podcasts and articles.
I haven't seen the latest Marvel movie with guardians
of the Galaxy Volume Three.
But apparently Rocket has a near-death experience.
I'm gonna see this movie cuz apparently this raccoon
character, he has an NDE.
I probably just ruined that for all of you
but but it's becoming, I wanna see it talked about
in the public square, which is why I'm doing
it in the public square.
Cuz the more of us that talk about it, the more
it gets normalized.
And the more it gets normalized, the more we can
talk about other people's mystical experiences.
Cuz they're not just NDE'ers.
All sorts of people have mystical experiences.
They have visitations from the dead that
Jesus shows up for them.
Buddha shows up.
There's a divine being.
They have a transformative, mystical experience
that sets them on a new course in their life.
And they keep it a secret because it's a shameful thing.
Cause it's not rational.
And I want it to be spoken of in the public square
because I think that we have an opportunity for the
first time in the history of the planet to nudge
humanity in a new way.
There have always been near-death experiencers.
There's, the Bible has a at least 5, 7, 8 of them
if you count Jesus maybe even nine if you count him.
All people being raised from the dead.
There have always been near-death experiencers,
but now we're hundreds of millions of us.
We have an opportunity to be influential.
And the two words, there was this study that was a whole
series of essays were written two years ago for a million
dollars in prizes hosted by the Bigelow Institute
for Consciousness Studies.
And the grand prize winner was a, like a
half a million dollars.
But in one of these essays that I read the research
project showed that 70% of all near-death experiencers
favor two words about their experience, love and light.
70%, no matter who they are.
And this is a phenomenal non sectarian change.
It doesn't have anything to do with religion.
It has to do with the transformation of individual
human hearts expressed in their own lives.
And in if there are 400 million of us in 400 million
different ways, cuz there are 400 million different DNA
packages, by the way, we share 99% of our dna by the way.
So we're, we are so much more alike than we are separate.
This 1% is what separates us.
But there are 400 million near death experiencers,
all with their individual experience, all knowing at the
very least that consciousness doesn't arise in the body,
that it inhabits the body.
When I first started this channel, I just,
when I saw one of these interviews, I thought, Oh
that's what I need to do.
I didn't really have an inkling of why.
I just knew that's what I needed to do.
And it's interesting, every conversation I have and yours
is no exception, is that I get a bit more of a inkling
of why it's so important.
I think it's really important that people get to, at the
very least, tell their story.
And it becomes just part of our sort of way of being.
I had a orthopedic surgeon who I interviewed last
week, and he was saying how they're now starting
to introduce the near-death experiences and what happens
to people in nursing courses.
Like in the more advanced nursing courses after
they've done their usual medical school, they can go
and do an add-on and it's to teach people about near
death experiences because it's becoming so prevalent.
Oh wow.
That's good news.
Yeah.
Which is a step in the right direction.
Yeah, because in the old days they'd be like, oh
honey, that's not real.
Yeah.
That was just, there was an hallucination.
It was your brain.
I think when Eben Alexander, the neuroscientist, when he
wrote his book, it became much harder to argue that this is
an hallucination because your brain is not functioning.
How can you have memories if it's not functioning?
It can't be that the seat of the consciousness
is in the brain.
It has to be something outside of that.
I wanted to ask.
I know we've been, we've covered a lot of ground.
It's been amazing.
The mystical experiences that you had when you were small,
if you could just touch on those what they were about.
Unexpected.
That's the first thing.
And undeserved.
I didn't do anything.
It just happened.
And so I was, the first one, I was five years old and I
was waiting for my sisters to come back from school.
And I was a morning kindergarten class and it
was half day kindergarten.
I climbed a little tiny maple tree in my side yard waiting
for my sisters gonna surprise them when I got off the bus.
And it was a, an autumn day.
And all the leaves were these two colors.
It was a maple tree.
I dunno if you have sugar maple trees down in
Australia, but they're, they get very colorful
in the autumn, but before they turn color, they're
these vibrant two-tone.
The top of the leaf is one color, bottom of the
leaf is another color.
And the wind was blowing and it was flipping these leaves.
And I got into this mesmeric state as I
watched at five years old.
And as I'm in this mesmeric state, just watching
these flipping leaves, I, this roar happened.
And behind me this very loud when I was a kid I
talked about it as like a whole bunch of trumpets
blowing behind me bra.
And as it blew behind me, it entered into me
and it grabbed me and it pulled me out of myself.
And I was stretched up.
I was inside the same angelic being, and I was pulled up out
of myself and I could see my human self and I was being,
and I was way above it, right?
Right through the atmosphere.
And then I was inside of this angelic being, and I
could still down this very tiny, thin cord, see my human
self sitting in the tree a million miles away from me.
But I was inside of this transparent orb
in this great darkness.
And inside this transparent orb, I had a body of light,
and I'm in this body of light, and there is like
a countertop appears a counter in front of me.
And then the, it's a barrier of some kind.
And the orb opens up and in pours a portion of the divine.
And this portion of the divine is morphing, changing
through all of these different shapes at an
incredible rate of speed.
Just change.
But consistently saying to me, you have a deal with
me and showing me itself.
And then it pulled me out of this orb and into the
darkness, and in the darkness I saw a glimpse of infinity
of the size of the divine.
I saw myself as pre-existent, and then I was back inside
the orb and I and it said to me, you have a.
This is me, Peter, making language for what happened.
You have a contract with me.
You work for me, you work for me.
You're mine.
You work for me.
And I was like, oh yeah.
I work for you.
I had that deal.
I'm, that's our deal.
Our deal is in this lifetime I work for you.
And then I'm back in my body again.
And I'm like, what?
And I jump out of the tree and I run in the house.
And cuz I'm a five-year-old kid going to Greek,
Greek school and the Catholic church.
And I run in the house and I say to my mom,
I'm gonna be a priest.
God talked to me.
And I got in trouble cuz I was not supposed to be in the
house cuz my, the baby was sleeping and I got kicked out
and I had to dust the house and all this kind of stuff.
It was punishment And cuz I broke the rules and I realized
that I should keep my mouth shut about this kind of thing.
And I didn't understand it.
At all.
But I, my mom and my dad would tell me that I
was I was a boy, right?
I did boy things picked on my sisters and,
hurt my brother and all this kind of boy stuff.
And, but my mom and my dad said that I was also had a
lot of compassion that they, the other kids didn't have.
And I think it came from this.
And then about a year later when I was six the day that my
dog, my dad accidentally ran over my dog and killed him.
And I saw it happen.
And it was tragic and it was emotionally, and my parents
had gotten me this dog because the, it's a long story.
I had this special dog.
And so that night as I cried myself to sleep, I
heard my name being called and I sat up in bed and I
hear this voice that it's not my mom and my dad, it's
not my sister, it's not my grandparents I don't know who
it is, but I know the voice and it's filled with love.
It's just calling my name.
And so I sit up in bed.
And it's calling my name and calling my name.
It's calling come to me, and I look down and my
body is still asleep.
Curled up on the bed with the pillow.
And I look down, I'm like what's that?
Is that me and I'm me And I looked down at my feet
and my body, and I've got this ethereal body again.
And I can see in the room and my baby brother has
got its crib in the room.
And it's dark in the room.
But the whole thing is like a sepia tone.
Everything is this copper illumination.
But if the illumination is not coming from the
outside, it's coming from inside of everything.
And it says, come to me.
Come to me.
And so I stand up and my feet aren't on the floor.
I'm floating above the floor.
Come to me, and I get to the door.
And it's most, it's like love.
I hear this love and it's voiced love.
And the door's kind of shut.
And it says, come to me.
Come to me.
And I reach for the knob and my hand goes through
the knob and it says, nah, just walk through the door.
You don't need a knob.
And so I walked through the door and I passed
through the solid door.
And at the top of the stairs, I looked down the stairs.
And there was a landing, which, the stairs came down
and angled at a 90 degree.
And in the la 90 degree angle there was a little elephant
that filled the landing.
And this elephant was all dressed in like sparkly
Indian elephant clothes.
And, but I, I was a Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic
Irish kid from Boston.
I didn't know nothing about Hinduism.
And there's this elephant and it's eyes are black and
it's speaking to me inside my head and it's telepathically
communicating to me, and it's waving me down with its
trunk and I float, come to me, and I go down and I'm
an eye to eye with this.
I'm like a six year old kid.
And my eyes are at the same level and I'm looking in one
of the eyes and I shrink and I fly inside the eye, pass
through and into the eye, and I'm into this darkness again.
But this darkness is, it's filled with wisdom.
And knowledge and comfort and I see a glimpse of myself
and infinity, and then I'm pulled back out again and
I'm in front of the little elephant and it says, go down
the stairs and go outside.
And I'm like, I can't do that.
My mom and dad told me never go outside at night.
It's no go.
And so it motions with its trunk down the stairs.
And so I float down the stairs and I go through the
front door and out into the road and it's upstairs in
the hallway still, on the stairs, but it's also with me.
So it's in two places at once and it's speaking to
me and it's says, lookup.
Look up.
So look up and there's this star filled sky and
this and as I look at all these stars, suddenly I
shoot toward them all.
And as I shoot toward them all, they all open up and
I see infinity inside them.
I see the origin of them all, and it's frightens me.
It's too much for me.
It's too big and too overwhelming.
And as soon as this happens, I am back in my
body again in the bed.
And I sit up and it's dark in the room and I'm, and I
spent, I don't know, an hour searching the house, even in
the dark, scary spider ridden cellar where I never, ever go.
I even went looking down there for the elephant.
And I, it wasn't until I was much, much older
after my first NDE.
That looking back over my shoulder of my life, I saw
this pattern cuz because there was another one that happened.
There were two that happened the year before I died.
I haven't even told you about.
I, back when I was backpacking on the Appalachian
Trail the year before.
As I look back from my NDE, I see this pattern
that set me up for this life that I'm living.
And I got to choose.
I get to choose now.
I have decision making capacity now, but I
made my real choice before I was even born.
And I've been living with that ever since.
And I've had to live into that because I've not always
enjoyed it and I've not always liked the choices that I made
not have been an easy thing.
Peter how can people learn more about the
work that you do?
And if they wanted to get in touch or ask a
question, what's the best way to do that?
I'm at peterpanagore.love.
You can email me peter pango.love.
I specialize in helping people who've had mystical
experiences integrate.
People who've had near-death experiences integrate,
help them understand what they've gone through.
I've had a lot of mystical experiences.
I didn't make them happen.
They happened to me.
And there's been a lot of them.
And so I have lots of unusual experience that
people have found helpful.
I run a YouTube channel: Not Church.
Not Church is about mysticism, and I run a global group on
Sundays, on Zoom for people from all over the world,
including Australia where we talk about the things that you
can't talk about in public, about your mystical life.
Excellent.
And do you have any last message for people before
we wrap the interview up?
Sure.
All you need is love.
That's all you need.
That's it.
All has been well and will be well, and you'll
find out for yourself the moment that you die.
It's not darkness.
It's light.
Trust it.
Peter, thank you for being the guest of my show.
I really appreciate you taking the time today.
Thanks Rod.