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April 9, 2023 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:48:52
Edition 716 - Peter Panagore - NDE Experiencer

Peter Panagore in Maine, USA says he "died" in a terrifying mountaineering accident four decades ago in a frozen and inhospitable area of Canada... His multi-dimensional and astonishing Near Death Experience account is detailed and unique... Now he helps people worldwide understand their NDEs...

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet.
By webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, I'm here to tell you, before we get into the meat of our conversation for this edition of The Unexplained, that I am looking at the moment at a crystal blue perfect sky.
I can't believe I'm saying these words, but it looks like spring and a little touch of summer have come all at once.
We've had, here in the United Kingdom, if you're not in the UK, and even if you are, we've had a pretty lousy winter.
Hasn't been freezing cold, although at times it has been damn cold, but it's been grey and it's been damp, and it's been really hard living in the apartment that I live in, dealing with the damp and the cold over this winter.
So to see a day like this one brings joy to my heart.
And, you know, when I finish recording these words and when I finish the conversation that we're about to do, I'm going to get out there and enjoy the remaining hour or two of that sunshine.
You know, I live for days like this.
I hope that I've conveyed how blue that sky is.
One of the things I love about America, North America, is that you have these beautiful blue skies at times, depending on where you live.
And we've got one of those today.
I cannot see a cloud anywhere.
And it's great news.
My thanks to my webmaster, Adam, for his hard work on the website and getting the shows out to you.
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So I just, you know, I need you to know that.
If you've made a donation to The Unexplained recently, thank you very much indeed for that.
Special edition of The Unexplained Now.
This is a conversation that is going to encompass an awful lot of things, principally a near-death experience and the circumstances leading up to it and what transpired after it.
And it's a conversation that I'm going to let run.
So I would imagine that you're about to hear something a little longer than we normally do here on The Unexplained.
And for this week, it's going to be the only podcast that I release.
I'm not going to release another podcast.
This is going to be it.
And you may well hear this over the Easter holiday or just after it.
So if you're about to enjoy Easter, if you're enjoying Easter, I hope it's good for you.
And if you're looking back at Easter when you hear this, I hope that it was nice.
And I hope the weather, wherever you were, was kind to you, if you're concerned about those things.
The man I'm going to speak to and with is a man called Peter Panagore.
He's in Maine, USA, a very beautiful part of the US that I was lucky enough to know for part of my life and lucky enough to visit.
He's a man of faith, a man of spirituality.
But all of this was brought into focus by a climbing, mountaineering accident that meant for a period that he effectively died.
And what happened to him is much more than your, I hasten to use the phrase, run of the mill near-death experience.
It was much more than that.
This one was all singing, all dancing, and incredibly impactful.
I'm going to let you make your decision as to the bona fides of it.
You know, there will be people who believe this really did happen and people who will think that maybe it was hallucinatory.
I'm inclined to think that something very different and special happened here.
But there again, what do I know?
I have to be the ringmaster in all of these things.
But you judge and you let me know.
Peter Panagore, the guest on this edition of The Unexplained.
If you want to get in touch with me, you can go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
And when you get in touch, please tell me by email who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Okay, I've said more than enough now.
So let's cross to Maine in the United States on this beautiful, beautiful day in London and speak with Peter Panagore.
Peter, thank you very much for coming on my show.
Oh, Howard, thanks for having me.
Talk to me about you then, Peter.
How you would describe yourself if somebody met you, I don't know, in Starbucks in Maine where you live, and you've never met them before and you had to describe what you do.
So talk to me about where you are and how you would like to be described.
As a black coffee drinker.
That's called Make Two of Us.
All right.
So I describe myself as a full-time writer, author, public speaker, and I work in communications and media.
That's my upon meeting spiel.
As I get to know someone a little bit more, they might say, if I was in Portland, Maine, don't I know you from TV?
And I would say, yes, I used to host the morning daily devotions show on Maine news, during the Maine news.
And they'd say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
What are you doing now?
I say, well, these days I'm running a YouTube channel and turning my second book into a movie and working, trying to teach mysticism and Korea yoga and breath as a result of my near-death experience, my first one.
Now, you know that a lot of people say that they had a near-death experience and it changed their lives.
And they all seem to have common threads, but they're all at the same moment in time different.
You know, we've got a couple of newspapers here.
And I'm very surprised if there isn't at least one NDE experience story in those newspapers every week.
You know, I always find them and some of them I will retell to my listeners and some of them I won't because we've probably heard the story before, whatever it is.
Why do you think stories, tales, descriptions of NDEs' near-death experiences are so common these days, are so much in the media.
I can't remember them being so when I was a kid.
Well, because when you were a kid, when I was a kid, medical technology Advanced to the stage where it began bringing people back from the dead.
And previous to the 1960s, where cardiac care came on, when cardiac care came online and eventually then spread globally and improved through the previous 50 or 60 years here, that's because there weren't as many of us.
There's always been near-death experiences.
It runs through the literature going back in every culture around the world.
The Bible has near-death experiences in it.
Lazarus for one.
Jesus for another.
But all over the world, it's always been a thing that's been happening.
But then science began to raise the dead and raise us by the tens of millions.
And so we're in every country and every culture.
And then in the, maybe it was the early 80s, the late 70s, this fellow named Raymond Moody came out with a book that brought near-death experience into the forefront.
He actually named Near-Death Experience.
And from that point on, it took a couple of decades for books to start coming out.
And so in the maybe in the 90s, a couple of books came out.
And then other, then my book came out in 2015 and became a subject that was noticed by the media because we were all speaking up.
Many of us are speaking up.
So I'm part of the first wave where I'm trying to encourage other Near Death Experiencers to voice that they are here.
We are here.
Like Horton, here's a who.
We are here.
We are here.
And the strength and numbers.
Look, my own mother, and I have told the story too many times probably for my listeners' liking, but I'll tell it briefly to you because you won't have heard it.
But my own mother was 10 years of age in an era when we didn't quite have the medical advances that we have now.
She was very seriously ill.
She had pneumonia, which in those days there weren't the treatments for it, and kids died.
And she went through a crisis.
And the doctor told my grandmother, she will face a crisis tonight, and she'll either come through it or not.
Be prepared for whatever happens.
My mother went to a beautiful place with colors that she'd never seen, beauty of an unimaginable kind, and she wanted to remain.
This will be a familiar story.
And she was told that she had to come back, and she said she didn't want to come back.
But of course, she did come back, and that's why you and I are having this conversation.
So we told that story at her funeral in 2006, and I will treasure that story, you know, until it's my time to go.
And I am absolutely convinced that she had an encounter with something that is beyond here, that it was not, it wasn't a hallucination.
She was 10 years of age.
You know, she hadn't reached that level of sophistication in thinking because she was a child.
She encountered something that could not be explained and innocently recounted it.
And the story was consistent all through her life.
So these things happen, I am sure, Peter.
They do.
And the change that happens as a result in the lives of the people like your mother is noticeable by everybody else.
It's not just that they change.
It's that people see them change and their behaviors change.
People who encounter the great beauty or the light beyond, whatever language you want to apply to it, they can't prove that this happened to them, but their lives and their reactions, the way they live is the evidence.
And the fact that my mother did live.
So, you know, this was years before the popular press began to run these stories.
Now, yours is a very deep and detailed one and a very, very specific one.
And it happened when you were younger than you are today, I think 40-odd years ago.
And it seems to me that you were living the life of a young guy, a young guy in education.
You wanted to go there and do things, experience things, have adventures.
And part of your adventurous life was to go climbing.
It was something that you did, yeah?
Yes.
I did.
All right.
And so you decided to go and climb in Canada, a peak in Canada, a frozen peak in Canada.
And if I've got the story right, the person that you went with was somebody that you didn't really know.
That's right.
We got to know each other that week.
A guy called Tim.
Was it a wise?
I mean, look, if I think back to when I was 20, I guess you were, what, 20?
I was 20, and Tim was about my age as well.
All right.
Well, when I was 20, I made, in fact, I continued making them for some decades afterwards, but I made many less than fully formed wise decisions.
Was that a wise decision to go and tackle a climb in Canada with somebody who basically, I think he just advertised for a partner to go climbing with, didn't he?
He did.
I should give a little background here, if you don't mind.
Before we spent that week together in the wilderness, more like eight days, we went out for a weekend together in the snow on the backside of Jackson Hole, which is in Wyoming, in about three feet of snow to see whether we were compatible skill set.
But we were new to each other on that trip.
And then before this climb, we spent days, seven days or so, backcountry skiing and snow caving into the Canadian wilderness with backpacks.
And, well, the reason why we felt comfortable with each other to do this is because both of us have been doing this for our entire lives to some extent.
This was the largest, most adventurous trip I had ever been on, but by no means was it my first, and neither was it his.
Tim had just finished his ice climbing certification as a lead climber, and I had talked him into, to get to your point, unwiseness, I had talked Tim into letting me climb with him using one axe and one ice hammer instead of two axes.
And my bravado as a youngster overcame My wisdom.
And so I set off on this ice climb with inappropriate climbing gear.
Why did you do that?
I was hurting on the inside, if I want to tell myself the truth.
I didn't want to go back to Boston.
I wanted high adventure.
I wanted risk.
I had spent time thinking about suicide when I was my senior high school.
Things happened in my family.
I didn't succeed.
And I have a high-adventure risk-taking adrenaline nature.
Are you the kind of guy, or were you the kind of guy that were you the age that you were in this era of video, social media, et cetera?
Would I be seeing videos of you climbing television towers and doing handstands at the top of tall buildings?
Maybe not the television towers, but the handstands for sure and balancing physically in difficult positions, absolutely.
Or skiing through the trees at high speed on the fall line.
That's me.
So did you go into this not caring what happened?
I didn't believe anything would happen.
The only way that one can enter into this kind of situation is trusting yourself and believing in yourself.
If you go in with doubts, you risk yourself even more.
And why did you go with the wrong equipment?
Because every time, and look, I know nothing about climbing.
I only climb places that have nice paths and railings and stuff like that.
I've been up some hills, but that's the way I've done it.
You went with, you said with an axe and an ice hammer.
Now, whenever I've seen people on TV on the BBC here in the UK climbing, they've usually had two of these pick things, hammer things, that they've jammed one into a rock face here, and then they've used another one to hold themselves up.
And you didn't do that?
I didn't.
I used an axe, which is in those days, that's what you're seeing when they're climbing ice.
These days, they have sort of bird-beak-looking picks, and the handles are curved, but they function in a similar manner.
They have a strap partway up where you put your hand through the strap and run a bead down so that you don't drop your axe.
But the axe is substantially longer than the hammer, but it essentially looks the same.
In my day, it was a wooden shaft with a bird's beak, just a straight bird's beak with serrated end on it that picked into the ice.
The difference between the two, there were two differences between the two.
And the first is length, the length of the hammer and the use of the hammer.
The use of the hammer was to chip the ice and to install and remove, using it as a lever to install and remove ice screws.
But it's also used to chip holes in the ice, and you could grip and hold with it on the ice.
The difference in the length of the shaft was I didn't get as far a reach on every swing.
And it was the length of my palm, basically.
It was maybe a seven-inch handle, six-inch handle.
So I had to grasp it with all my might.
I could never rest.
I didn't know that going into it.
You know, Tim and I had had long conversations in the weeks coming up to this trick.
Trip, we planned this pretty seriously.
We didn't go into this not covering every single detail that we could think of because we both knew how dangerous it was.
Right.
And of course, if you climb as a twosome like that or any team, you depend on each other.
In fact, your life could come to depend on the other person.
And frequently, in a lot of climbing situations, in the most inclement weather, in the most inaccessible places, those things happen.
So you need to know the other person.
You need to know what they're going to do.
You need to know how they're equipped.
Were you both equipped the same?
And if you weren't, was Tim cool and happy with the way that you were equipped?
Tim was 87% cool and happy with the way I was equipped because he also wanted to make this climb.
And I just couldn't come up with the other axe.
And so he was pretty good, pretty much on board.
He was on board enough to actually climb with me.
The previous week is when we learned to trust each other.
We had high adventures the week before where our lives were endangered by the circumstances we were in.
And so we learned how well we behaved under stressful life and death kind of situations.
So I don't talk a whole lot about those because they didn't end up in death, but they were a couple of times where we found ourselves in a situation where had we made poor choices, we might not have survived the night.
But we made good choices because we were both level-headed and capable and learned to trust each other.
So we brought that whole week of experience to the ice.
And part of the reason why we did the climb at the end of that experience in the wilderness was so that we could trust each other.
If you have that level of dependence, then I guess you have to go through the preparation to make sure that when I start this thing, we've covered all the bases.
Exactly.
If you can possibly cover all the bases, when the variables that you're facing are the elements and, you know, the will of the elements, the will of God, happenstance, things that go wrong.
You can't allow for those, can you?
Well, that's not completely true, Howard.
A person who's been experienced, I spent my childhood from when I was 11 right through college, hiking and backpacking in the wilderness in all seasons, summer, winter, spring, and fall in New England.
I'd climbed, you've been up to New England, I've climbed all the, not all of them, but a lot of the mountains in New England, and I did it over many years.
So there's a level of preparation that comes through experience.
And both of us were in a new environment.
I hadn't climbed in Canada before, but the snow and the cold were very familiar to me, as are the fog and the rain and everything else, all the elements.
I don't know what could have befallen us that night for which we were not prepared in terms of the elements.
Because if it had been snowing, we would have, or snow was predicted.
Good God, if it had snowed, we would never would have made it down.
But we were well prepared for what we thought we were going to do.
And our secondary mistake, besides my primary mistake, our secondary mistake was to expect ourselves to complete the climb in the same length of time as everybody else on the climb that day and to get down in a timely manner.
That's something neither of us calculated for.
So this particular beat, this particular route, this was a day climb.
Yes.
And that was, it's a day climb for everybody who climbs it forever, and they're still doing it.
It's a day climb.
Okay.
So it wasn't unreasonable for you to think, was it, that you could do the same?
No, it was reasonable, but we didn't, I didn't factor in the length of the swing of my arm with the hammer versus the axe.
Because it'll slow you down.
Yes, because the climbing that I had done, I'd been rock climbing with ropes and carabiners and chalks and blocks and all this stuff, but we don't use axes.
We had rubbery shoes in our fingertips and bags of chalk.
And so the whole swinging the axe thing, although I'd swung plenty an axe in my day, not into ice.
And so that was a new experience for me.
And I didn't have the knowledge to calculate what I needed to know.
And when you started realizing that you were behind schedule because of the equipment, did you start to feel uneasy or were you cool with the whole thing?
No, I was petrified, but I was cool-headed because one of the things that climbing teaches any kind of high-altitude climbing that radio tower, it takes a high level of focused concentration to be exactly where you are.
And that prevents the mind from wandering.
And if the mind wanders, that's when you become at risk.
And so it trains the brain to remain in focus.
So if I succumbed to the fear that was growing inside of me, I set myself in danger.
And so instead, I set aside the fear, even though it was very present.
Well, that was exactly the right thing to do.
And I don't know whether I'd have had the presence of mind, the intestinal fortitude, the guts, I guess you'd call it, to be as even at age 20, I don't think I could have been as sanguine about it, maybe, as you were.
But there you were.
You have to deal with it.
You know, it's deal with it or die or be stuck on the side of a slope all night, which you didn't want to be.
So, you know, the two most basic questions in journalism I was taught, the one most basic question, the two most basic words, what happened?
That's great.
Well, all of that we just spoke about, when we arrived at the top of the climb, the temperature dropped by about 30 degrees in minutes.
The stars came out by the tens of millions, giving us a level of illumination.
And the team that was departing just before the sun went down, the last team who was, they turned and looked up at us from way down below, five or six hundred feet below us, and raised their arms and are like, what are you guys doing up there?
And they turned and they left.
And the sun went down and the stars came out.
And we, hours before we got to this ledge to sit on, I knew the situation we were in.
I was going over it in my head, hypothermia, frostbite.
I was on the National Ski Patrol that had been since high school.
And I was working at a mountain.
And so I had training.
That was one of the skills that I brought to this trip was that I was in the ski patrol and was a first aid backwards kind of responder person.
And so I was the one who brought it up.
As soon as the sun goes down, I start having these violent shivers in my body.
And Tim starts having these violent shivers in his body where the muscles are all tensing and relaxing and tensing and all independently from each other.
And I said, Tim, this is hypothermia.
And we are in deep trouble.
And he said, I know.
And he hauled up the rope and the rope became this big knot.
And as I entangled the rope and we talked about what we were going to do, we decided that if we spent the night on the cliff, we would die.
That was very clear that we spend the night here.
We're going to die because we're sweat-soaked from the climb, the exertion of the climb.
We're chilled to the bone.
We're hypothermic.
And we have no water and no food and no fire and no way to survive up here in the windblown cold.
And no prospect of anybody coming to rescue.
Zero.
we were on our own.
And that was an I didn't know what the number was.
I didn't ask myself that question.
But I knew that if we didn't keep moving, moving was the only thing that was going to keep us warm.
So we decided that if we were going to die, we were going to die trying to get off the mountain.
And that's what we did.
I can tell you the full length of the story, Howard.
I'm not sure how much you want me to say.
Well, look, I mean, I'm utterly intrigued and enthralled by the story, and I love the detail of it.
If you want to tell me, then I realize that it's what happened as a result of that escapade, if that's not a trivial way of putting it.
It's what happened as a result of that escapade that I know is the core of this.
But I think how you got there is terribly important.
So there you are.
You are literally staring death in the face.
You're going to have to make a plan, and that plan is to try and get off here, try and engineer a solution to it.
Otherwise, death is, rather than being 50% certain, it's 100% certain.
Yes, it looked like it was 100% certain to us.
That's why we moved.
And it was what's called a three-pitch climb, Which means it had three rappel lengths to descend.
And so we were at the top of this third pitch, and Tim, we began.
I'll try to summarize here because you're right.
It's the results of what happened that are the most important aspect of it.
So we traversed in the dark, tied to each other, as you see in the movies where the climbers crossing the crevasses are tied together by ropes.
We're tied together by the rope with some distance between us and we begin our descent.
And through the night, hypothermia advances rather steadily, and it encroaches on our capacities for physical movement, for coordination, for just opening and closing your hand, for speaking.
Eyes begin to freeze.
Brains get so cold that they begin to stop making rational choices.
And that all progressed along with my feet became blocks of ice and cold feels like fire.
And everything on me was on fire, my nose and my cheeks and my hands and my feet.
And we had to keep our heads in the game, on point, on level if we had a chance for survival.
And one of the things that I learned the week before about Tim is that he was capable of that.
I knew this about myself.
I knew this about myself because I'd been on the ski patrol and I'd been to scenes of accidents.
I knew how to be calm.
And so he could be calm and I could be calm.
And that's a big part of what saved us.
So we made our first traverse and then we made a mistake.
We got across in the dark on this ledge.
We, you know, hundreds of feet up on the side.
We get over to this first rappel and we make a mistake and we descend and we, because of our mistake, the rope is frozen to the tree above rather than sliding free.
And we have our second delay, long delay.
I don't know how long we were there for, hours trying to pull the rope down.
Tim and I, with my weight and his weight, we couldn't get the rope free.
And finally, he decided to reascend up the rope in order to free it from above because we had no choice.
And he volunteered for this because he was the more skilled climber and also he was the leader of the team.
So I took the rope as it dangled from above and wrapped it around my waist and I lay down in the snow, a couple, three feet of snow, maybe a meter of snow.
And I made the lines as taut vertically as I could.
And Tim, he had tied these called Persig hitches.
They're a type of knot that have a high, like a 99% friction rate when they're pulled tight and a zero when they're made loose.
And he made these two huge loops.
He tied a Persic knot to one of the sides of the rope and this hitch to the other side and then began to ascend up the rope in the dark.
And at some points, the rope came free and he shouted falling and he fell down some distance, 20 feet.
I don't know.
I wasn't looking up.
I was looking out because of the way I was lying.
I rolled out of the way and the rope came down and the rope was free and we progressed and we made it to the next rappel.
And by now the moon had come up.
But every step of the way, every step of the way, I was willing myself to survive.
I didn't know that I had a survival instinct.
And so there came this point where the instinct took over my will.
And I felt like I reached inside a part of my brain that I didn't even know existed.
But once it revealed itself, it was obviously the thing that was at the core of my staying alive for as a human being for millennia.
And it was even though I'm sorry, here I am jumping in at a very important point and I shouldn't do that.
Go ahead.
Forgive me, my audience, for doing this.
But even though your brain has slowed down because of the effects of the cold, all of those things are still going through your mind.
You're still working methodically.
Oh, yes.
Because if I didn't work methodically, I was going to die.
And so the methodology, a methodology of climbing is like the exactitude of movement.
So every motion that you make, you have to think it through before you make it and have an alternate plan in case that one doesn't work.
And then to minimalize your physical motion in order to just make that action.
And that way you save energy.
But every time we moved, it reduced our energy because we hadn't eaten since lunch.
Basically, we're going to have dinner down below.
We didn't get down for dinner.
So we were out of food since lunchtime.
And every motion that we made was stealing our physical energy.
And so was the cold.
So to stay warm, to move itself was consuming energy, and then to, you know, sometimes it's...
When this other part of me came to the forefront, when my deep animalistic instinct came forward, it freed me from having to use my energy, my mental energy, to stay focused on my position.
I'm not sure how to describe this.
It was so deep inside my brain so as to be the driver of myself.
And it became the driver of myself.
And I continued to try to move as efficiently as possible.
Plus, I couldn't feel my feet or my hands.
So I have to look at what I'm doing in order to complete the action.
And I also had mittens on and ice cramp-ons and, you know, a helmet.
And so we make this transition, we traverse to the top of the second to last Pitch and we rappel down on the rock.
We're off the ice at this point.
And we turn this corner and we land on this landing area that has epoxied iron pins with rings and carabiners and straps because it's the practice location for people to do a day climb.
It's not a day, really, it's like a few hours where they train for this.
So there's a repelling station up on the top.
And that's where now we're safe.
We're clipped into the mountain.
We're safe from falling.
But we are in an advanced hypothermic situation.
And we still have to make this last descent.
And I had the rope and Tim was to my left.
And I tied the rope to my harness and I tossed the rope out around the corner because we had come around a rock-faced corner in order to be on this ledge.
And when I pulled the rope the first time, it jammed tighter than a Persic hitch.
It was the rope got stuck in some crack in the rocks up above and I couldn't free it no matter what I did.
And that meant I only had one end of the rope and I couldn't reascend.
We talked over reascending me since I was on that side that I could go back up, but it was crazy because I had no rope for protection.
I was wearing crampons.
That was rock, wrong shoes.
So we were now in another extreme, deadly situation with hypothermia creeping down on our backs the whole time.
Right, so it was later, you were tired, you were in a theoretically safer position, but you weren't because you were stuck.
Exactly.
Now look, you are a man of spirituality now.
Age 20, we change over time, don't we?
But I think all of us, if we get into a situation where push comes to shove, when the rubber meets the road, whatever metaphor you want to use, however you want to describe it, if you're on the plane where two of the four engines have failed, I've been on the motorway where somebody's driven towards me and it's looking like if they don't veer out of the way and I can't get out of the way, something bad's going to happen.
You know, I am here to tell you that I pray.
I ask God to help me.
Okay?
Now, I'm not a particularly religious person, although I was brought up with my mother's side were Catholics and my father's side were Protestants in Liverpool, so I had all of that mix there.
But religion didn't really play a part in my life, but whenever I'm in a situation like that, I will always say, God, please help me.
Did you?
I did.
I did.
And I no answer came for that.
Okay.
Not while I was alive, anyway.
Right.
And no time really for rationalizing that to say, well, gee, you know, I would have hoped you'd come and help me now, but you didn't do anything.
No time for that.
You're dealing with the situation.
Mostly what I ended up doing, Howard, is thinking about dying.
Thinking about death, thinking about afterlife, thinking about my parents.
And then this thing happened to me.
A peace came over me.
When I accepted that I was going to die, I stopped fighting.
But I didn't, it wasn't, it was a giving up.
I did give up, but it wasn't a despair give up.
It was a peaceful acceptance of my situation.
And I had been a spiritual kid, and I had been meditating at this point for several years, and I trusted that it was going to be okay, but I didn't know what it was going to be.
I had no idea.
And then the hypothermia continued to advance, and I began to fall asleep and crash down and stand back up again.
And then I unzip my coat, which is what happens to people.
And I, because I felt like I got hot, which accelerated the process.
And then I stood back up.
And then I stood up this time after smacking down on the rock from falling asleep, which is one of the stages of hypothermia, I should add.
That's end game right there.
When you start to fall asleep, that's it.
And of course, if you start removing garments, which some people in those situations do because they think that they're warm and they're actually not, then you seal your fate.
That's what happened to me.
And I knew better.
So my rational capacity was gone at that point because I was in the ski patrol.
I knew better than unzip my coat, but I didn't care because I was hot.
And it felt like all of the blood had rushed from my extremities into my heart and into my brain.
And I remember thinking to myself, I don't really need my feet.
I really just need my lungs, my heart, and my brain to live, I think, which is completely irrational.
And so I unzipped my coat and accelerated my process.
And did you think to yourself, I mean, you said that you knew that the situation you were in was pretty bad.
Were you thinking at that stage, I'm dying here, guys?
Oh, yeah.
I knew that I was dying.
I knew that I was dying because I was trained enough in first aid to know.
But there was nothing I could do about it.
And so I was more watching the process, I guess you could say.
I was surprised.
When I started falling asleep, I was surprised that it was a curtain dropping.
I watched the curtain drop.
Blank, I'm out.
Smack, fall, collapse, smack on the rock, wake back up from the shock, stand back up, pull the rope.
And you were not freaking out.
No.
Because panic, I was a Boy Scout since I was 11 years old.
And one of the first things they teach you is you don't panic in the woods.
Panic is actually what kills you.
And so that was drummed pretty deeply into my head.
And it became, but also because of my high adventurous life, even up to that point, I became confident in my ability to remain calm.
And the physiological process that you're going through was assisting that by the sounds of it, which, as you say, the word that you used and the word that came into my mind a Second or two before you said it.
Surprise.
What was happening to Tim, by the way?
Same process, but I don't know for sure because I was completely self-absorbed at this point.
I knew that I could see him standing next to me.
He wasn't saying anything.
We tried not to speak all night.
We only spoke when absolutely necessary, partly because our jaws were freezing and it was difficult to move our tongues and our lips, but also because every time we spoke, it took all this energy from us.
So we became minimalist speakers.
So I know that he was standing there.
I can see him in my memory, but we didn't talk.
I don't know what was going on with him.
I was too busy dying.
And I stood back up and I got tunnel vision, which is a big black circle around my peripheral vision.
And this tunnel vision collapsed very rapidly.
And I was surprised.
There's that word again.
I was surprised.
I was like, what is this thing that I'm seeing now that I've never seen before in my life?
And I looked around and I could, as I looked around at the scene, the scene was incredibly beautiful.
This is a most beautiful place.
It's the Ice Fields Parkway north of Banff and south of Jasper.
And it's monumentally gorgeous.
And I'm looking over toward the Columbia Ice Fields and up into the stars and this collapse of this tube.
I sweep past Tim and I can see his head and everything else is black around that.
And then it just fades to black.
And as it goes to fade to black, I think to myself, this is a strange way for me to fall asleep because I hadn't been falling asleep this way.
I must be falling asleep.
And then when it went to black, all of my pain went away.
And I was still awake.
I was still conscious.
And I didn't understand how come I can be conscious.
And where's my pain?
And where's the mountain?
And where am I?
And what's going on?
And in front of me, if I had a front, I could see this deep, deep darkness that extended out into the universe.
But there were no stars in this universe, but it had the depth of the universe.
And far in the distance, as I'm floating in this space, wondering what's going on, still calm though, I was like, what is this thing?
And way far away, this star appeared, this single pinprick of star in this dark blackground, and it came flying toward me.
And as it came toward me, it exceeded the speed of light.
The distance was immeasurable, and it came so fast.
And as it came so fast toward me, it communicated to me that it was taking me.
And it filled my vision.
It filled the darkness.
And as it came to me, I knew it was my angel.
It took me years to figure this out, who I'd met as a child.
This orb, this power, this intellect, that's what it was communicating to me was mightiness, knowledge, intellect.
Were you connecting with your guardian?
Here's me jumping in again.
Sorry.
You were connecting with your guardian angel.
Well, yes, but I might not summarize it as a guardian angel only because it was also previously my transport when I was a child into higher realms of heaven.
And those are stories for another time that I kind of was born with a mystical capacity that began to show itself when I was a kid.
And so when you asked me if I was spiritual or religious, all my life I'd been connected.
I came in that way and kept all of that a secret as well.
But this...
Oh, no, go ahead.
Go ahead, please.
No, for you then, there was a...
When you read these newspaper stories I referred to at the beginning, they talk about the shock and surprise that here is something that I didn't expect.
For you, though, it's interesting.
You were not walking towards the light, which a lot of people describe.
The light came towards you at a great rate of speed and enveloped and enfolded you.
Plus, there was a sense of familiarity.
I know what this is.
Yes.
I didn't want to go.
I was like, I don't know what's going on here, but I'm not going anywhere.
So I was resistant because I was confused about what was happening, but I wasn't afraid.
It was outside of my experience, but the light itself was familiar to me.
But it was more like every single time it's ever encountered me when I was a child, and it comes in different ways now, but it's always capable of taking me with it against my will.
So it's like, I don't know what's going on here, man, but I am not going anywhere.
But it took me with power that I had never encountered before.
And it consumed me.
It enveloped me.
It enfolded me.
It took me from myself over which I had no choice whatsoever.
And it severed me from my body.
And that was an entirely different experience that I'd had from the times that had come to me in my youth and even the year before when I was on another backpacking adventure, the March previous.
I became disassociated with my physical form.
I'm not sure how to understand And I was enveloped inside of this angelic being, this intellect, this power that was speaking to me, but no language.
It was communicating to me all these things simultaneously, its might, its intellect, its vastness, its superposition.
I could tell that I knew that it was a reduced version of the divine somehow, and that it was my transport, but it was also the presence of the divine itself, even though it was a limited form of it.
It's both, Well, it's sort of like being superpositioned in two places at once.
It was two things: it was the fullness of the divine and the reduction.
And I was inside of it, and I had a light body.
I could see myself.
I could see myself, but I didn't have a physical form.
I had a form, but there were no molecules in it.
And everything I say is a metaphor.
So I was made up of like energy in the shape of Peter, but I was not Peter.
I didn't have a nose like Peter.
I didn't have ears like Peter.
I was just like a, I don't know, a mannequin of Peter, sort of.
But I was made of light.
And I was inside this entity.
And this entity was speaking to me love and welcome and power and might and superposition and all these things.
And I had no power to move.
But I could see through it because it was transparent.
And I could see out into the vast darkness.
And I was superpositioned.
So I had a secondary point of view.
And my secondary point of view was outside of this orb of light, this entity messenger that was carrying me back on the same route up the tunnel, you could say, but like the elevator chute, maybe.
And I was outside of it.
And I was outside of it.
And I could see myself in it.
And my outside self was paralleling my inside of the entity self.
But when I looked over to see if I could see myself seeing me, I couldn't.
So the eye that I was seeing myself inside this angelic being was somehow of a higher order, but also I could see both images at once.
So I could see myself seeing myself and I could see out of the eyes if I had eyes, which I didn't because I had a light body, but I could see through this being from this interior position inside of it.
So you were sort of omnipresent.
In a way, maybe, but I wasn't in control at all.
So I was being, this was all being done to me.
And so, you know, I always think of omnipresence along with omnipotence.
And I wasn't omnipotent, but I could perceive to an extent omnipotence because that's what the angel was made of, was made of this divine being.
And so it carries me and this higher part of me outside itself back up to where I first saw it at the edge of this universe-sized space.
And NDE is this thing that unfolds itself for me in my life.
Over decades, I came back with a certain amount of knowledge which was a much reduced fraction of what I understood on the other side.
And over my lifetime, some of that fraction that's been left on the other side, some of those has come and revealed itself to me as I live my life and I continue my inward journey.
And this section of what I'm talking about, I don't understand how this happened.
I can't, there are parts of my NDE that I still can't see and I can't really see this.
So I either, this entity maybe unfolded itself and I found myself in this illuminated darkness, this void, people call it, but it was also illuminated.
Or somehow, you know, as I say this, maybe I melded with it.
Maybe I became the orb.
The angelic being was gone and I became this enormous orb of energy.
I feel like I unfolded from inside of it or I popped out of it into this void, but I became similar to it.
I became this giant orb of energy.
I didn't have the knowledge and the power, but I had self-awareness and comfort.
And my self-awareness was knowing that this is who I had always been and am, that this was my truer self, and that I had never been fully human.
I had been inhabiting the human body, but also enveloping the human body that I had.
But it was never really, truly me, that I had returned to my true self.
And my true self could see in every direction simultaneously, as if I had 10,000 eyes or was one big eyeball.
But there was a limit to my capacity to see.
I could see deep into this darkness, and I was alone in this darkness and content.
Did you feel like you?
I was, yes, I felt like me, but nothing like Peter.
Right, so you felt like your essential you.
Almost, if you term things these ways, I'm talking to my audience here, almost the spirit of you, the essence of you.
Yes.
the stripped down, no molecules, no concepts, no ideas, no personality, no self-identity, me.
The one that has nothing...
the one that has no thingness.
So did you become...
Did you have the thought or did anything tell you then, oh, this is what happens when you die, something else must be going to happen.
They're going to take me somewhere else.
Something is going to transpire here that is going to be quite interesting.
Were you having those sorts of thoughts?
And were you thinking about the people back here, your mom and dad?
I wasn't.
I didn't.
I experienced myself as I was.
And I eventually asked if I was dead.
This is also the confusing thing about all of near-death experience, at least I should say, my near-death experience, confusing thing to me is that it's all happened simultaneously.
The timeline is crazily impossible to comprehend for me.
It's one of those things I don't, I just know that it.
So I tell my story in the sequence of events, but it's not the way I experienced it.
I don't know how to contain it and tell the entire story in a single dot.
It just doesn't compute to my brain.
Eventually, I asked if I was dead, or maybe I asked if I was dead right then.
And then the voice said, yes, you're dead.
But it seemed to me that that happened after this event where I came to recognize myself as I truly was and always had been.
And as I'm in this place of contentment, it's not that I'm just content.
It's the whole space is contentment.
I am content inside this void that is unthreatening at all.
I'm at ease.
And I'm amazed that I'd forgotten myself.
And as I am there, the light comes again.
But this time, the light is an opening in the dark.
I need to talk about the edge of the darkness.
So I could see this vast distance, but there was a point at which I could not see beyond.
And that darkness was infinity itself.
I couldn't see into the infinite itself with the eyes that I had.
I could see that it was there, but I couldn't comprehend it.
So when I say see, I mean understand and comprehend.
It was beyond my capacity for understanding, and so therefore was dark to me.
And then the darkness, the nearer darkness, the void I was in, it's like a big, maybe you could imagine it as a big, huge belly.
I'm in this big, huge belly, this universe-sized belly that I can't see outside of, but it's a really good belly.
I'm the most content I'd ever been.
And then it opens.
It opens and like a gigantic door in front of me comes toward me.
And this opening is fluid and it's made of light.
And it's coming toward me and it is the most beautiful light I'd ever seen.
And I am attracted to it.
And so I move with thought toward it.
And as I move with thought toward it, it comes to me.
And it is every color of every star in the sky that I saw that night, which is, if you've ever been in a place with no stars far up north, there are billions of them.
And they twinkle and they're all sizes and colors.
It was all of these in this flow like liquid.
And it was all of these colors and colors I'd never seen before, light frequencies that exist beyond my human eyes capacity.
And I remember I have no human eyes.
I'm in a place of nothingness.
I'm not only the nothing, everything is nothingness.
And so this light is also simultaneously, at the same time that it's colored in 10,000 million colors, it's also white.
It is pure white, brilliant white.
And so it's them and it's many and one at the same time.
And it's flowing and it has this surface area to it.
I can see the surface of it and I can see into the depth of it because it's also translucent.
And so I can see this light flow, but I can see through the light flow into a deeper darkness.
And as it comes toward me, seductively, I only want it.
And so I move toward it, it moves toward me, and I touch it with my soul self, my higher self, this energy body, this orb of consciousness.
I touch it because I want to feel it because it's radiant.
And as I touch it with myself and it touches me, I am opened.
And as it opens, it fills inside of me and envelops me.
And it speaks to me inside myself without language.
And it expands me and my interior.
And it shows me itself.
And it shows me myself.
And it shows me my human life that I just left.
And it shows me my truest self.
And my truest self is like this, like a photon, a single photon, but it's superpositioned again into this field of bazillions of photons.
And these bazillions of photons are the energy field of the mind of the divine that is the divine itself.
And I am exactly made of exactly the same energy as itself, but I am a reduced form of it outside of it and connected to it.
And I can see myself, that I can see from this, inside of this photon, that I am this entity.
But I am also reduced from this entity.
And I can't see the depth of this entity or the height or the breadth.
It's beyond my capacity.
But I know that I am it itself.
And I hear it calling me into being.
And it's not like it's my name.
It's the name of this photon, but it has no language to it.
And in the scriptures, they talk about the breath, the ruha, the breath of the divine, calling us into being.
And I'm being called into being continually.
This part of this light self of myself is being called into being continually.
And it is the trueness of myself.
And from this place, I see my next level down soul that is enormous.
And it is the everlastingly long from its moment of being called into being eons ago and always constantly being called into being in the now.
And it is pinpricked with like skewers.
I've been describing it as a baguette, a very long baguette.
And I am the baguette.
I am the bread.
But there are skewers stuck in it.
And there are many skewers stuck in it.
And these many skewers aren't the bread, but they are in the bread.
And they are my lives.
All these lives that I was simultaneously living.
And there's a sequence to them, but to me, they're all simultaneous.
So I'm inside all of them, all of them at the same time.
And I get to go inside two and see myself inside two of these lives.
I inhabit two different bodies, and I know that I am my higher self, and I see where I am through the eyes and feel through the skin of where I am.
And then I'm pulled out of that, and I'm put into some, that was a human of some kind, and then I'm put into some kind of creature, whether it's a, I used to think it was a lizard.
I don't know what it was.
I don't even know if it was on Earth.
I don't even know what I was.
But I had a consciousness, but I was seeing entirely through a set of eyes that perceived different light than I'd ever seen before.
And I was pulled out of that.
And then I was shown my human self, my most recent self.
And all the while, this voice is calling me into being, showing me that it is Creator and that I am creature created, even as that most pure photonic self is creature created.
And it shows me my human life.
And in this human life, I am back to Peter again.
And in this human life, I see, I feel like I'm under the glaring eye of the great fireball of destruction.
And it's aiming right at me.
And it sees all of me.
It sees my entire life.
There is no part of my human life that I just had that was hidden from it at all.
And as it's speaking my own name to me, calling me into being, it's also telling me, I have always loved you.
I have loved you through all your actions.
I have always been with you.
I am you.
I love you.
I love you.
And then it showed me all the pain that I caused in my life.
Well, this is all simultaneous.
So you're going through all of this.
You're being reassimilated into a greater whole, which if that is what happens to all of us, then, boy, that's quite a process.
But then you go through the life review.
Yes, and I tell it in this misorder because it was all simultaneous to me.
I could tell the life review first, but it wasn't first.
It was all at the same time.
It was like a three-dimensional chess game.
I'm playing all the levels all at the same time.
And I'm being played on all the levels all at the same time.
And that is its now-ness.
So in my life review, I experience all of the pain that I gave away in my life.
All of the Christians would say sin that I caused in my life, which for me was the pain that I caused others to suffer.
But I experienced it from inside of them.
From in the moments, in the minutes, in the hours that I was causing them this pain.
So I was inside of them experiencing what I was doing to them while I was doing it to them.
And I was also inside of me experiencing all my reasons and emotions for causing them this pain.
Simultaneously.
And did you, were you given an idea of what that was for?
Why were you experiencing, you know, we all have an impact on other people's lives.
There are times when I've had a negative impact, I'm sure, on some people that I've, you know, passed through their lives.
And as I've passed through, maybe my impact hasn't been so good.
And I'm really sorry for that.
But was it explained to you why you were being made aware of that?
Eventually, yes.
But as I went through the process, no.
What was shown to me was that all of the pain that I gave away actually was mine, accrued to me.
And I became the bearer of all this pain.
And as I was in all of this pain that I gave away, a hell, you could say, a hell of suffering, the pain that I had caused.
As I was in this place of suffering, I could see all of humanity.
I was shown a radical equality of all of human beings and that no one of us is greater or lesser in the pain we cause others.
Maybe one person causes more pain and one person causes less pain on earth, but from where I was, the comparison wasn't human to human.
The comparison was human to divine.
And the unlimited purity, perfection of the divine being, of the light itself, so surpassed our human brokenness that it made all of our human brokenness equal.
So in other words, it didn't matter.
At the end of the day, it was of, I won't say it was of no consequence, but it was of less consequence than it might have been.
Was this a form of absolution that you were being given?
Purgation, I would say.
And so when, and meanwhile, while all of this is happening, it's the voice.
Now, I can't see the divine.
I can hear the divine.
I know it's inside of me.
I know it surrounds me.
I know I'm in it, but I can't see it.
I can only see my own pain.
And so as I'm experiencing all of this pain, it's speaking to me.
I love you.
I have always loved you.
I have always known you.
There's no part of you that's hidden from you.
And from me, whenever you did these misbehaviors, I still loved you because I am you.
And as this, as I began to hear this with my heart, as I began to listen to the voice rather than to my own suffering, as I began to pay attention to the offer that was on the table,
I listened through all of the ear of my heart, where I had also accrued all of the love that I had given away in my life, and all of the love that had been given to me in my life became this vehicle for me to hear.
And as I listened to the light, I turned toward the light and a choice, but the choice was superpowered.
It was as if I couldn't make any other choice.
I had the capacity to choose, but the overwhelming power of the love was beyond being able to ignore it.
And so I turned toward it, and as I turn toward it, all of the pain goes away.
All of I'm healed, I am whole, and it fills me even greater.
And I expand with wholeness and wellness and peace and beauty and knowledge and understanding, joy, adoration, bliss, paradise, knowledge.
And I am absorbed into this being.
And I'm filled to such a capacity by it, by its love and light, beauty, that I feel like I'm going to obliterate back and lose even this capacity of selfness, which was nothing at all compared to my humanity selfness.
And I reach this expanded state of unity and it contracted again.
And I contract back down.
And now I've got some relationship back to Peter again.
And I say, am I dead?
And the voice says, yes, you're dead.
And now I'm smaller, still gigantic compared to my human size, but smaller than I was when I was expanded and denser somehow.
Because I can think of my parents now.
Up to this point, nothing on earth mattered to me.
There was nothing other than the divine being itself, not even me.
And then there was this memory of my parents suffering.
And I said, but my parents, you know, my dead, the voice says, yes, you're dead.
I said, but my parents are suffering.
And it swept me across itself and brought me to the edge of heaven where our universe begins.
There's this like a field between the two.
And it pushed part of my consciousness into our universe so that I could see what was outside of heaven in real time.
But 99% of me was still in the divine belly.
And I could see all of our universe.
And I wasn't looking around.
I was being shown.
And that's a different experience because I wasn't in control of my capacity for seeing.
I was being shown what to see.
And I was shown the length and breadth and depth of our universe to its origin.
And in its origin, as it's being made as I speak right now, as it's unfolding the divine, the divine darkness, which still in its infinite self remains impenetrable to me, but was expressing itself in love and beauty and light and truth and creation.
And it was creating our universe as I watched, even though our universe was expanded in its current state.
It was still creating its strength underneath it, like a web of light that supported it, that was invisible, except for to me.
I could see it, and I could see it spilling out the darkness becoming light and filling all things, all galaxies, all stars, all beings.
And I could see it unfolding other universes, universe after universe after universe after universe, just constantly unfolding them.
And as it unfolded them, it showed me this love.
It showed me that the love it was weaving into all of these universes and to our universe from itself, which is love.
It showed me that I am the beloved.
That's what it felt like to me, that all of this love that it was expressing in all of these universes was particularly aimed at me and that I experienced all of this infinite love of itself.
And it always was, is, and will be love beyond my ability to understand.
Love that creates wellness for what was, is, and will be.
It's all healing and all fullness.
And then it brought my attention from this overwhelming experience of being bathed in infinite love back to the universe.
And I saw our galaxy and our solar system and Earth in live time.
And in this live time, our Earth was like a hologram.
And I could see all 7 billion at the time people on the planet all at once.
And everybody's real and everybody's living.
And some are sleeping and some are driving and some are on the subway and some are at war and babies are being born.
And I can see every single person all at once.
And I could zoom in on people.
And I zoomed in on this one ship in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where I could see the people on board the ship.
And I zoomed back out.
And inside of every person I saw on the ship and inside of every single person I could see.
And I could see every single person was this golden speck of light like gold dust.
Like a speck of golden illuminated dust that was at the core of every single human being.
And it was the same light that is inside of everything there is.
So the same particle or whatever it was that was being reclaimed in you was alive in all of them and they would be going through the same experience at some point.
So you've been shown the meaning of all things, it seems to me.
At what stage did the power, the force, explain to you what the plan was?
And I know this is a very mundane way of describing it and forgive me for that because my terminology doesn't really fit the story that you're telling.
But, you know, they must have unveiled to you at some point, it must have unveiled to you at some point, what the plan of action was, what the direction of travel for you would be.
I was left with choice, but I also understood.
So I was left with choice, but I also understood that the purpose of my being was the gold fleck itself.
There wasn't any action that I could take.
It was being the thing itself.
That's the message that I got.
That's the message that I live.
And that all else other than that is a vanity of vanities.
All the world is vanity.
the beingness of itself is all that there is for me.
And as I looked at Earth, it was covered with a foam of impenetrability, and nobody could see this light inside themselves.
I could see it from my heaven.
I was being shown it from my heaven's point of view, but it was obscured to everyone else.
But I could see this erratical equality of light being inside of everything there was.
And then my parents' faces showed up.
And my parents' faces, my mom and my dad, their faces contained the accumulation of their life of suffering.
And I could see their pain.
And we had an extenuating circumstance in my family that caused an excess of pain for my mom and my dad and us, which is why I was not going back home to Boston for vacation in the first place.
And I could see all of their pain.
And then I was shown, they each had two life tracks.
They were together, mom and dad on the right, mom and dad on the left.
And their life tracks on the right was life without me going back.
And the level of their suffering was radically increased compared to life with me going back.
And their suffering continued in life with me, but it wasn't as steep and it wasn't as destructive.
But their ends of their lives were the same.
Whether they took the right path or the left path, whether I chose the right path or the left path didn't matter.
So you were being given a choice, and the choice was predicated on the experience that your parents would have.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Summarized well.
Yes, exactly.
Wow.
Sorry for the wow.
That trivializes it.
No, that's astonishing.
No, no.
So you summarized it in a way that nobody else, not even me, I never summarized it myself that way, but it's accurate.
So if this was me, my parents were wonderful people, and I've lost both of them now.
The void they leave in my life is just impossibly huge, and I think of them every day.
If I was put in that situation, even if I had been shown the meaning of everything and my place in the scheme of things, I would have chosen to go back and be with them, if that was at all in a heavenly way or any way.
If that was possible in the cosmos, I want to go back with them so that they didn't have to suffer the loss of me, because I know that I meant a great deal to them as they meant a great deal to me.
So were you given...
You were shown it, but how were you given the mechanics of the decision?
Well, part of the showing of it was being shown that the length of my own life was a human life is the wink of my eye, and that in timelessness they would be with me in a moment, in a wink, if I stayed, and they would come, and their ends would be the same in any case, either left or right, they would come to this place of being beloved, as everybody does, it was showing to me.
And then I, but it was there, the voice said, choose.
No sound, no, no language, choose.
And I said, if I go back to this human life, do I get to come back here to this blessed bliss?
Great question.
And the voice said, yes, you come back here.
And I said, well, then, plus I knew timelessness, you know?
And so knowing that the length of my life was a wink of my eye, my human life, I thought to myself, I could endure that.
That's easy.
Turns out I didn't have any idea what I was getting into, but I chose, I said then, I choose to live my life.
And it said to me, you won't live yours.
And it shot me out.
So the last words you heard, the last words you experienced were, you will not live your life.
Yep.
All right.
So that means, does it, that when you go back, the life that you lead will be for a different end, will be to a different purpose, won't be the same.
And to be a different person.
Wow.
I didn't understand it at the time, and it accompanied me.
So I got shot out, and that same angelic being, which is God itself, to use that word, it is the divine being itself.
A reduction of it accompanied me and it took me.
And as I traveled with it through these denser and denser layers, I became denser and denser.
And then there were a million doors presented in front of me.
And all of these million doors were tubes to my human body.
They all were lives I could choose to live.
And there were a million of them.
And in the middle of these doors was a big, huge beam of white light that I knew was the divine presence.
And it was right through like a big circle of doors.
And right in the middle of the circle was a big, huge beam of white light that took up a lot of the, it had no, it was its own door.
And then it spread out through all the doors to the edges where it would almost in darkness.
And I could see that the beam was coming from heaven.
But I wasn't allowed to look all the way back.
I couldn't like turn to take a backward glance.
I could only see that it was coming from there.
And the voice said, choose.
And I thought, what it meant was, pick aspects of your human life that you would like to include in the next one.
And I picked creativity.
I picked messenger.
I picked hedonism.
I picked independence.
picked a will and I in the next thing hedonism how did I did.
Well, I wanted...
No, it's not, is it?
And it turns out I wasn't really hedonistic in my life.
I was just sort of Of anti-authority, as it turns out.
So, you wanted to be anarchic.
You wanted to go back, you wanted to be better, but you also wanted to have a bit of spark about you.
I wanted to be human and divine.
That's what I wanted.
Because, in this choice, I was given this choice, and I thought underneath this choice was this messenger thing that was being given to me, ordered for me, agreed to.
I don't understand, didn't understand it at the time.
But I had this impulse to only want the light.
After it showed me myself, I only wanted the light, but I felt like it would be too pure.
If I was only light, how could I be a human?
How could I interact with anybody?
Who would be able to relate to me?
And so I chose between the two.
And I ended up what I am.
And I have that hedonism thing, that's kind of a strong word, because I haven't lived a hedonistic life, but I've lived a free life.
I have interior freedom.
I live unconstrained by, well, that's not completely true because I recognize the constraints of culture and politics and social interactions, but I also know that none of them are real.
They are all temporary.
They're all human-invented.
And that my orientation from that moment on, once I came back to my body, which I'll tell you about in a sec, became dominant in me.
I chose more light than human.
All right.
So you came back with a conscious understanding that all things are transitory.
Yes.
And as I was brought to my body, I could see my body.
It's like the heaven opened up, like in the Star Trek where the ships just appear outside the planet.
They drop out of hyperspace and boom, they're right there.
And that's kind of what happened.
Boom, we're right there.
I kept getting denser and denser and thicker and thicker and smaller and smaller and condensed and condensed.
And I'm inside this angelic form that's transporting me.
And as we get to my body, I see my body and I'm hanging off the side of the cliff with my strapped in because I get the strap on so I'm not going to fall.
And I'm lying there, you know, arms sprayed out, legs sprayed out.
And it pierces my chest like it opens my chest with me as the tool.
So it like stuffs me in like I'm a knife and I become this knife or two hands and it opens my chest and it screws me inside myself and I have no power to stop it.
I'm just being like poured into this body and now I'm inside this body and I can see as I'm inside this body, I can see out the hole that's in my chest.
I can see the divine being.
I can see this angelic form.
I can see this, I can see the night sky, I can see this angelic form, and I can see some ways back toward heaven.
And then this thing just, my body just closes up and the eye goes out.
And the eye goes out, and now I'm suddenly awakening in my body, my brain's coming back online and I'm encased, I'm entrapped, I'm exiled inside this form that's full of pain.
All it is is pain to me, suffering.
And it wasn't like, it's like the very existence as me as a human being is painful compared to the very existence of me without a physical body.
And you're absolutely sure that this whole process was not, and you will have been asked this question a million times, so here we go again, for you, that you weren't just hallucinating in a semi-dead, semi-living state?
All I can say to the answer to that is that my life shows the results.
Because it's a subjective experience.
I can't prove it to you that it wasn't hallucinatory.
It wasn't hallucinatory to me.
It was actual reality.
And that this place here, this is the confining, limited place, the pretend reality, the temporary, beautiful hellscape, I call it to myself.
And whether one of the things that happened to me when I came back is that I decided because I couldn't say it, I could never tell what happened to me in truthfulness, I would never talk about it.
And so I kept my mouth shut for 20 years and I lived my life.
And the evidence that I present to the world, and I've not been a perfect human being, don't mistake me for like an angel because I'm not an angel.
Right, so you didn't come back a saint?
No, I did not come back a saint.
And it turns out being saintly is not what people think it is.
Being saintly is, yes, it involves right action, as the Buddha would call it, but it arises out of the heart that's aimed toward the light and in the context of the imperfection of the world.
It's the saintliness is this interior connection to the divine itself.
That's what it is.
And how it expresses itself in the world.
So my favorite saint for an example of this is John Rusbrook.
He was blessed.
He wasn't given sainthood.
Blessed John Rusbrook was the love mystic.
And his writing is filled with love.
But he also started the Children's Crusade.
So he was a living contradiction.
And there is a living contradiction for all of us.
The expectation of humanity for perfection from its saintly people prevents humanity from embodying the light itself.
When people are set up on pedestals so that, oh, you know, that person did this thing, they mustn't be telling the truth.
It's never about that person.
That's the fundamental mistake.
It's always only ever About the light.
Okay.
Now, there is a mundane dimension to this, and the mundane dimension to it is that you are back here.
You've been there.
You've discovered the meaning of it all.
You made your choices.
You're going to be different in the future, which is what shines through all of this.
You tell me that it was a transformative experience and you've been a different person since.
And I hear what you say.
But you're there on this frozen slope.
So is Tim.
And you've come through an experience in which you nearly died.
I'm guessing he went through the same physical experience anyway.
How'd you get yourselves off the slope?
As my brain came back online, as I began to hear, hearing kind of wound up after suffering, I started hearing noise and the noise resolved itself into words.
And it was Tim screaming at me, don't die, don't die, don't die.
And my body's shaking around and I open my eyes and it takes him a moment and he's crying and he's screaming at me, don't die, don't die.
And he's like, oh my God, you're not dead.
I thought you were dead.
You were dead.
And he helps me stand up and I don't have any idea what's going on.
I don't know who I am.
I don't know who he is.
I don't know where I am.
I'm just completely confused by the whole thing.
And as my brain gets more and more settled and I'm listening to him and I realize, oh, this is Tim and we're stuck on this cliff and this is our situation.
And he's saying, if you're going to die, I was going to die.
And he's just now lost it because I had died.
And now I'm back and he's trying to adjust to this.
And I pull the rope.
He tells me, pull the rope, pull the rope.
And so I pull the rope and the rope comes free.
And my only supposition, two things might have happened.
It was a miracle, which I'm not sure that it was a miracle.
I think that the way I fell must have fallen off the cliff enough that they dragged the rope over and it pulled it free from whatever is snagged in.
And then we descended.
And maybe that's a miracle.
Maybe the miracle is that I, you know, so I don't discount that.
It's just not like an angel came down and flicked the rope off.
It kind of sounds like one, Peter.
You know, there you were stuck fast and dying.
And the next minute, you're not dying.
You're back.
And not only that, it's a double whammy.
You're free.
Yeah.
And so I like to look for the mechanics of the miracle and that doesn't make it less of a miracle.
It just makes it more feasible.
So my supposition is that the few times that I fell previously, when I fell asleep, I didn't actually fall off the edge of the cliff.
And this time I was dangling off the edge.
And so that was a little different.
And so we pulled the rope and the rope, and we descended and we self-treated for hypothermia because I knew what I was doing by then.
My brain came back online.
And so we self-treated and we defrosted and I came back an entirely different person.
And immediately, immediately, I was living in this space of being above myself and seeing through my human eyes.
I was 100% aware that I was inhabiting my body, but I wasn't all in my body.
Most of me was above my body.
And then I began to live my life that way, trying to figure out how to adjust to this thing that happened to me that nobody else would understand because I couldn't talk about it.
And even if I could talk about it, who was going to not commit me to insane?
Did you tell your parents?
No, I didn't tell anybody.
You didn't tell anybody?
I kept my mouth shut for until three years.
And then I, two years, two years, and then I told my buddy, but I couldn't possibly explain to him what happened.
And then I told my wife the day after we got married.
And then I told another buddy.
So over 20 years, I told three people.
And only because I had to tell them, not because I wanted to.
And so, no, I didn't tell my parents.
And when I finally, when my fine, when I finally told my parents, this was back in the early 2000s, they didn't believe me.
And nobody did.
And that's why you kept your mouth shut.
That's why NDEs kept, we kept our mouths shut because nobody believed us.
We couldn't prove it.
No.
Unless you're in a medical situation where somebody goes, oh, this guy was dead.
Now he's not dead.
He's telling this strange story.
But for me, I had no medical team to back me up.
If you were asked to sum up in words that could be said in two minutes how you are different after that experience and coming back versus what you might have been had that been a routine climb.
How would you sum all of that up?
It's a lot to sum up, it seems.
I would have gone for a graduate degree in architecture.
Instead, I went to divinity school to study mysticism.
And I embarked instead of on a career in the family business, building houses and schools and all sorts of stuff outside of Boston.
I went to divinity school to study mysticism and found myself becoming a minister as a hideout so that I can continue my interior journey.
The biggest difference of all is that my interior world matters more to me than my exterior world.
And the pursuit of the oneness of being has become the obsession of my life in terms of my spiritual practices and my intellectual practices.
And I found a way to make a living as a minister while doing that and have a family too.
But in terms of my social interaction, I have lived a life of risk-taking compassion and kindness, which again does not mean perfection.
Okay, don't confuse these things.
So in my life as a minister, I was often in the gritty, nitty, dark corners of humanity with the worst things that you can think of.
I was ministering among them because I know you can't kill me.
I know where I'm from.
I know who I am.
I know where I'm going.
I see the world, every single breath I have as a temporary place, even when it hurts me, even when it feels like time drags on.
I can't ever escape this deep inner self That knows the truth.
I'm sorry, here I am jumping in again.
And, you know, my listener, please forgive me for this, but I just have to incise in these little, little, little windows just to make this point, really.
That's good for you.
That gives your life meaning.
But as a priest, people will come to you with their dilemmas, and some of those may be to do with the scriptures, and some of those may be very day-to-day mundane issues that you are there to assist with or listen about.
Did you allow the experience that you had to pervade your interaction with your, I'm not going to call them parishioners, but the people who came to you?
In other words, did you say to them, if they said, I've had this terrible experience, don't know what to do about it, I'm looking for guidance from God, did you say to them, don't worry, I've been to what comes next and everything's going to be okay?
Never.
Never.
Never said that.
Never said it because how could that wouldn't help them?
But I couldn't help the light that was growing inside of me from interacting with every aspect of my life, including the parishioners who came.
And so I always operated from this state of interior pursuit of the one who was pursuing me.
And I know the biggest difference in terms of religion is that I'm not a religious person.
I'm not a believer.
I don't have any belief at all.
The divine had no being, no gender, no structure, no holy book, nothing, just love.
And so when it comes to scriptural interpretations, I was on the outs a lot because I'm not seeing it from a theological point of view.
I'm seeing it from the point of view that Jesus himself sounds like a near-death experiencer to me.
And if we pull apart and pull away the parts that are overlaid over his language, we can see that.
But I never said that clearly.
I never stated that from the pulpit.
I would always make that, weave it into the stories that I was telling and do it in a gentler, more subliminal way.
And the way I helped people was practical.
If someone is, I attended lots of deaths and dyings and helped people fix roofs on their houses and domestic violence, victims and perpetrators of other kinds and all sorts of stuff.
But always from this place, this steady place, this standing place with one foot here in the world, but my main foot back weighted into heaven.
And so even though I never talked about it because I didn't want to lose my job and I needed work for my family and I was doing good work in the communities I was living in, I avoided all questions that would press me to the position where I had to admit what I was not willing to talk about.
How come you're doing it now?
Because of something that happened in one of these churches.
And so I walked into this church in the town I still live in.
And I walked into this church, I got this job, and it was a big church in the big resort community along the coast of Maine.
And it turned out that they were dishonest with me.
The financial people were very dishonest with me.
That there had been a large sum of money that had gone missing in the previous decade, and that the people who were running that project were now in charge of the church, and that they turned out to be hiding or protecting knowingly or unknowingly an embezzler who was also the treasurer in the financial project.
And did that have a legal resolution?
I'm just thinking of this in terms of legalities for broadcast.
I don't want to be defaming anybody, and I don't want you to be libeling anybody.
I'm not libeling anybody.
This went to court, and she was convicted.
Okay.
All right.
And yeah, so but in the 11 years that I served as the minister during the first seven years, because I never worked for them, they always thought that I was, you know, I worked for them.
They signed my check, but I only work for the divine all my life.
I can't help it.
I only have this singular orientation.
Everybody who I love in my life, everybody who I love in my life is secondary to this.
I can't, it's not like it's a choice in my heart.
I have a beloved.
And so my position in the church, while granted through the covenant, the contract that I signed with them and that I was officially their employee, I never worked for them.
And therefore, I was rather uncontrollable and would ask all the questions that needed to be asked and prod the people that needed to be prodded, kind of carelessly for my position.
And so as we began to discover the truth of what was going on, a group of us, not just me, they attacked in a way that these powerful people, people who had significant positions in the world, and they attacked me and tried to destroy me personally, professionally, socially.
The closer we got, the worse it became.
And so the whole place was poisoned by this thing that was happening on the top of the hill in this church.
And in the end, when we finally found the proof of what was going on, they tried to silence me and by contract.
Sorry, by contract.
You don't mean in the godfather type way.
No, I mean like, no, no.
I meant by a non-disclosure.
They forced me to sign a non-disclosure.
And so I couldn't talk about it publicly, but I found a way because the same person with whom I am now reconciled after 15 years or longer, 18 years, we have a reconciliation now and it's good.
And this perpetrator, I knew that she was working for another company in town.
And so without saying the words directly, I let this person who ran this company know that something was up.
And he called the cops.
Right.
So that's what blew the whistle.
And that is what made you think again about the path that you've taken by the sounds of it.
It was after all of their real actions to, they were trying to strip me of my ordination.
They were trying to get me defrocked and professionally destroyed.
You've talked about, presumably you've talked about this in other broadcast interviews.
And it's in a book.
You want to read about it.
It's been published in a book.
And nobody's tried to take any action against you.
No, because it's true, right?
Because, you know, it's like it's true.
So, you know, people can do with it what they will.
After all of this was over and we caught the perpetrator and these protectors, her protectors, left the church and they left all the organizations in town.
It was very public.
It made statewide news where I live.
It was a big deal.
At the end of all of this, they had pressured the church as a whole had turned against me.
There was a group of people who hadn't, but the church as a whole had turned against me.
They had turned the church against me.
But after it was all over, the church felt repentant.
And on one Sunday morning, I walked into the sanctuary.
This is maybe three or four months after all this happened, including the court case.
And there was a deacons meeting going on.
And by bylaws, in the United States, if you have a nonprofit and you have bylaws, you have to abide by the bylaws according to state law.
And so the bylaws of the church, according to state law, the deacons couldn't meet without the minister present.
And so here they are, they're meeting in the sanctuary without me present.
I walk in on their meeting and it's an illegal meeting according to state law.
And I'm like, what's going on?
And I ignored them.
I walked around them and I went up to the pulpit.
But they'd spent 11 years trying to crush me.
At this point, it was nine years trying to crush me.
And so I was like super suspicious, even though everything had worked out okay.
And then an emissary, they send an emissary up and the emissary says to me, Peter, we've been talking about the way we've treated you.
And we can't believe how you put up with us for all these years and that you endured all these things that we did to you.
And there were financial things that they tried to do to me too.
It was, they used every trick that they had in the book.
And they apologized.
And she said, we're so sorry for what we did to you.
And then she was actually one of the people who didn't turn against me.
She was one of the people who believed in me.
So where are you left now?
Well, one last thing, Howard.
Let me say that I stood in the pulpit that day and I came out of the closet.
And you explained that I understand.
So that was a cathartic experience.
And at the end of that, you said, okay, I've been through all of this.
I have been vindicated.
Plus, I have something very important to tell you.
Yes, mostly it was I trusted them enough to tell them the truth because they finally saw, and this gets back to your initial question, they finally saw I was unstoppable in pursuit of the truth for them.
No matter what they did to me, I resigned.
I resigned twice in the first 18 months that I got there because I knew something was up.
I couldn't cause that much trouble to cause them to attack me so frequently in the first 18 months unless there was serious trouble.
And this small group of loyal people talked me into staying.
And so I stayed and endured a lot.
And in the end, they said to me, we couldn't believe how much faith you had to endure what you did.
And I got up in the pulpit and I said, so here's the thing I've been doing from the pulpit all the way along.
I've been lying to you.
I don't have any faith.
I've been misleading you.
I am not a person of faith.
I do not have belief.
I don't believe in the Bible.
I don't believe in Jesus the way that you believe in him.
I don't.
But I'll tell you.
Wasn't there a riot?
No, because they were stunned.
Okay.
They were stunned into silence.
But they were also, they'd also seen everything I had done.
And it was statewide news.
It was news all over town.
And so I said, look, this is what happened to me.
And in the end of my story, you'll understand why I began by telling you that I don't have any faith.
And I told them what I told you today about how I died and how I came back a different person and what I was doing in my contract.
I could point to my contract with them.
In my contract, they were contractually forced to allow me time to meditate.
I mean, none of my clergy peers had that in their contracts.
I had it in mind.
Yoga and meditation at my whim and the freedom of study, those three things.
And they were in my contract.
And what they meant for me was I could continue my interior journey through my meditation life into singleness and my Kriya yoga inside of my Hatha Yoga, interior life, energy life, and that I could study whatever I wanted as long as it was Christian-based.
And so I've continued my exploration of mysticism in the ancient history of Christianity, Western and Eastern.
And I said, look, this is why I was doing those things.
So it was right in my contract.
I began with you guys this way.
And so I could point to evidence beyond their experience with me.
And from that point on, everything changed.
They asked me to stay for two years to help them heal, which I did.
We tried what's called restorative justice, which in the United States, it's a movement where the victims of the crime and the perpetrators get together and they talk it out.
And in our case, I was trying to re-welcome the treasurer secretary back into our financial secretary, back into our congregation.
Not the overlords, but this poor person.
And the church wasn't ready for that.
It took a long time for her and I to get reconciled, not on my side.
So this was for you the ultimate forgiveness.
Peter, where are you placed then?
We're having this conversation on a sunny day here in the UK in April 2023.
You know, what is your role?
Do you see it now?
Oh, I died again in 2015 of a heart attack, and I came back from that event committed to speaking out.
I sewed my lips shut even after I came out to the church.
I've been a messenger my whole life, and that's my role.
And my role as I see it is for myself, is to continue my interior journey.
That's my primary role, to reconnect with the divine inside of me.
But in terms of the world, to be a spokesperson for everyone, to tell everyone that this is already inside of you and to fear not, and that love is the most powerful tool that we have when we love each other, when we love our pets, when we just love and accept love.
This is the treasure of life and the treasure of heaven.
And that the darkness that's perceived at the end of life is not darkness at all, it's light.
And that this is experiential here and now, that you don't need to wait to die in order to connect to the light, the living light within you, and live inside the radiance itself and bring a bit of heaven into your life.
And that's what I'm doing.
And it has no name.
It's ineffable.
It has no structure or form and can be and has always been, in terms of humanity, accessed by breath work of all different kinds.
You had a heart attack in 2015, and I'm sorry to hear that.
Did you have the same NDE-type experience that you had on the hillside, on the slope?
Not the same.
Not the same, but similar.
Enough similar that I chose to come back a second time, this time for my granddaughter and my son and my daughter, primarily my granddaughter and the extenuating family circumstances.
And I didn't travel as far, but the same entity, the divine being, met me and allowed me a choice.
And I chose to come back because, you know, what's another couple decades?
Not very long.
It's a cosmic blink of an eye, isn't it?
It's a hell of a story.
I know that there will be people who are amazed by it and taken aback by it.
And of course, there will be people who are extremely skeptical about it because that is the nature of being a human being.
You know, I've been amazed by it.
I hope that you live many, many more good years.
And when you get to the point where, and we will all get to the point where we have to depart this plane for the last time, do you think that you will be reincarnated?
You will come back as someone or something else?
Or are you going on now to some kind of eternity?
I never wanted to come back here.
For most of my life, I prayed every day, from my first NDE to my second one, every single day, you know, some variation of, can you take me home today?
And now if I can be useful and come back maybe one more time, if I can be useful, I'd come back again.
Because here's the corollary, Howard, that even though even in my incarnation, my soul continues to expand and learn.
And so my education through the layers of heaven accelerates whether I'm here or not.
And if one time coming back, I guess I'll agree to this one more time if I'm needed.
Right.
I hear what you say.
And I wonder how much you will know about your previous existences when you do come back, if you do come back.
I think that's probably one that we can't know the answer to.
It's a hell of a story, Peter.
Thank you for telling it.
Thank you for sharing it.
And I hope that I've done it justice here.
I've allowed the conversation to breathe.
I apologize at the points where, for brevity, I've leapt in.
If people want to read more about you, you have a great website domain name.
I'll let you say what it is.
I will.
And you've been a wonderful host.
And I might be reached at peterpanagore.l-o-v-e.
Peterpanagor.love.love.
I didn't even know that domain existed.
Peter, thank you so much.
I hope we talk again one of these days.
And you've given me a lot to sit back with a cup of coffee in the sunshine and think about before I do anything else today.
Thank you.
Peace to you, Howard, and everyone else.
I don't think I have words for the story that you've just heard.
Extraordinary, I think, is one peg that I'd hang on this last 90 minutes or more of conversation.
Let me know what you thought about Peter Panagore and the things that he had to say.
Certainly given me an awful lot to think about.
As I sit here and I'm going to boil a coffee up and just have a big old think.
It was time that I did, I think.
You know, have a little bit of contemplation.
I seem to be doing stuff all the time these days.
And the moments that I get to just sit and empty my head are too few.
So I'm going to do that now.
I wish you well wherever you are and whatever you're doing.
More guests, great ones in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
So until we meet again, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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