Welcome to Round Trip Death and part two of Peter Panagora's adventure.
If you haven't yet heard part one, I recommend starting there.
It's episode number 238.
On this podcast, we relive near-death experiences with the people who actually survive them.
There's a lot more to hear from Peter, so let's jump right into it.
It's this funny thing, near-death experience is this funny thing that I keep learning about
it.
My learning from it and my learning about it is this ongoing process.
It happened almost 40 years ago for me.
I'm still understanding what happened to me that night.
I'm still understanding.
And it's not just in my memory or someone phrasing something to me like you just did,
for which I am grateful.
But also the mystical gifts that come keep, everything is always new.
So I have this moment of acceptance of my circumstance and this piece fills into me
and I still pull on the rope.
I didn't give up, but the rope's not budging.
And then I got hot.
And all of this, what it felt like to me was that the blood that I could feel, because
I couldn't feel my feet at this point, the pain, the fire in my feet had stopped.
All the nerves were stopped sending that information.
But I did feel the blood rush into my core, my torso, and up from my arms.
And I felt it in my head and I felt it in my chest.
And I started to get hot.
I felt like I was sweating.
And I wanted to adjust my temperature not to be hot.
So of course, I irrationally unzipped my coat and opened it up.
And at this point, I had what was called a 6040 jacket by L.L. Bean.
And I sprayed it with silicone for waterproofs.
It's cotton and poly with this big green jacket.
And I unzipped it and opened it up and Tim yelled at me.
It's like the first thing he said to me in a long time, you zip your coat back up, you
idiot.
And I'm like, I don't really care.
I'm hot and I'm trying to cool myself down.
And so I ignored him.
He's often his own space mostly.
And I'm in my own space sort of inside myself as I pull on this rope, paying attention to
my body, paying attention to my mind, the peace that's inside of me.
And then I began to fall asleep.
And I would fall asleep like this curtain drop in a darkened theater.
You're sitting in the audience and the stage is illuminated and the monologues is in the
center stage and suddenly the curtain just drops, boom, and the whole place is pitch
dark.
And so this curtain would pitch dark drop on me and I would fall into unconsciousness,
collapse, sleep, a dreamless sleep.
I would fall to the rock and smack my head, smack my shoulder, head out a helmet and would
stand back up again because the shock would awaken me and I would pull on the rope again.
And this repeated itself.
And it wasn't like I had any warning.
This curtain would just drop and I'd be out and I'd wake up.
So I stood back up this time, this last time.
And as I stood back up to pull on the rope again, I had my peripheral vision was surrounded
by a blackness I'd never seen before.
So this blackness was also like being on a stage in a spotlight and you're the monologues
on the stage and you can see the edge of the light beam that's surrounding you in front
of you and the darkness beyond it and you can't see the audience and you can't see the
stage hands or the wings and then the light gets smaller and smaller and smaller and it
comes up to your face.
And then as it goes to your face, you can see the edges of it just around my face.
And then it went to black.
And as this was happening, I was thinking to myself, what is going on here?
I'd never seen anything like this, that this fading to black in front of me.
And I could see only in the tunnel of my vision.
And one of the last things I saw is I swung my head to the left to look at Tim and I watched
this blackness all around him except for his face.
And then I swung back to look at the mountain in front of me and I'm staring at the rock
mountain is this light gets smaller and smaller and poof, it's dark.
And as it gets to its smallest spot, I remember thinking that I didn't understand what was
going on.
I was confused and befuddled as this darkness closed in front of me.
And as the darkness closed in front of me, I expected I thought I must be falling asleep.
And I expected my consciousness to stop as it had before, but it didn't.
Instead, I was awake, the darkness came and I was awake and I didn't understand what was
going on even more.
I was confusing and in the where the mountain had been a moment before as the as the tunnel
vision collapsed, now was gone and I had no more pain.
And I didn't understand why I didn't have any more pain.
And the darkness that closed on me became an expanse in front of me where the mountain
should have been.
There was this wide, wide, wide void of darkness and it was dark darkness until a pinprick
of light appeared at the farthest distance.
A galaxy's, a universe's distance away, there was a single pinprick and it rushed toward
me.
It was white light and as it came toward me at an incredible speed covering a vast distance,
it expanded to consume my view and communicated to me telepathically, instantaneously, all
power, all intellect, and I'm taking you.
And as it talked to me without language inside of me, I didn't understand what was happening
so I took all of this willpower that I had through the night for my survival and I put
it up like a shield in front of it.
But the shield was amounted to nothing.
It was empty.
This entity, it reached in to me, it took me and encased me and unfolded me against
my will.
And I went with it and I was inside of it and enveloped by it.
It was like a gigantic orb and this orb was an intellect and it kept communicating to
me all knowledge, all smartness, all comfort, all welcome.
And I was inside it, encapsulated in it, sitting in it, and I had a physical form but I had
no physicality.
There were no molecules of me.
It was like an energy body or a light body but there weren't electrons and they weren't
photons but they had the shape of my human self.
And I was inside of this angelic being who I recognized now as the same angelic form
who had come to me in my youth.
And it took all of my capacity for choice.
I could not stop it.
I couldn't move.
I could see through it.
It was transparent.
And outside of it, I had a second point of view.
I had this other view that was sort of located nowhere but I could see myself inside this
orb traveling this distance.
And I could see this light body that I had but from the light body I couldn't see this
other eye of me that saw me inside the angelic form.
So I was bilocated and the angelic form, this being of intellect, was also superpositioned,
bilocated.
It was the intensity and the infinity of the divine itself in a reduced form that was much
greater than me but reduced in quantity but not in quality.
And it was both this limited entity for approach to me and the divine self itself.
And I was inside this and we traveled backups like an elevator shaft of its previous trajectory
toward me.
We returned on the same path.
And when we reached the point at which the light had appeared, it unfolded itself or
popped me out of itself.
I am not clear about what happened there.
I'm still trying to see that part of it.
But as I popped out into a greater darkness, in this greater darkness I had a new form,
no more light body.
Now I'm an expansive orb myself.
And my understanding of myself, my vision outside of myself, my thinking, my identity
are all one thing.
They're not separate and broken into components.
I am this much larger no thing because now there's not even this energy that I had in
a more dense form of my light self.
Now I am an expansive singular self.
And in my singular self, the first thing I recognize is myself.
I know me.
I know this has always been me.
I know this is my true me and that I had never really truly been this physical form that
I had just left.
This was a recollection of myself.
And inside this darkness, there was also illumination because I could see in every direction all
at once like I had 10,000 eyes or as a single eye looking out in one direction, but all
directions at once in this timeless space.
And I could see further than I'd ever seen before.
I close my eyes and I can see back in my memory the experience of seeing to the edge of infinity.
There was this very huge distance as far away as the pinprick of light was for me when I
was just dying.
This was infinitely further.
And I could see to this edge of darkness.
And beyond this darkness was infinity and I could not see into the darkness.
But I could see in this illuminated darkness all the way out to the edge at infinity.
And I was unafraid.
I was content.
I was at ease.
I felt safe.
I felt myself.
And as I was there, this light appeared.
It was like a tearing open of all the darkness.
And it was an intense light like a waterfall of a cascade of all sorts of colors, all the
colors of all the stars that were up in the sky that night where there's no light pollution
in Alberta and in British Columbia.
The further north you go on a moonless night, there are 10 million stars of all different
sizes pulsing in different colors.
And this waterfall was made of all of those star lights of all these different sizes and
colors and light, much more light, light that I can't see with my human eyes, infrared and
ultraviolet and x-ray and more and more and more.
And they were all in this flow that was flowing out of this rend in the darkness, flowing
down, flowing out.
And it was like pearlescence.
And it was like a fish scales.
And it was also all pure white.
So it's simultaneously all this light of all these different colors, all these different
frequencies and also all at the same time, singularly this white brilliant light.
And it had a surface to it and it had a translucence to it.
I could see into the depth of it and a transparency.
I could see through it into a tunnel.
And it was the most seductive, desirous, brilliant, no thingness I'd ever seen.
I'm in a place of nothingness.
And even this light is no thing.
So it approached me and I approached it and I touched it with my energy self.
And as I touched it with my energy self, myself opened and it poured into me as I entered
into it.
And as all of this happened, there was this simultaneousness to everything that happened
next.
And I tell it in a sequence, but there's no sequence in timelessness.
I spent many years of my life trying to construct a way of thinking about it in order to say
it to myself so that I could understand in my head what my soul knows.
So this entity infills me and as it comes into me, it's all life with all capital letters.
It is all life of all of the universe.
It is the universe itself and more.
It's the creator of all there is.
And it pours into me in this purity that expands me and shows me myself.
I see my origin as a creature, not just a human creature, but as a consciousness creature.
I hear my soul name being called into being in the now, always being made, always being
called into being.
And I see simultaneously this forever and ever eon length of the existence of my soul
that has an origin.
And as I see the origin of it, as my name is being spoken without language, it's bringing
me into being on and on and on.
And for all these eons, I see the very moment of my creation and the creator says, I am
creator and you are creature.
And it shows me my origin of myself.
And it's like I'm a singular photon, one photon.
And there's a field, a universe sized field of photons and goes back into a universe is
depth and more than that.
And it is one consciousness and it's made up of all of these separate photons like them.
And the them is one.
And I am the same substance of it.
I have made of a single photon of it and I am outside of it.
I am outside of it and connected to it.
But I am a reduction of it.
And in my reduction of it, it is also me, but I am so much infinitely smaller than it.
And I am told that I am made, I am created and this is creator.
And this it shows me my other lives in this long elongation of the length of the life
of my consciousness.
I see all these other lives that I had lived embodied in different forms.
And some of them were humanized.
I was shown into one that was a human life.
I was shown into one that I don't know what it was an animal life, an alien life.
I have no place of reference, but I can bring my mind back into the inhabitation of these
other lives and see through the eyes of the one I was inhabiting that was me, but me in
another time or world or form.
And after I was withdrawn from these two, I knew that neither of them and none of these
other lives were actually me.
That the me who is truly me is this soul that's above all of these lives through which these
lives are being lived.
The soul lives into these lives.
My soul was living these lives, but it was my soul was so much bigger than any of these
lives.
And also I saw my human life, my recent human life, and I was embodied back into my recent
human life in my life review.
So I'm being told that I am creature, that I am made, that I am eternal, that I am made
of light, and I'm also shown that I am also human and that I had lived a physical life.
And this physical life that I had just left, my life review was to go through all of the
suffering that everyone in my life had lived because of me.
So I was inhabited inside of their bodies in this chronological order where I experienced
all of their emotions and psychology and pain and anger and confusion that I also overcame
over on the other side was experiencing from my original human point of view, all of the
reasons and emotions that I was intentionally inflicting this pain on them.
And so I had this another by location.
I was both the human self who caused the pain and I was the humans, all the humans that
I had caused the pain to and the pain that I gave away was magnified.
It was so much greater than the pain I thought I had been giving like by a magnitude of 10,000.
It was so much more and I found that all the pain that I had given away was mine.
It accrued to me and I felt it in myself and inside of myself as I felt this pain of these
people that I had caused this suffering to, I felt guilty.
I judged myself and I judged myself not for because I was also being shown simultaneously
all of humanity's brokenness.
So I see my own brokenness.
I see the real pain that I gave away.
I see the pain that every human gives away.
I see the structure of the universe being made in a way that everything consumes something
else.
Everything hurts something else that this is the nature of the universe and that it
wasn't my fault that I made these choices in the origin of my humanity, but it was my
choice as a human to cause these pains.
And there was this radical equality of all the brokenness of humanity.
There was no one worse or one better in comparison to the divine that was this perfection and
this purity that was speaking inside of me and was next to me and surrounding me, but
I couldn't see it.
And as it spoke to me, I began to hear it through the ear of my heart and with the ear
of my heart where all this love had been accumulated through my life, all the love I had given
away and all the love had been given to me, I began to hear this love that was being spoken
to me saying, I know you, I've always known you.
I've always known you as a human being while you caused all this pain and even while you
caused it, I still loved you to the amount of love that you now feel.
I have always loved you with this.
And as I listened to this, all of my pain went away.
All of the pain I had ever caused anyone was gone and all of the pain I had had gone.
I went through this profound healing and wellness and influx and inflow as I expanded of this
multiple aspect of love and the voices saying, I love you, I know you, I've always known
you, I forgive you, I welcome you, come home to me.
And it filled me with truth and knowledge and understanding, joy, bliss, adoration,
love, healing, wholeness, wellness, bliss, paradise, love, beauty, all one thing.
And I wanted, as I expanded, I knew that I could know whatever I wanted to know and I
wanted to know about the structure of the universe and I was shown all the astronomy
and cosmology and chemistry and biology and geology and physics.
I understood so much of the structure of it, but I couldn't comprehend the making of it.
It was still beyond my capacity for understanding even in my soul nature where I had no brain
in the way of the acquisition of knowledge or the processing of information.
And all of this was happening as I expanded and expanded into this state of adoration
and this light that was a total fulfillment of me and surrounded in the light, being in
the light, but I was still somehow not in the fullness of the divine because I reached
this place in the infinite.
I reached this place at the edge of this expansion that was being done to me where it felt like
one more molecule of the divine self and I would obliterate and annihilate and enfold
back into the origin of me.
And at that point, I became conscious of that and I was reduced back to size again.
So my expansion contracted and when I contracted, I had a remembrance of my human life and I
said without sound or voice or lips or brain or words, am I dead?
And the voice was again next to me, but I could not see was all there was around me.
I was in the belly of the divine and I said, and it was also very personal and directly
inside of me and next to me.
It said, yes, you're dead.
And I said, well, I can't die now.
And the voice said, why it's time to come home.
And I said, my parents are suffering because my sister had vanished and now they've gone
through a lifetime of mourning and grief and they're going to lose me.
And now they're going to have this whole suffering compounded.
And in that instant, I was swept across heaven, this dark void of light and no thingness to
this edge where it's like the Higgs boson energy field where energy becomes matter.
Part of my consciousness was tucked outside of heaven through this field of creation,
seeing with my soul self, all of the universe, most of me, 99% of me is still in the bosom
of heaven.
But this small part of me can now see all of the universe and all of the galaxies all
the way back to the beginning of the beginning of the universe.
And as I look and see this voice is speaking, all of heaven is speaking inside of me, still
in heaven.
The same voice is speaking inside all the universe and at the beginning of the universe,
there is this unfolding of love, this love that is greater and larger than the whole
of the universe.
And it's like a wave that pours out and it pours through all of the matter that there
is being created in the moment that I'm there and being created for billions and billions
of years.
And there's this unfolding of love as the voice continues to show itself as it unfolds
universe after universe after universe, multiple universes unfolding and unfolding and unfolding
and all of them filled with the same divine love that is inside this darkness that I cannot
still see.
There's this point at which my vision ends and out of this place, this darkness spills
all of this love that pervades everything there is.
And as I watch this, my vision is taken back to our galaxy, down to our solar system, down
to earth and earth, I see earth in real time.
I see it as it is.
I see half the planet in darkness and half the planet in sunshine and clouds and rain
storms and human beings doing every human being thing, all 7 billion people all simultaneously
and inside of all of them as they there's murder and rape and love and beauty and ships
and factories.
And I see people doing everybody doing the shopping and frying eggs and inside of every
single person, there's this flak of golden light that is the same that is inside of all
there is.
But in these humans, it's illuminated brilliantly and none can see it in the other.
And I can see it as plainly as the sun in the sky.
And the whole earth is covered with this thick foam through which no one could see and see.
And as all of this is unfolding, all of this love for all of these universes and all of
our universe is pointed directly at me.
There is this particular beauty of love that I am the most beloved in all of all of the
universes, I am the one, the receiver of all this immense love that goes on for eternity
and from timelessness and that every single human being is beloved just like me.
And so there's this prodigal child, prodigal son come home to the family and the most beloved.
And yet this is true for me, but everyone is most beloved.
All are most beloved.
And the voice says to me, nothing is lost.
All is me.
All belongs, all I am.
I am all there is and I am love beyond measure.
And because of my love, all is well, has been well and will be well for all human beings,
for all of the universes because I am love of this immense measure.
And so I then see my parents' faces and I see all of their accumulated suffering over
all these years, all in their expressions.
I see into their suffering and I see parallel lives sort of behind them.
I see a life without me, with me dead and a life with me living.
And I have this comparison of the suffering between the two and the suffering with me
living is much less than the without me, which was full of abject brokenness.
But the end of both tracks for both my parents ended in this beauty, ended in the sameness
as me.
And the voice said, now you see nothing is lost and suffering ends.
So stay because in a moment, and I understood then that the length of my human life, of
any life I've ever lived is the snap of a finger and that in a snap of a finger, my
parents would be dead on either track and be welcomed back into this abundant love.
And then as I saw this, I was given a choice.
And I said, if I go back there, can I come back here?
And the voice said, yes, you can come back here.
You get to choose.
It's time for you to come, but you get to choose.
And I said, well, if I can come back here, then I choose to live my life.
And the voice said, you won't live your life and flipped me away like a pebble off a finger
and accompanied me in wrapping me with the same angelic form, but also with the fullness
of the divine presence.
And as I am carried away, I get denser and denser.
And suddenly in front of me, there was a million doors and all these million doors are in concentric
circles and all of them are tunnels that lead back to my life as a human being.
And each one is different.
And in the center of all of them is a beam of white light, much larger than all the doors.
And there are rings close to the light and getting further away from it.
And the light itself fades to dullness at the furthest edge of these millions of doors
of choice, of lives to live.
And the voice said to me, choose.
And choose light.
Choose.
But I didn't want the purity of light.
I wanted some selfness.
I wanted some humanness.
I chose outside of the light.
I wanted the light with all of my being, but I wanted enough.
There was enough of me of a human self there now, enough of an ego that I wanted some selfness.
And I made this choice and down this tunnel I went.
And in that tunnel, I saw all of the probabilities of my life.
All the choices that I could make.
All the choices that would lead to other tunnels.
And all of this at the end of my tunnel, I came down to my body being carried and crushed.
The further I went from the divine self in heaven, the smaller I became.
But it wasn't like I was shrinking in proportion.
It was like space was being taken out from inside of me.
And I was becoming denser and denser and denser and heavier and heavier until we got to my
body, which I could see.
I was shown my body and then this angelic being took me and jabbed me into the right
in the center of my heart, of my clavicle.
Not clavicle, but my breastbone.
Into the center of my breastbone and like screwed me into the body in a very painful
way.
And I was suddenly being in, I had been crushed down and like a fluid poured inside this body.
And I could see up through this opening.
And then I watched the opening close.
And then I felt my brain start to re-engage, kind of were up like a computer.
And as it came back online again, I had this wash of suffering.
I was in a container.
I was trapped.
I was imprisoned inside of this physicality.
And this brain thing came back online.
And then my ears began to hear sound.
And as I listened, it formulated into language.
And as I listened, it was, don't die, don't die.
And my body's being moved and I'm hearing this loud noise.
Then I opened my eyes and there is Tim looking down over me.
Don't die, don't die.
And then he's, you were dead.
You're alive, you're dead.
And stands me up and I am completely confused.
I don't know who he is or where I am or what this thing is that I'm inside of.
But as he's talking to me and my brain continues to come back online and all I feel is pain.
I'm just filled with physical pain.
Everything hurts.
I'm exhausted.
I'm hungry.
I'm thirsty.
I'm scared.
My body is confused by the pain.
And I know that I'm not this thing and that I had been somewhere and that somewhere I
had been was my true self.
But so much of it was cut off from me.
As soon as I entered my body, there was this great loss of this strong connection.
Peter, before we move on, that was amazing.
I've never had a guest on the show that I let talk that long without stopping.
And it was interesting to see your eyes closed.
And I felt like you were reliving this whole thing as if it were happening again.
You looked that intense.
And I just wanted to make sure that our listeners understood that.
It was amazingly real to sit and watch.
Do you mind if before we talk about the rescue and stuff, if we go back and I ask you a couple
questions, please, what did you learn about God from all this compared to what you knew
before?
I knew nothing before I went to Catholic high school.
I learned I read one of the gospels every year I grazed in the church, but nothing.
God is no thing.
There was no gender.
There was no religion.
There was just love and power beyond any imagination that I could ever conceive of that I was made
of the divine light itself, that I had lived many lives, that none of those lives were
actually me, that I am actually this consciousness.
I'm actually this divine being that is constantly being created in the now, always in the now.
And that God had no physicality.
It was like I talk about love and beauty and joy and healing and wholeness and hope and
knowledge and they were all one thing.
There was no separation between them.
They were not, you know, truth is over here and knowledge is over there and wisdom is
down the street.
They were one being and this one being was infinite beyond love, beyond my understanding,
love beyond my human capacity of grasping.
Pretty much nothing I had learned.
All of my faith vanished in the moment that I awoke.
I was zero believer.
I was zero with faith.
All of that was gone from me in an instant.
Only the thing that mattered to me for all of my life until today, it's the divine light
itself.
It's this energy that's ineffable.
There's an ineffability to it and that everything that can be said about the divine is de facto
wrong because there is no language.
There are no things there.
There's no thing there.
There's no brain.
There's no language.
There's just concepts.
There's no ideas.
It's this energy that's even beyond the word energy.
It's love beyond imagination.
It's living.
It's living and it knows everything and it loves everyone.
It loves the rat in the New York subway with the pizza in its mouth.
It loves the eagle that comes down and eats the fish.
It loves the star that explodes and takes away the planet, everything.
There's nothing.
There's nothing that is not it.
All that there is here is infinitesimal compared to its actual size, which is immeasurable.
Yeah.
I feel bad for people who may have been listening to this while they were doing something else
because the beautiful way that you described it, you got your money's worth out of your
adjectives today, my friend, is really fascinating.
And if I wasn't really paying attention, I'm sure I would have missed a lot of it and not
understood some of it.
So I'm going to ask you to do something here that's going to be difficult.
And if you can say no, if you want to.
I would love you to explain what happened to you as if you were talking to a six year
old.
So very, very simple primary kinds of terms.
And in if you only have one or two minutes to do it, because that's the attention span
of that child.
I have had experience with telling this to a six year old, even to a four year old.
I said, honey, you know that I'm different.
You know that I have this other way of living.
It's because I died.
And when I died and went away, I went to the to heaven where only love exists and where
my strength and light comes from, where you are from, where we are all from.
And unusually, I got to come back.
Unlike great Grampy, he's gone over.
But I can tell you, having been there, that he still lives and he still loves you.
And as much as I love you.
That's it.
I like that.
That says just as much, I think.
I think it's fascinating that while you were given a choice whether to come back or not,
it almost sounded like it had already been determined for you to stay there or, in other
words, dead in this life, to stay to stay in that heavenly place.
But you brought it up.
You mentioned about your parents and how devastated and how painful it would be for them.
Do you think that that had something to do with you then being given the choice whether
to come back or not?
I've thought a lot about that.
If you know, God is omniscient.
How did the how did the divine not know that that scenario would unfold?
You know, so I I land in the space of paradox with it.
I did bring it up.
I brought it up because I also was shown the length of a human life.
The snap of a finger and the amount of bliss and healing made me think that I could endure
anything.
That's it.
I made this choice a second time.
I died in 2015 of a heart attack and an ambulance on the way to get a stent.
And I died in the ambulance.
And I I chose again to come back for this now seven year old.
And and each time I was welcomed home and each time I know that I'm I live a separate
timeline now.
So the parallel lives I saw of my parents with or without me, they wouldn't have known
either way what it would have been like on the other path.
But I do.
And so whatever the whatever reason I was given a choice for.
I don't really know the answer.
I I know that I brought it up.
I know that there were some weight that I was even though I had gone through this purgative
fire of divine love that cleansed me of all of the karma that I had carried with me.
There was still this love that of attachment to my parents, caring for this for them because
of my my stupid mistakes.
They were going to cause them great suffering.
I don't understand more than that yet.
Right.
And you describe the stamp of a finger a couple of times.
And sometimes when I hear something like that, I think, well, that's scary.
You know, life goes by so fast.
On the other hand, it can bring great comfort when you're talking about, oh, I just lost
a loved one or something along those lines to think that.
That it's all going to.
That's OK, because the reuniting comes quickly in the great big scheme of things with our
little earthly eyes and our tunnel vision.
It seems like, well, that's going to be forever.
But I believe that it really does go quickly, like what you're saying in a good way of quickly.
The funny thing I talk with elderly people, one of the funny things I learned from elderly
people is that the older you get, the faster time moves.
Now, we know that that's not true.
Time doesn't actually move faster, but that's the way it feels to pretty much every elderly
person that there is.
But from my point of view, the point of view that was shown to me, my self identity isn't.
My primary self identity is my heavenly self and my eternal nature.
And so I live my life knowing its brevity.
And this brevity actually gives me this, well, it gives me courage.
It gives me strength.
It gives me wonder and adventure.
It gives me a form of selflessness that has enabled me to, when I was a pastor, to live
a very daring sort of interventionist kind of ministry, working with domestic violence
and lots of other violent circumstances as an extreme example.
But also in my daily life, the knowledge of my own death is the freest thing about me.
Knowing that I'm going to be freed from this temporary place helps me overcome suffering,
my own suffering.
It helps me be a witness to my own life.
It allows me the space and freedom to pursue my interior journey knowing that this shell
that I live inside of is expendable.
It's given me opportunity to choose against my cultural context and pursue this mystical
life when what would have been beneficial to my family is to have lived a more capitalist
lifestyle.
But I see all of these things as so temporary.
And there are consequences for my choices because I'm a human being.
But there's a consequence for my life I foresee.
People ask me what I foresee.
I foresee myself.
I foresee my own light.
I foresee my entrance to heaven.
I don't know that I will or will not go through a hell, but I know that my connection to there
is myself.
And so I see the eye wherein I see God, God sees me, said Meister Eckhart.
And that light is who I am.
So I don't grieve like other people do.
I miss I'm sorrowful when people die.
My dad, my sister, my cousin, friends, dogs.
But there is no death.
That's a very strong motivator.
Well we better get on to chapter three.
Okay, you're back in reality, right?
You're up on that cliff face.
Adam grabs you and repeat what he said and what he did.
So I come back into my body.
Is that what you mean?
Yes.
Okay, so I'm back inside my body.
My brain words back on and my ears open up and I hear this sound as I begin to understand
that that's language and I begin to understand that this is being words being spoken and
screamed at me.
And as I listen, I hear you.
Don't die.
And as I listen, I open my eyes and I see Tim leaning over me, grabbing me, shaking
my body.
And I see the look of surprise on his face.
So my eyes open up and he's crying and he's screaming and he's yelling, you were dead.
You were dead.
I thought you were dead.
You were dead.
I thought you were dead.
He stands me up and I'm weak and I'm disoriented and I don't know who I am and I don't know
who he is and I don't know where I am and just understand that I am in this suffering
body that is this prison that I had just returned to.
And I know that this isn't me.
I still remember this other self, but all of the 99% of the information I had moments
ago is now lost to me.
But I know that I am inhabiting this body and that it's not who I am.
And as he's talking to me, I'm not listening to what he's saying.
I'm just kind of adjusting to all of this world.
And finally, I listened to him and he's saying, pull the rope.
And I pulled the rope and the rope came free.
So in this, every time I had fallen asleep, I had landed more on the ledge.
And this time when I fell asleep, pardon me, when I died, I rolled a little bit further
to the edge and that must have brought the rope free.
I don't know what else could have done it.
Miracle of some kind and I stand back up again.
And as I stood back up again, the rope must have come loose.
And I pulled it as he told me to.
And the rope came free.
And we put it through the ring and he descended and I followed him down.
And at the bottom, we crossed the icefields parkway to the parking lot across the street.
And we took out the tent.
And at my insistence that we don't jump in the car and turn on the heater because we
couldn't heat up our bodies too fast because we're frostbitten and hypothermic.
So we had to bring our temperatures back up much more slowly.
We went climbed into this tent that had a, it's an Arctic tent.
It had a chimney and a vent so we could light our stoves inside it without asphyxiation.
So we lit our stoves and we warmed water slowly.
We stripped naked and got into our sleeping bags and huddled next to each other and sipped
cool to warm to hot to eating and we warmed our bodies back up enough to get into the
car to fire up the heater and to raise our temperatures.
And by then the sun was up and we, when we were warm enough and we had our senses back
and we could think more clearly, we packed up our gear and we were loading the car when
the warden pulled in and get out of his vehicle and his truck and said to me, to us, are you,
were you the boys on the mountain last night?
Yes, sir.
We were.
He said, well, I've come to see if I needed to requisition the helicopter to collect your
bodies.
And that was this shock to hear from him and his worry and his concern and his warning.
It made it all more real, didn't it?
Oh yeah.
And off we went and embarked on 24 more hours of crazy adventures of totaled the car.
We spent time in the clink, just a terrible next 24 hours.
Oh man, some other show for that one.
Oh my goodness.
Wow.
I don't even know what to say after all that.
How does that change your life?
And I don't mean, I mean, we can already tell this has been a deep change in your life,
but if someone who maybe you grew up with saw you 30 years later, what would they be
surprised at how different you were?
Well, I'm going to my, I went to a Catholic school, but my high school, the city high
school that I would have gone to is having its reunion in a month.
And I'm going to be doing just what you said.
I'm going to be seeing people I haven't seen in 30 years.
And they knew me when.
So I've been trying to figure out what I'm going to say to them.
I guess I'll say to them that, you know, when I was in college, I died and I had a radical
change in my life.
And that's why I didn't go into my dad's business because most of them know my dad or knew my
dad or many of them did.
I didn't go into my dad's business and I went off in this other direction.
I would keep it light, but if they were curious, I'd tell them the deeper truth.
I died and had a union experience and I came back an entirely different person.
And I live, I've lived my life of these 40 years in interior practice.
I've become a scholar and a storyteller and I've been, I dove deep into the literature,
the ancient literature, East and West and read everything and studied.
And now this is my life.
And yes, I was that person before and now I'm this person.
I, I'll still have fun with you guys.
But I am not who you used to know.
And you seem very at peace with all that.
Oh, I can't be any other way.
I hid.
So I kept this a secret for 20 years.
I locked my lips and I pretended that this didn't have, I knew it happened to me and
I was working on my interior life the entire time, but I didn't tell anybody.
But my, my, my eccentricities were obvious to everybody.
And this, this, and my eccentricities were sometimes funny, sometimes strange and sometimes
courageous.
And the, none of that came from me.
It all came from my, I don't know, point of view that I'm passing through and that there
are higher orders and things that matter that mattered to me that don't matter to you.
And it wasn't until there was this big embezzlement in the church I was serving.
And when that was all over, I came out to my congregation and then everybody in my town
knew about my NDE.
And then I ended up with it, had this TV show for all these years.
And I poked around trying to feel out my larger audience, whether I could talk about this.
And then I came out with my book, which kind of popped me out.
But it wasn't until the month that my book came out, I died a second time of this heart
attack.
And so I was in, I was in the hospital room from having been gone through ICU and I got
a phone call that day from my publisher saying, who didn't know I'd had a heart attack and
died.
And when I told him, he's like, Oh, Peter, Peter, that's just too much.
You can't have two people.
This is just too much, Peter.
But if my book was coming out a month early, and I had said goodbye to my wife, see you,
honey.
You know, I've been waiting to go home.
But then I chose to come back because my kids needed me and my granddaughter needed me.
And then I stopped.
I changed again, near death experience, mystical experiences, cause a reformation of the identity.
And in my new identity, I was at ease with who I was and who I was becoming.
And I was no longer going to pretend in any circumstances that this wasn't who I am.
And so now and I continue to live in this coastal main town.
One of the reasons why I love living here is because I had been the pastor here and
they'd all seen my antics, everything from, well, helping with embezzlements and murders
and arsons and domestic violence to being a stilt walker and running a chainsaw during
a sermon and all sorts of crazy stuff.
And they like me, they know me.
And so I feel like I can just be me here.
And now I can just be me wherever I go, partly because of my community here.
They just accept me as I am.
And fear of being thought of as insane was always a powerful motivator to keep my mouth
shut.
As was the instruction that I was given to be a missionary, to be a messenger, to be,
and then have no words for this and no way to communicate the, the, the shock tea of
it.
I knew what the energy was.
I felt it inside myself.
I couldn't communicate that energy to anybody, let alone with words.
So people that have had NDE's, it often takes a long time to process.
What could we do to help people?
It's going through that kind of situation.
Well, you're doing it right here in this podcast because you're letting people know that there
are tens of millions of us who've gone through this.
And part of my problem, part of my problem was that I didn't have anybody to talk to.
Now at least we have people to talk to.
I hear that a lot because if they, if you try to talk to somebody, they think you're
crazy, especially 20 or 30 years ago, mostly not as bad today.
Last thought I want from you, pretend I'm that, uh, your seven year old granddaughter
again.
What's one thing that I can learn from this?
That I will always love you.
There is no end to my love.
Peter Panagor, thank you very much.
Thanks Eric.
Thanks for having me.
If you have had a round trip death experience, we would love to hear about it.
Send an email to eric at roundtripdeath.com.
And lastly, if you have found this program uplifting, if it's given you just a little
more hope in the future, share it with a friend, hit that follow button and take a few seconds
to write us a review.
Until next time, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and
the next.