What If It Did Work?
What If It Did Work?
From Chaos to Clarity: Peter Panagore's Journey Through Near-Death Experiences and Spiritual Awakening
Join us for a thought-provoking episode with our esteemed guest, Peter Panagore, an ex-reverend turned bestselling author and spiritual counselor, as we explore the profound impact of near-death experiences on personal transformation. With a wild childhood of skiing and backpacking shaped by ADHD and religious upbringing, Peter's journey takes an extraordinary turn through harrowing encounters with life, death, and divine light. Discover how these experiences led him from a life of adventurous chaos to one of deep spiritual insight, inspiring his acclaimed book "Heaven is Beautiful."
Peter shares his gripping tale of survival on a sheer ice cliff, where he faced the brink of life and death, enveloped by hypothermia and darkness. It was during this perilous moment that he experienced a transcendental encounter with a mysterious divine light, marking the start of his spiritual awakening. With visceral storytelling, we traverse his journey of confronting his own darkness, enveloped by unconditional love, and achieving an extraordinary union with divine consciousness, altering his understanding of existence and the afterlife.
Throughout our conversation, Peter offers invaluable reflections on the transformative nature of near-death experiences and their ability to reshape perception, identity, and the divine. Explore with us the intersection of religion and mysticism, and how these mystical experiences can inspire hope and empathy, transcending fear. Peter's insights encourage listeners to seek meaning beyond the confines of institutional doctrines, embracing the profound, life-affirming transformations that near-death experiences can bring.
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I never told no one that my whole life I've been holding back. Every time I load my gun up so I can shoot for the star, I hear a voice like who do you?
Speaker 2:think you are all right. Everybody. Another day, another dollar. One of my favorite podcasts, my favorite episodes because I'm biased, it's my own podcast I gotta say I'm definitely super. I'm definitely super excited about this guest. We are talking about near-death experiences, the light at the end of the tunnel, the seeking mortality, seeing your life flash right before your eyes. Maybe it's like a movie, maybe it's not. We'll find out. He's an ex-reverend. Peter Pangor is an acclaimed author and spiritual counselor, known worldwide by his best-selling book Heaven is Beautiful. How Dying Taught Me that Death is Just the Beginning. His life is a testament to the power of personal transformation, having undergone profound changes following his two near-death experiences, which redirected his career from in architecture to studying Western mysticism at the Yale Divinity School, and for over two decades pete served, while privately pursuing global mystical studies, as a tv writer and talent on nbc tv news. His inspirational messages reached 30 million views. His fest, his first bestseller, two minutes for god, originated from 1700 TV scripts. Congratulations, brother. How's it going?
Speaker 3:Excellent Thanks for having me here today.
Speaker 2:So I got to ask, before your near-death experiences, two of them, most people you have to have the proverbial nine lives like a cat to survive two Were you a product of a deeply spiritual household? Were you raised?
Speaker 3:I was raised I was raised uh, religiously. I would say uh, roman catholic and greek orthodox. Dad was greek orthodox, mom was roman catholic. I was raised in both uh, and the churches were a block apart from each other. I went to Catholic high school but I was also kind of a wild person ADHD, not a lot of governance on my own inhibitions so I was not a wild child, but certainly on the edge of that.
Speaker 2:Now the good news is both churches are pretty aligned. Being a Roman Catholic myself, you could have communion at both churches. So what happened? What got you from the ADHD going to Mass? Maybe on, was it like Easter?
Speaker 3:No, it was every week CCD.
Speaker 2:Every week. Oh yeah, I'm a product of ccd myself. But but after, after I did all my sacraments, I remember I was in eighth grade and they're like, okay, drum roll, do you want to continue doing this or do you want to press on? And I looked around, I'm like, is it mandatory? Like no, I'm like okay, and then that was it, yeah.
Speaker 3:I was. I was out after confirmation myself, but then I there was this Catholic high school near me, this all boys Catholic high school, and they had a crew team, a rowing team, and I really wanted to row and so I went to Catholic high school near me this all boys catholic high school and they had a crew team, a rowing team, and I really wanted to row and so I went to catholic high school.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm a product of a public school education. But my two daughters, I bamboozled them the first couple years. They're in public school and they're doing the ccd and they hated ccd. And I'm like well, how about a deal? You go to a Catholic school and I promise you you won't have to do CCD anymore. And they both signed on the dotted line, not realizing they had to study theology every day instead. But oh well, hey, you know what? Yeah, yeah, it's always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Speaker 3:Yes, I learned that at divinity school too. The Episcopal dean of Europe told me that.
Speaker 2:That's too funny. So I got to ask, because I know you're sending me the book and I'm one of those speed readers and I'm one of those that I can't put something down. I've got a little obsessive, compulsive. So I know I'm going to read the book. You sent me the YouTube video, which is just like right there, just because it's like it tees it up, it's like the cliffhanger, it's like I need to watch this. Is this like cliffhanger with frigging Sylvester Stallone? Is it that other movie with, like Chris O'Donnell? But were you avid? Because were you like this athletic person, since you did crew? And then you were just like into just going all out, because the closest I ever got to a mountain was up. I'm a fear of heights, so probably space mountain or the matterhorn if I was out in disneyland well, I eventually became a stilt walker, but that'll give you an idea.
Speaker 3:um, but I was a downhill skier. I was on the national ski patrols, backpacking since I was a boy scoutier. I was on the National Ski Patrol. I was backpacking since I was a Boy Scout Outdoors, mountains, wilderness, wintertime, summertime, autumn didn't matter, and I rode crew and I ran track and played ultimate frisbee. I guess I was a jock.
Speaker 2:I was the opposite. I was closer to Rudy. My high school was horrible in sports, but I was even more horrible so I couldn't even make those teams. So I got a degree in journalism. About one day I'd be the next sportscaster. But being Catholic, being a journalist, it's like you take a vow of poverty. It's like mine is seminary. If I was going to do that, I would just go out and became a priest. So yeah, long story short, I never became that, that sports reporter. So, but lead, lead us into that first near-death experience, because that that's the basis of the book. This is where you literally you were, were dead right.
Speaker 3:I was dead. Yeah, I was. I'll try to tell it as tightly and briefly as I can. My family ended up in disarray when I was 14, when my older sister ran away but from our point of view, vanished, and it caused a lot of consternation and disruption and trauma in my family. And so by my junior year of college, I wanted out. I wanted to be as far away as possible. So I went on student exchange and I went to Montana State University so I could backpack and ski. That's where I went and study, oh yeah, yeah, study.
Speaker 3:So come spring break I didn't want to go back to Boston, which is where I'm from, and I wanted to avoid my family. So I thought, what adventure can I be on now? And a guy was running a trip and he's looking for a partner to go backcountry snow caving for eight days in the Canadian wilderness in March on 10 feet of snow and then top it off with a one-day ice climb on this world-famous ice climb. And I'd been cross-country skiing and snow caving. I've done all sorts of stuff like that and wilderness was my thing, but I'd never been ice climbing. I'd rock climbed a bunch but never ice climbed. So I borrowed and rented almost all the equipment that I needed, and I say almost because I came up short on the axes. I only had one axe and I could only come up with a hammer, and a hammer is, say, seven inches long and the axe is maybe 18 inches long, and so the axe is meant for climbing. The hammer is not. You can climb with it but you're not supposed to. It's for putting in ice screws and taking them out and chipping the ice. And so my partner, tim, had just finished that year his certification in ice climbing as a lead climber, and so he tried to talk me out of it. But he really wanted to go and I really wanted to do this climb, and so I talked him into it. So I made that's why I died, because I decided to climb with inappropriate equipment.
Speaker 3:We made our ascent. I was much slower than all the other climbers on the ice that day. By the time we reached the top we should have been at the bottom. It was a 500 or 600-foot climb on sheer ice, in I don't know, 10 degrees, with 10 feet of snow, and when we got to the top the sun went down and the temperature dropped about 30 degrees and we were stuck in the dark, five or 600 feet up on this cliff with soaked to the skin because we're sweating, with no extra food and nothing to keep us warm. So we decided, I realized, because of my training, that we were in a grave situation Because immediately when the sun went down, our bodies started to go into hypothermia and my body, all of the muscles in my body, each individual tiny little muscle, was pulsating at its own rhythm and I was racked with the shakes.
Speaker 3:My jaw, I was clattering, my teeth were clattering, my body's shaking all over the place clattering. My teeth were clattering, my body's shaking all over the place. Long story short, we had a tremendously traumatic night traversing and repelling down this face in the dark with the advancement of hypothermia. With every step, the less energy we had, because we we didn't have any more food and so we had to keep moving to stay warm. But the more we moved, the faster our energy depleted and the colder it became.
Speaker 3:And hypothermia steals your reason, it makes you stupid, it makes you make bad decisions. And so we made a series of bad decisions and by the time we reached the last rappel, we were in a dire situation the fire of my feet, the cold, feels like fire, and the fire of my feet went out. So my my feet were numb, I couldn't feel them, my hands couldn't feel them. We were on this ledge and, uh, we were clipped into the mountain for the first time. It was the space where they would practice repelling. And so maybe 100, 150 feet up and we're clipped into the mountain with a strap and a carabiner and not in danger of falling, and I had the rope, and this might be three or four in the five in the morning, I don't really know what time it was. I didn't have a watch and I didn't really care, I was just trying to survive, I, and I could tell you other, I could tell you the details, like like I was driving my willpower to control my fear so that I could stay level headed and not die from panic by making a major mistake.
Speaker 3:And then there was this period where my brain sort of switched into a different sub mode, like a lower level. You know, in the old days you had the software and then underneath that you had other software, the operating. Well, you still do. You have the operating system. So my brain went into like operating system, where I had like an early mammalian experience of desire for survival and I can't explain it to you. I wasn't thinking about it rationally. My body wanted to survive. It wasn't something that I was deciding to survive.
Speaker 3:It switched over to this animalistic, very deep, ancient, evolutionary mode of wanting to live, and so I was being driven forward by this and by the time we're on this ledge, I'm still in this mode and I've got the rope and I tie it off to my harness and I take the other end of the rope and I toss it out around this corner, because we had descended down this crag in the dark and turned a corner. And we're standing on this ledge and I pulled on the rope and I got stuck like three, five inches and, and the more I pulled on the rope, the deeper, the tighter got stuck, and now we can't go down because we don't have a rope and I can't go up because I only had half a rope, and so now we're stuck on this ledge and I had this understanding that I was never going to get out of this. This is now 12 or 15 hours into the well, after sunset. So sun went down around four, so maybe 10 hours. We're into the dark and I realized this is it. I wasn't going to die here. And I started thinking about my family and I started thinking about God.
Speaker 3:And as I was thinking about all of this, that animal thing went away and I became very calm, I became very accepting of my circumstance, I became peaceful peaceful, but I'm still pulling on the rope and I began to fall asleep last stages of hypothermia, and I would fall asleep and I'd crash down to the ledge. I would have strapped in so I didn't fall, I'd pull myself back up because I'd smack my shoulder or whatever. And it shocked me back awake again and I stood up this last time. And when I stood up, uh, I had this tunnel vision and it got like a spotlight come into a darkness all around it and as it began to close, I was thinking I must be falling asleep again. And then it closed and instead of falling asleep, I woke up and now I'm awake and I'm outside of my body. I'm kind of in front of my physical body. I have no pain and there's no more mountain and I'm not in Canada anymore. I don't know where I am.
Speaker 3:And in front of me is this expanse of darkness. And this darkness had a substance to it. It was like velvet and it was very, very distant and way and it was. It was weird because I could see the darkness. It wasn't like you're in a room and you shut off the lights and you can't. You can see. You can't see your fingers in front of your face. It was. It was somehow not just dark and way, far in the distance, this little pinprick of light appeared like a galaxy away, like a little tiny star, and it rushed across this expanse. And as it rushed across this expanse, it communicated to me telepathically not in language, in information, and it told me that it was taking me and it reached in to my body and it took me and it carried me back the way that it had come and I was.
Speaker 3:I had this. I had like a human shaped body made of light, no molecules, and there was this severing from my body. It was like it's like a plant being snipped and the flowers no longer connected to the roots, the flowers no longer connected to the roots. I was cut off from my body and this intelligence that was carrying me was feeding me, comfort and welcome and communicating to me with love and beauty, but it was somehow a smaller version. I knew that it was a smaller version of the divine itself. And when I was being carried up I was so it was sort of superpositioned in two places at once, two things simultaneously.
Speaker 3:I was superpositioned because I could see myself inside of this angelic being, this orb, this consciousness, and being carried up. But when I looked with my light body self for that eye that was seeing me, I couldn't see it. I was somehow God's eye seeing me, and then it brought me into this even vaster space and I was in like a big, huge womb of infinite, full darkness and I no longer had a physical body at all. I wasn't even a light body. I was an orb of consciousness and my thinking and my beingness, my identity, my understanding of myself, my physicality were all one thing. I was an entity of consciousness and I could see in 10,000 directions and I could see in the furthest distance. There was a darkness that I couldn't see into and out of that darkness and I was content, I wasn't scared. I realized that this is me, this has always been me. I never was that little tiny human person. I'm glad to be back at what I was and am and always will be.
Speaker 3:And as I'm thinking these thoughts without language, the greater darkness sort of rips open and this light pours out. And this light is the most beautiful, attractive, seductive, luscious, delicious thing I've ever seen, ever. And in the instant of my seeing it I thought I want it, and in that instant I was transported to it. It was immense and it was this flowing, it was like a doorway in the, and it was a solid, liquid, transparent, translucent, flowing, iridescent wall of light that was emanating life and love, and it was also simultaneously being one big, huge white light. It was 10 zillion different tiny little colors of light, all individuated x-rays and ultraviolets, every color, every light in the spectrum that I could see, and it wasn't flipping from the many to the one. It was both at the same time and all I wanted was it.
Speaker 3:And so I reached out with my orb energy self and I touched it, and as I touched it, I was absorbed into it, I was opened up and it poured into me and I was infilled and surrounded by the energy of the divine. And then all these things happened at once I, I, I kind of reshaped into a light body and a divine eye appeared in front of me, gigantic eye, and out of this eye, this light poured, which was my being, and it was seeing all of my life. So I had this, this all of my life. So I had this, this all of my life was, was illuminated in, in all of my life, and I was 99.9% pure light and loved and understood. And I understood that the divine being had always been living in me, as me.
Speaker 3:And but there were these little dark spaces, these little shames that I had hidden from myself and from others, and I could see their darkness, and so I kind of pulled them all together in the size of like a thumb and tried to hide them from the light, and as soon as I did that, I fell inside the darkness. So I fall inside my own darkness. So I fall inside my own darkness. And inside of my own darkness I experienced all of the pain that I'd given to everyone in my entire life, in a chronological order. From inside of them, I experienced their reaction emotional, psychological, chemical reaction to all of the bad things I'd ever done with intention in my life. And simultaneous to that, I was also me, inside my previous head, experiencing all of the reasons and emotions I was causing, that pain and all of the pain that I gave to them accrued to me. It was, it was, and it was 10 times greater than I thought that I had ever given them.
Speaker 3:And meanwhile, the, the divine light, is speaking to me and it's speaking love. I love you, I have always loved you. I love you as you are. I know everything about you. I've experienced your life with you. I love you, I love you, I love you and, and and I could sense its immensity, its unlimited nature, its power, its purity, its beingness, and and I judged myself in comparison to this unlimited beauty, while all the time it was only speaking love to me and as I, as I, as I lived through the shame of all the pain that I caused, it's telling me I love you and all of the, so all I carried all the darkness that I had created in my own life with me, and this was like the divine fire of purgative love.
Speaker 3:And if you ever heard Catherine of Genoa, she talks about the divine power of purgative love, the divine fire of purgative love, and it was cleansing me of myself, of my attachments to the pain that I gave in my life and, meanwhile, all of the love that I'd given away in my life and all of the love that people had loved me with all became like this ear through which I could hear the divine love loving me, on offer, joy, love, beauty, knowledge, intelligence, awe, bliss, paradise, understanding, all of the great trust, hope, all of the greatest parts of humanity of being the best you can be, compassion and kindness were all one thing, and it and it inflated me to this level where, where I felt like if I inflated any more, I would have been destroyed and and folded back into the, into the immensity of the divine itself.
Speaker 3:And so I had this union experience, and in the middle of this union experience I I simultaneously was reduced to the size of a single photon, and I was a photon in a field of photons. I was on the edge of this field, and this field of photons were all entangled with each other and it had no beginning and no end. And although they were individuated, they were all also a collective consciousness of the oneness of being, and I was part of that. And so I'm in this union state with them and the one, and I see my soul that is lower down than me emerge from the darkness and become this long tube, and inside of this long tube are all these little tiny worlds that I, or lives that I had lived for centuries, in a chronological order in time, but they were all existent at the same time for me.
Speaker 1:And.
Speaker 3:I was, I wanted to look inside them and it let me look inside a couple of them and and then it pulled, pulled me out, and then I wondered about my family. I got kind of remembered my family, my mom and my dad. My mom had been broken by all of this stuff that happens. It's terrible things that happened. And uh, I said, uh, what about my parents? They're, they've already lost one kid, they're going to lose two kids.
Speaker 3:And then I was swept across this immense space, through this field on the other side of which our universe existed, and I was like looking like the James Webb telescope, seeing all this, this weaving of all these galaxies and light, light. And I was shown the greater darkness pouring light, creating the entire universe, as I watched eternally, forever, always the lights pouring out, and this light is love itself and it's woven into every single molecule of every single thing there is in the entirety of the universe. It is the energy beneath everything, it's the super consciousness that makes everything exist and it's all love. And out of this darkness, other universes were popping, one after the other after the other, just this infinite number of, of creative, of creative universes, and all of those universes and our universe and the immensity of love and the, and the belly of the, of the, of the divine. I was inside, of all was made of this unconditional, infinite love and was all aimed at me and I became the most beloved there ever was and as I'm, as I'm, the most beloved there ever was. I'm shown earth and every single person on it in live time, and every one of us is the most beloved of all time, which is a total contradiction, because most means only one uniquely loved, but it was uniquely loved everybody, and that, that, the, that nothing was ever lost and that, because everything is made of the divine being, of all love, everything is beloved as they are.
Speaker 3:And then I, I, I, I thought about my parents again and their faces showed up and mom and dad a and mom and dad b, mom and dad a, I saw their entire lives without me. If I die, I saw and be my entire life with them if they lived, if I lived, and the difference between the two was a very large measure of suffering Without me. Disaster, destruction, nuclear, a bomb goes off in my mom's emotional life. With me, they survive and suffer, and so I say I haven't completely come into you yet, but can I go back? And if I go back, can I come back here to bliss and heaven? And the voice said, well, we'd like you to stay, but, yeah, you can go back. I say, well, I'd like to live my life. And it says to me you won't live your life, and throws me out.
Speaker 3:And as I get thrown out and back inside this angelic orb of consciousness being carried, and as I'm being carried, I become denser and denser and I can see a huge beam of light coming out of the darkness, creating all of these doorways. And all of these doorways and all of these doorways were lives I could live in my human body. And the voice says to me choose a life, choose light. And so I choose, kind of a combination of the two. I choose light, but I also choose, you know, a personality, kind of a personhood, and and I go down and this door opens and I go down this selected tunnel and inside of this tunnel are all these other doorways that lead to all these other tunnels, like choices I could make, and they're all. It's like a huge field of probability.
Speaker 3:I get to the end of this thing. I see a body. I don't know what it is, I have no idea what's going on. There's two people, one bent over clutching the first one, people one bent over clutching the first one and and this, this being stabs into the chest of the prone one and stuffs me inside.
Speaker 3:And as I'm in this thing, I'm like, oh my god, I'm contained, I'm trapped, and then I the I can still see out of this the hole where it shoved me in, and then the hole closes and my brain comes back online. I hear it come back. I feel it come back online. I open my ears first and I hear screaming and yelling don't die, don't die, don't die.
Speaker 3:And this whole, this thing I'm in, is being shaken around. And I open my eyes and it's my partner, tim, and he's staring down at me, crying and screaming don't die, don't die, don't die. And suddenly he sees my eyes open and he's like you're not dead, you're not dead, you're not dead. I thought you were dead, I thought you were dead, you were dead. And he pulls me up and I don't have any idea who I am or who he is, or where I am, or what I am, or what this world is. All I know is that I'm in exile and that I've lost this true self of my own. And now I'm contained and trapped inside this thing. And then I start to remember, my brain starts to work and I start to remember where I am and who I was, and I Tim gets me to pull the rope. The rope comes free, we descend and well, we treat, we treat ourselves for hypothermia and we survived, and sun comes up, and that's a real thumbnail sketch. It's lots more happened.
Speaker 2:Well, peter, how long were you in heaven? Did Tim tell you? Hey, you were out for like a half hour an hour.
Speaker 3:He didn't tell me he was. We were in shock. I was dead long enough to know that. He knew that I was dead, but I don't really know. I didn't have a watch on. He didn't have a watch on, it wasn't a concern and I never asked him. And I never asked him because I didn't even know who I was anymore. I wasn't like trying to figure out what happened on the mountain, I was trying to figure out who I was. How can my consciousness be contained inside of this mechanism? I'm stuck in. What is this flat world? The entire world looked different for me. Everything in the entire world sounded and tasted and felt uh and looked artificial, like, like thin celluloid, black and white and the that that I could see the light pouring through everything else. So I was in. My identity was gone.
Speaker 2:Now I've been meaning to ask you you said your sister ran away. Did you guys ever find her? Was she dead? Long story.
Speaker 3:She was a student at Mass Art in 1972, massachusetts Art College of Art, and she took a lot of acid and split. Went to California, lived in communes, disappeared for a long time, showed up for a little while with the baby, disappeared again, got arrested Years later. We adopted the baby. She split the country. She was gone for decades and then in 2006, she showed up in South Beach, miami, and contacted us and my parents met with her twice and then she died in 2007.
Speaker 2:Okay, so then she was literally alive during your near-death experience. So maybe that's possibly a reason why you know how they say. You see those, your family members or whatnot. She wasn't there because she was literally still alive.
Speaker 3:Well, she was, but I didn't see anybody. Lots of near-death experiencers do see other beings and people that they love, but that was not my experience. My experience was not quite unique, but unusual. In the NDE world it's a subset where I went into. I went to the light itself. I went to a state of union where my where, nothing was lacking. It wasn't like I missed anybody, because everything, the totality of all life, was there. It was fullness. I can't even explain to you. It's, so much so that it's left a deep mark on me.
Speaker 2:Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure, I mean literally, you've had two near death experiences and you you've got. You got to visit where you know, where they always say no one here gets out alive, and you know, you did check into Hotel California and you checked out and you came back to reality. You came back to tell your story. Now then, do you do you think that every person creates their own version of heaven, or do you think it's from other people that have experienced near-death experiences that's very similar to the one that you had?
Speaker 3:I think that the divine is compassion itself and gives each one of us what we need in order to live the life that we need to live when we come back. I didn't go all the way into heaven. I didn't stay dead. I was like in the ante room, I was like on the threshold.
Speaker 2:I went into the state of union, but I wasn't so like a purgatory, yeah, sort of like purgatory Right, kind of like that. Another Catholic.
Speaker 3:Right. But I also think that my Christian upbringing influenced my experience, and I've read NDEs about Kali, the Hindu god. I've read NDEs about Buddha. I've read NDEs where Jesus shows up and I've others where Auntie May shows up. Some people go to this like beautiful place made of grass and butterflies and other people go to like a castle in the sky or a council of elders. Truthfully, I don't know. I don't know. It's beyond me, but I think, as I talk to my friends who are NDEers, it seems like we're all given the NDE that we need not the one we want. Seems like we're all given the nde that we need not the one we want. And so the way it influenced me. When I came back, um is well, the orient. I changed my entire life because I had to. It was screaming inside. It came back with me. It wasn't like it wasn't like I left it there when I, when I came back, it came back with me. It's still with.
Speaker 2:Now is it like in the movies, like there's after effects. Like you, you wake up in a cold sweat because you had these visions of of where you were, or nothing like that. No, no true after effects, except for the simple fact that you're like. You had, like that, charles dickens, the ghost of christmas future, visit you and you're like man. I gotta change my life and I have to change it immediately sort of.
Speaker 3:I love that story, um, and there's a. There's a story about charles dickens in a train wreck where he may have had a near-death experience, just letting you know. Um, yeah, there are tons of after effects, tons and tons and tons and and and the. The one that was most disconcerting early on was what people call empathy, but it's, it's some kind of psychic ability that that everyone that I met I could, I could feel their emotional state, so much so that I didn't know where mine ended and theirs began. And in crowds it was overwhelming and disconcerting and disrupting. It was crazy-making. That's just one example. It gave me a permanent sense of my own immortality, and not as a human being, but my eternal nature, and so I live my life accordingly to that, according to that. So the second time I died was the best day of my life. You know, I got married and I had kids, and those are wonderful, beautiful, fabulous things. But when I got to die that second time, I got to go home and I was having a good day.
Speaker 3:From that heart attack I was not afraid. I had not been afraid of death since the day I came back, and so I came back with an after effect of courage. I came back with an after effect of kindness and compassion. I came back with a trouble with electricity, with lights and radio waves. I see into people. I came back with this beam of love that I had to close because it was too crazy making for people. Everybody thought I was falling in love with them. I wasn't, I was just loving them with this love and so I had to kind of pull back on that. All these people were falling in love with me all the time and it was crazy. Yeah, there's tons of after effects, and the most important after effect was my longing to go home, my loss, my bereavement, and that bereavement drove me on my interior path, which brought me into the deep studies that I began when I was at Divinity School and then continued on in my life. But they mostly influenced my meditative practice, my interior journey.
Speaker 2:Now were family and friends. I'm sure they had a near-jerk reaction when you went from being in architecture. Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm sure they had a near jerk reaction when you went from being an architecture oh yeah, and you know an architect. And then all of a sudden, you know you're into, you know this deep sense of deeply spiritual person. You know you're, you're, you're doing a lot of Eastern medicine, eastern medicine practices of, literally. I mean, you know just this personal experience led you to a completely different path that your family and your friends just couldn't comprehend, correct?
Speaker 3:No, and I kept it a secret for 20 years, so they never knew why. Because I didn't want to. I didn't want to be, I knew it was crazy sounding, I didn't want to be troubled by commitment, uh, and being committed to some institution well, I'm sure what I mean.
Speaker 2:Being a parent of my kid knew. But you I I mean you know in if from an architect to something else nobody's like.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah, yeah, Everybody was wondering.
Speaker 2:You kept it a secret. You never said hey, nothing.
Speaker 3:So I was at the time I was an undergraduate in the English department at UMass, amherst, but I've been studying, but I've been working construction. I've been pushing it. My dad's an architect I've been at the drafting board, you know, pushing a pencil, doing whatever he wanted me to do or whatever I was capable of doing my whole life. And I was working in construction so that I could know how the bones of building from the inside out. And then I was going to go to graduate school. I got accepted at Georgia Tech, where my sister was had just finished her architecture degree, and so the you know I was going into the family business and it was my senior year of college, and so I was going to be going to graduate school in architecture. And that summer my dad sent me out on this job to go. There was a mall being built in my city and he sent me out to this property. It was a wilderness property, basically outside of Boston, and I had to survey it and tell them what was there, and so I surveyed this. It might have been 15 acres or so, and I'm in the middle of this meadow and this woodland and I take off my shoes and I feel the energy of the earth and the butterflies are talking to me and the trees have whispers and the clouds are beautiful. And the butterflies are talking to me and the trees have whispers and the clouds are beautiful, and the bees are landing on me and I and I have this total communal experience with nature. And I go back to my dad and I say, dad, I, I'm, I, this is, this is what's on the property, but I'm not going to grad school, I'm not going to architecture school, I can't do this. I can't. I can't go in and kill wilderness areas. I can't't do it. It's alive.
Speaker 3:And a long time later, 30 years later this is maybe 10 years ago after I came out, I asked my mom and my dad so you remember that summer that I came back from Montana? And my mom says, yeah, you were really different. I said how? So? She said, well, it wasn't that you weren't before, peter, but somehow you were suddenly so much kinder and compassionate. You were just much more attentive. You were. You were like a different guy and we wondered. We didn't know what happened to you. I told them that I'd been on the mountain. All right, they knew the story. I came back with a stutter. I was pretty severely damaged by all this. I still have residual physical problems from this night.
Speaker 3:And and so they knew that. They knew that that thing happened. But they didn't know that the other thing happens because I, I, I didn't have any language for it and B I was afraid if I talked about it they'd all think I was crazy. Knew, all of my friends knew, my girlfriend dumped me. My girlfriend dumped me, um, and it was I. I lost a lot of friends, I, I became a very different person. It was, it was disconcerting for everybody around me.
Speaker 3:And so then I go off to divinity school, um, I study mysticism, which they, they don't teach at yale. Okay, they have classes on it, but it's not like a degree. So I go to the dean of students and I talked her into letting me do an independent study for three years under her guidance of mysticism. And she never asked me why, and she's. I still talk to her. She's 93 years old. I call her up on the phone every couple of months because she totally changed my life and, uh, so at the end of those three years I was going to go, I was studying.
Speaker 3:I should tell you what I was studying East and West, I was trying to find language. I was trying to find peers, people who were like me, people who had similar experiences. I was trying to find language to think about it, and I was trying to find meditative tools to use for my own journey, because all I wanted to do was die and go home, and I was praying for my own death every day. I want to go home, I want to go home, I want to go home. And so at the end of my three-year study with her, at the end of two and a half years, I guess she said no, you know, peter, I've been watching you, you're very compassionate, you're really good with people. I think you ought to be a minister.
Speaker 3:I'm like, I don't want to be a freaking minister, and this is a Protestant school too. So I'm Catholic Orthodox. I'm like an alien already, and I'm plus, I'm doing yoga. I'm doing. I'm like the only person who's 19 in the early eighties. I'm the only person doing yoga in the library, out on the, out on the lawn in the chapel, and everybody thinks I'm a crazy guy. And um, she talked me into becoming a minister. So I became a United Church of Christ minister for 18 years hid inside the church and I came out to everybody after this major embezzlement in the town, in the church, Long story. But at the end of all of that I decided that the people, finally I could trust them with the truth and in the meanwhile, I'd only told my wife in 20 years and one other person Really Yep.
Speaker 2:Such an amazing story and such a beautiful story which everybody can read, and heaven is beautiful. It's a bestseller. The three things that I love about it resilience, spirituality and something that we all need, inner peace.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah, wicked, inner peace, beautiful. It's being made into a feature film. I just spent 10 days in December in Pacific Palisades meeting with my producers, just before the fire. God bless them all. So it's happening. Who's going to gonna play you? I can't tell you, but I, I can tell you, I can tell you it's a hot young thing. Um, I can tell you, it's, uh, an a-lister okay, good man, it's a.
Speaker 2:Are we looking at like a major motion picture release or netflix?
Speaker 3:they're talking well, they don't really know exactly where it's going to land, but they're talking about a feature film with a significant budget.
Speaker 2:Okay, great. I mean, I love movies on spirituality, and the best part about it is that you were, you always had that. It was always within you. You were a very spiritual person. It makes you wonder, though, like what the experience would be for like uh uh agnostic or like an atheist. What, what would their near death experience be? It's a great question.
Speaker 3:I got buddies like that who, uh, 70% of us agnostics, atheists, religious people come back talking about two words love and light. And this guy, jose, he became, he was like an electrician and he had this near-death experience. I think he was electrocuted and he became a painter and he's a beautiful painter. Is he the painter? No, no, I'm thinking of Nancy Nancy's the painter. Is he the painter? No, no, I'm thinking of Nancy Nancy's the painter. She was also an atheist and it's transformative.
Speaker 2:Being a Catholic, I have to ask you this yeah, Do you think when you die there's the Jesus, the St Peter, the God, or is that just open to our own interpretation?
Speaker 3:I think they're symbolic of people who've had near-death experiences and they're trying to put it in language in a way that people can understand, and so it becomes personified and metaphorized and symbolized and that, if you look at all the, there are 10 to 20 million near-death experiences in the united states alone right now. Wow, and and you, probably, everybody probably knows somebody, but most of us aren't talking about it because it's embarrassing, people are afraid to be judged, and so some people meet Jesus. I haven't heard anybody meet St Peter yet my namesake, by the way. I think that in the moment of your death, you're gonna find out for yourself and what you're gonna discover is that your original self is made of light and love and you've always been beloved.
Speaker 2:There's not for eternity well, there's definitely just that we are. We are all souls, we are all infinite, the possibilities of us are infinite, which which is a beautiful thing. So heaven is beautiful. Where can we buy this book? Barnes and Noble Amazon, now. Where can we find you?
Speaker 1:I know YouTube is a great place.
Speaker 2:Is there anything anywhere else where we can just watch and hear these amazing stories? Because you're an amazing storyteller, by the way.
Speaker 3:Thank you. I'm at PeterPanagorlove, peterpanagorlove and I help people. Half of my job is telling stories about spirituality, about near-death experience, about mysticism, and the other half of my job is counseling people who have had these mystical and spiritually transformative experiences to help them integrate emotionally, psychologically, spiritually and in relationships, because it's very disruptive and troublesome, as beautiful as it is. It's very disruptive and troublesome, as beautiful as it is. It's otherwise too, but I'm at peterpanagorelove and I've been interviewed by lots of podcasters.
Speaker 2:The full story is all over the Internet. You know, it's just an amazing story and it's something that all of us eventually will have to experience, and most of us are just fearful of death A lot of times. That's what's stopping people from truly living their life, because they always fear the worst case scenario. We always fear even rejection would lead to death. I mean, I couldn't. I was so fearful, fearful, just living in fear, because my mom raised me that way that, you know, all roads led to death. Even getting rejected by a woman somehow would. I would get humiliated by the whole town, the whole city of Miami, and everybody would find out.
Speaker 1:But no, you know that's Everybody would find out.
Speaker 2:But no, you know that's. It's reassuring to hear that you know From you, because that's what a lot of people you know we all have to. We all hope, you know, we all have faith and we all hope that the agnostics and the atheists aren't right. That you know you just die, black light and roll credits and the story and there's nothing left of us but to know that there's there's an actual soul and that they're. I mean, you were in the waiting room but you know that that's. That's you still like the? The golden ticket to Willy Wonka, cause you got to experience that and you got to experience it twice.
Speaker 3:I did Um, and each time it it radically changed me and I know people are afraid. That's why I wrote the book in the first place. It's why I became a minister. I spent a lot of my ministry when I was a clergy person helping people die and helping people grieve because everybody's so afraid but there's really nothing to be afraid of.
Speaker 3:It is, and I know that it's easy to tell your kid. Your kid screams in the middle of the night there's a monster in the room and you go in. There's no monster. Look, there's no monster, don't be afraid. And the kid can't stop being afraid. Telling them doesn't make a difference, sitting there holding their hand that might make a difference till they fall asleep. So that's kind of the way I look at it. I'm here to help people find a little hope, hold their hand I've held a lot of hands of people dying and help guide them across. I looked at my ministry as a clergy person, as a midwife of death. I helped people cross over and tried to make it gentle for them and make it gentle for the people who were grieving, which is pretty hard. But I wrote the book to give hope.
Speaker 2:But I wrote the book to give hope. Now, peter, do you think it's all marketing per se? All our religions that say if you don't follow us, there's eternal damnation? That you know? All, all religions, all light leads to glory.
Speaker 3:I think that all religions I'm sure I know that all religions are founded by mystics, people who have had these major near-death or near-death-like experiences, and they start talking about it and then religion forms around them and theology develops by people who have not had these experiences, experiences, and it becomes more about power and control and right thought. Think this way, believe this thing and you'll be saved. And it's helpful to a lot of people. It's not saying that it's not helpful to lots of people, um, but it's uh. You just look at the history of religion. That's all you have to do. And it's not just the catholics and the protestants okay, it's, it's to do. And it's not just Catholics and the Protestants okay, it's the Sikhs and the Hindus, it's the Buddhists and the Taoists. They've all been at each other's throat one way or another. But it's not the mystics who are doing it, it's not the people of love, it's not Rumi, it's not the. You know the, the it's.
Speaker 3:Religion has its positive nature and its negative nature, but the problem is is belief? You have to. You have to if right belief opens the door. Well, if you look at the history of christianity, you know, if you look at modern american christianity. There are people who, oh, you're not a Christian, you're going to hell. Well, I go to church every week. Well, you have the wrong church, you have the wrong—.
Speaker 2:That's all of us, from the original church, catholicism, all the way down to Protestants and, you know, especially, evangelicals. If you don't go to my non-denominational church, you're going to. You go to hell, or you know I hey, do you want to go to my church? No, I'm Catholic. That's not being a Christian.
Speaker 3:My church is.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and it's like and if you think about it in the grand scheme of things, when you talk about the foundations of each religion, this is more of a selling point, because I couldn't see you know the original, whether Jesus or the apostles and all that, saying, hey, if it's not this way, go F off. And that's pretty much how you know we need to change the way. Okay, you go to mass or you go to service, that doesn't give that's one hour or two hours of your week. That doesn't mean you go to Denny's or go wherever and treat the hostess and treat the waitress and treat everybody else like crap and then judge everybody. Treat the waitress and treat everybody else like crap and then judge everybody. That's, you know that. That, that's my, that that's. That's something that we all need to reflect on as man and we just have to which you know plenty of it just to love love unconditionally and like what Jesus said to love anybody can love their friend, but to love the people you hate, that's the real challenge in all of us.
Speaker 3:And the trick is to see the light inside yourself. When you see the light, when you actually see and experience the light inside yourself, then you can't help but see the light and experience the light in others. And when you can see the light in others, they can still be your enemy, but you don't have to hate them. And they might be your enemy only because they have their own agenda and you're in the way of it. But there's this thing that supersedes all of that is when one sees the living light. And I lived this. This isn't theoretical for me.
Speaker 3:I had enemies during this whole embezzlement thing. I was a target of powerful people who were trying to destroy me and they were my enemies and they declared that I was their enemy. But I couldn't help but love them anyway. I did everything I could to win the battle, win the day. I even pierced my ear, because this is when I was a minister. I pierced my ear and wore an earring, just because it pissed him off, I'm sure. So I was trying to disrupt whatever I could, but I couldn't hate them.
Speaker 3:And it's not because I chose not to, it's because I found inside myself the light itself. And once you find the light inside yourself. You can't help but see it everywhere you go. And there's this universal nature of this light. It is in everything, everywhere, all the time. And if you're stepping out in nature, if you're, if you're all upset and you and you got to cool off, you go outside, you stand in nature, you kick your shoes off, you stand in the grass and suddenly you're like it's because nature has this the divine energy pours right out of it, soothing to your soul you know, I can talk to you just because you're such an amazing person for such a forever and ever, because you come from a place of love which we all need to do more of and you're very engaging and amazing storyteller, pete.
Speaker 2:any last words of wisdom just for people in general.
Speaker 3:Pete any last words of wisdom just for people in general. Sure, in your private life, in your personal life, in your business life, in your public life, if you have the willpower to develop a practice of meditation, you'll find you're a better person in every circumstance. You're more capable of clear thought, you're more present to the people who are around you. You're a better leader. If you can practice a meditation, if you could find some way to practice a meditation thing, if everybody practiced a meditation thing as their life of prayer, there'd be peace among people. And the other thing is you don't have to worry about mysticism or meditation. All you have to do is love the people that you're with. Just love, be kind, or meditation.
Speaker 2:All you have to do is love the people that you're with. Just love, be kind. Well, thank you. Amen to that one. Peter Pagor best-selling book. Almost said the Italian version, had to catch myself. That's worth a pause. Heaven is Beautiful. How Dying me that death is just the beginning. Thank you for your time. Thank you for everything. Buy it. Buy it on Amazon, buy it at Barnes and Noble. It's an amazing story. It's a book. It's a book a testament on faith, on resilience. Just be a better person. Especially times like these, we need more love and less judgment. Thank you for your time, peter.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Omar. Thanks for having me. Peace to all you people out there voice no more.
Speaker 1:The hardest prison to escape is our own mind. I was trapped inside that prison all for a long time. To make it happen, you gotta take action. Just imagine what if it did work.