Peter Panagore Transcript: The Hell of My Own Making and the Oneness of Being

Peter Panagore Interview

Summary

Peter Panagore describes childhood mystical experiences, out-of-body encounters, meditation, and near-death experiences that reshaped his understanding of consciousness and death. The discussion also considers why unusual spiritual experiences are often dismissed and how accepting them can change one’s view of life, mortality, and spiritual practice.

Questions This Interview Explores

• What do near-death and out-of-body experiences reveal about consciousness and life after death?
• How can childhood mystical experiences be understood and supported?
• Can meditation lead to direct experiences of spiritual reality?
• How does believing in continued existence after death change the way we live?
• Why do people often hide or doubt their spiritual experiences?

Key takeaways

• Death is experienced as a transition rather than the end of consciousness.
• Life can seem brief when viewed within the larger span of existence.
• Meditation can loosen identification with the false self and deepen spiritual awareness.
• Mystical experiences may occur naturally, even in childhood.
• Unusual spiritual experiences are often hidden because people fear disbelief or judgment.
• Spiritual insight carries a responsibility to give its gifts away.

Transcript

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done nearly 500 of them now, and if you would like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com—B-A-T-G-A-P—and look under the Past Interviews menu.

This show is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. I say listeners because it also exists as an audio podcast. So, if you appreciate it and would like to support it, there’s a PayPal button on every page of the site, and there’s also a page about other ways to donate if you don’t like dealing with PayPal.

My guest today is the Reverend Peter Panagore. Peter has a Master of Divinity from Yale University. He had two near-death experiences, which transformed his life, and we’re going to be talking about those, but also about some other things, because his life was already sprinkled with interesting spiritual experiences before he died.

The first of his near-death experiences was while ice climbing near Banff, Alberta, in 1980, and the second was in 2015, when a congenital heart condition caused him to have a heart attack. He’s been practicing Zazen and Centering Prayer, and also Kundalini and Kriya Yoga, for 40 years.

For 15 years, he hosted a daily television broadcast reaching 30 million views a year across Maine and New Hampshire, in which he told inspirational devotional stories. Before that, he served as a United Church of Christ minister and pastor in Maine and Connecticut, and published 150 sermons and many prayers.

His second book is called—and I have a picture of it; I’ll flash it on the screen here—Heaven Is Beautiful: How Dying Taught Me That Death Is Just the Beginning, and it’s an Audible bestseller. His first book, Two Minutes for God, is a bestselling inspirational devotional book. Peter runs a global spiritual counseling service and travels as an inspirational speaker and teacher.

Just before we start, since we’re going to be talking about NDEs, or near-death experiences, today, I just want to take a minute to explain why I consider these experiences relevant to the theme of spiritual awakening, and thus to the theme of this show. I just wrote out a little paragraph here of some thoughts I want to express.

I consider spirituality to be not just the aspiration to know ultimate reality or one’s true nature, although it very much is that, but also to understand the subtle mechanics of creation, at least those relevant to the process of spiritual awakening. Such knowledge safeguards one’s path and may improve one’s effectiveness as a teacher, should one become a teacher.

For instance, some spiritual teachers reason that there is no personal self ultimately, and that therefore life after death and reincarnation can’t exist because there’s no one to survive physical death or to reincarnate. If they teach such views to their students, how will it influence their spiritual journey? What if they’re 80 years old or dying of cancer and feel they are far from spiritual awakening? Will they feel that their life has been in vain, and that they will die and cease to exist without having attained life’s highest goal?

Contrast this with someone who realizes that the death of the body is just a milestone on a long journey, and that whatever spiritual progress they have made in this life will carry on, either into the next life, if that’s the way it works, or whatever. It will carry on. So, anyway, I just wanted to express that thought, and maybe as a start I can get Peter’s response to those thoughts.

Peter: Well, I learned when I was dead that I continue on, so I have no problem whatsoever if somebody’s teaching the other thing, because from my point of view, they’re going to find out when they die. And so I’ve never been about evangelizing, because everybody’s going to find out the moment that it happens to them.

Rick: That’s true. I often think that it’s kind of amusing, in a way, that hardcore atheists who are materialists are going to have a bit of a pleasant surprise—hopefully pleasant—when they die. They’ll go, “Wait a minute!”

Peter: Right. “He was right!”

Rick: “Now I can’t… How do I tell him now?”

Peter: Maybe they know. Maybe they can figure that out.

Rick: Yeah, like in the movie Ghost. They can go find Whoopi Goldberg and communicate with their friends and tell them they’re still around.

Visitation Dreams from Deceased Loved Ones

Peter: Yeah, well, that happens a lot, actually. Visitation and dreams from deceased loved ones are frequent occurrences. When I was a pastor, people started whispering to me, “My aunt—I saw her in the kitchen doing dishes. She looked at me, and I had this incredible feeling of telepathic love, and I knew that all was well with her.”

People don’t talk about it much because it’s kind of kooky, but it happens all the time.

Rick: Yeah, various polls have been taken by Pew and by—who’s that other famous pollster in New Jersey? I forget. I met him once. George… It’s not coming to mind. But anyway, they’ve done polls about people having these kinds of experiences, and they’re very common—I mean, extremely common. So it’s a little weird that there should be any stigma about having them, or any fear about telling others you’ve had them, it seems to me.

Peter: Well, I think that there’s a reason why there’s a stigma, and I think it’s a biblical reason. I think it goes back to—I want to say Deuteronomy, but I’ll just say the Hebrew Scriptures. There’s a passage about how it’s bad to cavort with mediums, spirits, and all that kind of stuff.

So there’s a prohibition built into the culture to distrust the direct experience of the transcendent—that’s mediated through pretty much anything, really. I mean, once the Bible was zipped up and sewn shut, the Western church took the perspective of, “That’s it. No more revelation. No more direct communication.” And that is also true of these experiences that so many people have about a deceased loved one coming back and communicating that all is well.

Rick: Yeah, although Christian iconography and art of various kinds are full of images of otherworldly things—angels and devils and all kinds of stuff that we don’t ordinarily see around us. So it’s there, and obviously not only in Christian Scripture. I mean, the very birth of Jesus—you know, the shepherds were visited by angels in the field and were fearful, and were told to relax. It’s not a bad thing that’s about to happen.

There are so many stories like that in every single spiritual tradition. So it’s a bit of a schizophrenic attitude.

Peter: Yeah, I agree, 100 percent. Yep.

Rick: Yeah. Anyway, I guess the main point we’re getting at here is that there’s more to life than the snap of the fingers that our 70 or 80 years on Earth is represented by. And if that is true—which I believe it is, and have experienced that it is—then it would behoove people to get to know about that. It changes your whole perspective, does it not?

Peter: It completely changes your perspective, because you begin to understand the temporal nature of all reality, including yourself. It’s all passing away, and especially us. I mean, the cosmos is going to last another how many billions of years? But each individual consciousness, each person—we get a short time here.

If we begin to understand that this is just a passage through physical experience, and that we had a beginning before and that we have existence after, we have existence before and existence after, we’ve got this little bridge. Here, it seems like this bridge is really long, but when I was dead, it was that big, and it was—pop! I thought, “Oh my gosh, that’s the length of my life: the wink of an eye.”

The length of my life: the wink of an eye.

Rick: Well, when you consider the time span of geologic time or astrophysical time and so on—

Peter: It’s nothing. Humanity’s existence on the planet as Homo sapiens is nothing.

Rick: Yeah. They do these things where, if you take the length of the universe as a 24-hour clock, humanity has shown up in kind of the last seconds of the last minute on that clock.

Peter: Yeah, yeah. So it seems to me to be a fallacy to think that we’re the most important thing there is.

Rick: All right, we’re going to get into a lot of things here. In fact, the person who recommended that we interview you said, “Oh, his near-death experience is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s much more.” So we’ll get into everything we can.

From what I understand, having read much of your book and listened to some other interviews, you had a proclivity for spiritual experiences or unusual experiences even from your childhood. Perhaps it would be interesting for you to recount a few of those.

Peter: Well, it kind of came unexpectedly when I was maybe five or six years old. My parents had had another boy. The fourth child to be born was the baby, and at some point he moved into my room, which upset me. Now I had to share this room. I was five or six years old.

I remember early on, when he moved into my room—and I loved my brother, okay? If you’re listening, David, I love you.

Rick: I’m glad you’re not in my room anymore, but otherwise…

Peter: Well, it’s mutual. It’s mutual, okay? So my brother moved into my room, and it was a small room that I had, and I was suddenly sharing it with this little baby. He always went to bed before me, and my new bedtime routine was to do it in the dark with my mom.

She would always tuck me in, kiss me, we’d say a little prayer, and she’d leave the door open six inches, with the night-light on in the hallway. I fell asleep like I always did. Then one night, early on, when he was living in my room—and I love my brother, just to be clear—I heard, “Peter, Peter.”

So I awoke to that, and as I sat up in bed, I heard, “Peter, Peter.” But it was a voice I’d never heard before, and it was compelling to me. I turned and looked, and as I looked around the room, the room was the color of sepia tone. It was illuminated, even though there were no lights on. It was all this coppery color.

I kept hearing my name called, and I got out of bed. As I got out of bed and put my feet on the floor, I happened to look to my left, and there I was, asleep in my bed. The covers were over me, and I was sound asleep. I stared for a while at myself, but I wasn’t afraid. I was in wonderment.

A Child’s Encounter with a Guiding Elephant

I kept hearing my name called: “Peter, come here. Peter, come here.” So I moved forward to peek out through the doorway, which was open six inches, but I didn’t see anything. I kept hearing my name, and I went to touch the door to open it, but my hand passed through the door.

So I kept hearing my name and felt called, and I passed through the door. I went into the hallway, where the light was off because everybody was in bed asleep, and the doors were all closed. I went to the edge of the stairwell. The stairs went down six or seven steps, and then there was a right-angle turn and a landing.

On the landing, there was a little baby elephant. The little baby elephant was speaking to me telepathically, calling me, and motioning with its trunk for me to come down. It was covered in Indian clothing.

Rick: You know about Ganesha, don’t you?

Peter: I do, and at the time, I didn’t then. I was a little tiny boy, and I was raised Orthodox Catholic, Roman Catholic, and Greek Orthodox. Ganesha—I had never seen an elephant. And so I went down the stairs, and I floated down the stairs to the elephant. When I got to the elephant, it was expressing love, compassion, and wisdom through its eyes.

Its eyes were—there were no pupils, there were no irises, there was no white of the eye. They were just black. And the blackness of the eyes, as I looked into them, was like looking into an everlasting expanse of beauty and feeling love and compassion coming from this little tiny elephant. It expressed inside me what I felt was belovedness and trust. I trusted it, and it said to me, “Now go down the stairs. Go…” It took its trunk and pointed down the stairs, and I went down the stairs, floated down the stairs into the front hall.

It told me, communicating to me constantly, inside myself, “Go through the doors.” I passed through the door with the curtain on it and the screen door, and out onto the little porch and down the steps. Keep going. I went down the steps, down the walkway, out into the middle of the road.

I lived in a sort of 1910 cul-de-sac, and so there was no traffic ever. There was a woodland behind us, and I’m in the middle of the road, and it says to me, “Now look up.” So I look up into the starry night sky, and suddenly the starry night sky becomes eternal, and I see into—I see infinity. I see an expanse that I was incapable of seeing from where I was. It suddenly expanded into infinity and eternity, and I became frightened, and I popped back into my bed.

So now I’m awake in my bed, and I’m wide awake in my bed, and I think, “What has happened?” It’s dark in my room, but I’m all worked up. And so I do something I’m not allowed to do except to get up and go to the bathroom. I get up out of my bed, open the door, and go to the bathroom, just so in case I get caught, everybody would know, “I went to the bathroom, Mom.”

But the first thing I did before I went to the bathroom was look over the stairs to see if the elephant was there. The elephant wasn’t there. I went in the bathroom, went to the stairs, went down the stairs, crept around the house, looked in the living room, looked in the kitchen, looked in the dining room, went back upstairs, and went into my sister’s room—which I wasn’t allowed in at all, ever, but I went in there. Andrea’s asleep, Cynthia’s asleep.

I closed the door and sneaked to my parents’ room. I listened at the door. I didn’t hear anything. I went over to the railing—there was this railing with these spindles, and I dangled my feet over—and I just stayed there for, I don’t know, a long time, looking and wondering what had happened to me, because I knew something had happened to me. I must have spent an hour there.

I did other stuff hanging around, but I kept wondering if the elephant would come back. Then I went to bed. I got tired, went to sleep, and never told anybody about it, because what was I going to say? “I popped out of my body, and I met an elephant.” That’s nice, right? “Have some more peas. Eat your peas. You had a dream. Move on.”

I kept it to myself. Later that year or a year later—it’s kind of fuzzy, the timing of it—we had a little maple tree in my front yard, and it was my tree to climb because I could get into the lower branches. It was my safe space.

My brother was sleeping because he was the baby. My mother was ironing. “Go outside and play, Peter.” So I went outside, went into the front yard, climbed the tree, and sat in the tree.

I heard the same voice inside me. I heard it from behind me, and inside me, a singular voice said to me, “You belong to me. You’re mine. You work for me. You’re mine.”

I was like, “Oh, okay. It’s God. God’s talking to me. An angel’s talking to me. Heaven’s talking to me.” There was no language to it. There were no actual words.

So I climbed down from the tree. I went into the house, and my mom was ironing the clothes. I was banned from being inside, and she said, “What are you doing in here, Peter?”

“Well, something happened.”

“Okay. Tell me what happened. Don’t wake the baby.”

I told her, “God—an angel came to me and told me that I belonged to God and that I was going to work for God, and I think I’m going to be a priest, Mom,” because, Catholic or Orthodox, that was one sort of way to do this thing.

She said, “Oh, really? Well, then you’re going to need to learn. You’re going to be living alone for the rest of your life. You won’t be a married housewife.”

This was like 1966, okay? My mom was ironing my dad’s shirts or shorts or something for work, and she said, “You’re going to need to learn to do this stuff for yourself. You’re going to need to iron, do your laundry, sew, and clean the house. Today, you could begin by dusting, because you came in.”

So I ended up starting my—and I still dust and clean—but it was the beginning of my independence and punishment. Whenever I was disobedient, I always cleaned the house.

Rick: So what do you make of that whole experience now?

Peter: Well…

Rick: The elephant and the stuff that—the fact that you had these experiences. I mean, you must have thought about them over the years. What do you…

Peter: Well, they were always an anomaly to me, and then there were a couple more that happened a year before I died. Only in hindsight do I understand now what their meaning was.

But I can say this about it: I seem to have been born a mystic. It seems that maybe it’s in my DNA, maybe it’s in my soul, or some combination of these two things. But there seem to be people in the world—and I’ve met others like me—who seem to just have this happen to them.

God somehow calls them, or their soul is advanced enough, or whatever that is. I don’t really understand it. I just know that it’s like a talent. It’s like I was born with this thing, and I am able to use it. That’s really kind of what it is.

And it’s isolating, because there I was, a six-year-old, and I knew that I was not my body. I didn’t travel very far; I saw very deeply. But from that day forward, I was always sort of on the outside.

I think it was around that time that I started not talking much. My parents nicknamed me “Silent Pete” because I just didn’t say anything. I was kind of in wonderment a lot.

Rick: Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I was going to say I envy you, and I don’t want to envy you. But kids should be supported if they have such experiences and not dismissed as kooky or crazy or overly imaginative or something like that, because I think you and I would agree that everyone has the capacity or the potential to have deeper insights.

A lot of times, people are dismissed when they have them, and then they kind of clam up. I mean, I’ve interviewed a number of people who saw angels as a child or had some kind of mystical experiences, and the adults just didn’t get it, so they stopped talking about it and eventually lost the ability, which is a shame.

Peter: I agree with you that we should be more open in our society when we’re talking about the things that we don’t understand. My parents didn’t—I didn’t tell them, so they didn’t know, except my mom knew about the angel. But nobody knew about the preceding experience. I kept that to myself.

Why I kept it to myself—maybe because I didn’t understand it, maybe because it seemed special to me, and speaking about it would somehow lessen the experience. Maybe if I talked about it, nobody would believe me, and then I would begin to doubt myself. It’s true.

Rick: I don’t think they would have believed you. Most of them would have just felt you had too much spaghetti sauce for dinner or something, that you had a vivid dream.

Peter: Right. And it was unlike any other dream that I’d ever had, or had until I was in college. And we mentioned before we were on air—you mentioned Thomas Keating, the abbot from St. Joseph’s Abbey, outside of Boston, west of Boston. I went to a Catholic high school near there, a Catholic prep school. My religion teacher, my senior year, at the end of school, went to a retreat at the monastery and learned Centering Prayer, or meditation. She came back to our class and taught us how to do it.

I was adept at it from day one and began my daily practice from that time forward. I was the only one in my class who even liked it, let alone kept at it. And I find, over long practice, that it strips away, as Keating says, the false self, which allows more room for the divine to enter in.

I was adept at it from day one and began my daily practice from that time forward. I was the only one in my class who even liked it, let alone kept at it. And I find, over long practice, that it strips away, as Keating says, the false self, which allows more room for the divine to enter in.

Rick: Yeah. Okay, so let’s move on to your near-death experience. You were a big outdoorsman. You were really into skiing, hiking, climbing, and all that stuff, all year round, summer and winter. So you went on this adventure up in Canada. Take it from there.

Peter: Yeah, so I was a college student on exchange, hiding out from my family back East. My sister had vanished when I was a kid. I ran away from home, broke my mother’s heart, and I was escaping from family emotions. I didn’t want to go home to Boston for vacation. I found a buddy, a fellow who would go snow caving, backcountry skiing, and ice climbing. It was his trip, and I joined his trip.

Like you said, I’ve been an outdoorsman. It wasn’t the first winter trip I’d been on. So after our snow-caving tour, which lasted about eight days and was fantastic, we did this one day of ice climbing. Tim—I had been a technical climber on rock, but never on ice—was a lead climber on ice and rock.

We had all the gear. I had most of the gear winter-wise, and I borrowed what I couldn’t find. So I borrowed crampons. I had climbing boots that I bought.

Rick: Crampons are these spiky things that you put on your boots.

Peter: Spiky things. Actually, I rented those from the outing club.

Rick: Yeah, they strap onto your boots.

Peter: They’re there. Yeah, that’s a good description. They’ve got two points that look like fangs that come out, and then points that go down. So you can kick the fangs that are here into the ice. With the points that go down, you kind of lean back a little bit and get four points of contact on the ice. So you can toe-grip onto the ice.

I got an ice axe, and I couldn’t find another one. So I had one ice axe; you need two. I found an ice…

Rick: I’m showing a picture of an ice axe on the screen right now. Your second thing was an ice hammer. I’m showing a picture of that on the screen right now.

Peter: They both have wrist straps on them. One of the hammers has the strap on the bottom, and the ice axe has a strap partway up. You can put your hand through the strap and slide a bead down—at least the one I had—and hang. You can set the axe, then let go and hang and rest.

But the hammer—you have to hang onto this thing because it’s really not useful. Its primary use is not climbing. It’s putting in screws, taking screws out, and chipping ice away. But you could use it in a pinch.

Tim and I decided we wanted to do this climb. I didn’t have enough ice axes; I only had the one. But we did it anyway. That was our fatal choice, because it’s a world-famous climb. It’s just between Jasper and Banff in Western Canada, and there were maybe eight or ten or twelve other teams there that day climbing.

We made our ascent, but because I had a hammer and an axe, it slowed our ascent down significantly, so that we reached the top of the climb—maybe 500 feet, something like that—at dusk. All the other teams had already descended and were leaving. I watched them walk out. They weren’t even on the ice anymore by the time we got to the top.

At that point, we knew that we were in trouble because the sun was setting and the temperature was dropping fast. We had eaten up our food. It was a day climb. We didn’t bring up a stove or a tent or any of that kind of stuff. And we were soaked because it’s a wet sport.

A Mountaineering Emergency in Freezing Darkness

Tim hauled up the rope pretty fast, and it became a 300-foot knot. Hypothermia set in. I got a clattering jaw, like in a cartoon where that’s a real thing. I had to get the rope untied, so I took off my gloves and began getting frostbite pretty immediately because I had to untangle the rope.

As we talked about what we would do, we knew that our situation was desperate. We were sitting on a ledge. Our legs were dangling over it. There was maybe about 10 or 15 feet behind us—a wall that went up. The mountain kept going. We were only 500 feet up. Behind us, maybe 10 feet away, was this wall.

We got hypothermia; it was starting to set in. I was on the National Ski Patrol at Bridger Bowl. I’d been on the ski patrol since I was a freshman in high school—not at Bridger Bowl, but elsewhere. I was trained. I was a first responder, a ski patrol guy.

I was observing to Tim that we had hypothermia and that we were getting frostbite. So we decided that we were going to die there if we stayed. We might die if we tried to get off. We talked about snuggling up against the cliff and kind of cuddling for warmth, but decided that both of our core temperatures were so low that, being wet and shivering and shaking, we were never going to get warm.

If we did that, we were going to die. The only choice we had was to try to get off the cliff. The sun had set. The moon had not risen at this point. There were a bazillion stars of every color imaginable filling the sky. So there was some light, kind of black and white, enough light to see by.

Tim roped up. We took the same rope. He roped in front of me. I roped behind him, maybe 10 or 15 feet, put on our gear, and in the dark, the semilight, traversed to the first rappel.

We decided not to speak unless it was absolutely necessary, to conserve whatever energy we had for our survival. We knew that we were in serious, serious trouble.

We got to the first rappel. This particular place had a spruce tree or some kind of small fir tree. You’re supposed to take a piece of nylon webbing, wrap it around the tree, put the rope through the webbing, and throw the rope over the edge so that when you pull the rope through at the bottom, it slides.

But we were already beginning to lose our cognitive capacities. We decided that we didn’t want to waste a piece of webbing that cost money. We were poor, stupid, dumb college students losing our ability to think. So we threw the rope over the tree itself.

Tim descended down 100 feet. There’s an open space, so now you have to go through, kind of sliding down the rope. Your feet aren’t on the rock anymore; you’re just sliding down in space.

I got down to this platform area. It was probably about 12 by 12 feet or something like that. Snow was up to my knees. Tim was there. At this point, my coordination was gone. I was in a state where my lips were frozen, my feet were frozen, and my jaw was frozen. I couldn’t really talk; my lips were too hard to move. I wasn’t able to stand well. I was falling over in the snow.

Finally, Tim and I got our act together a little bit. He was helping me up, and we grabbed the rope to pull it through. The rope was stuck. It was frozen because the rope was wet.

Rick: It got caught on the tree.

Peter: Caught on the tree. It has rough bark, and we can’t get the thing loose. Both of us are hanging on this thing, and we just can’t get it loose. The night is getting colder. Our situation is getting more serious. Every minute that passes, we’re in more danger.

Rick: So you need to get the rope loose in order to attach it to a new thing, lower down, and then lower yourself down from that point?

Peter: Correct. Correct. Eventually, there were three rappels, and for each one, we had to use the same rope to descend down this whole length.

Tim knows a hitch called a Prusik hitch. Hitches are friction-based knots where, when you pull on them, they become super tight, and if you slack them, they become loose.

This particular hitch—we had this really superfine line with us. If you tie it on a rope with a big, huge loop, you can slide this thing up and slide the loop up for your foot. It’s an ascender’s hitch. When you step on it, it becomes 98 percent locked.

He knows this hitch. I don’t know this hitch. He ties two of them, one on this side of the rope and one on the other side of the rope, makes these huge loops, and steps one foot in, then the other foot in. He’s going to ascend back up because there’s really nothing else that we can do. Someone has to go up and get the rope free.

He’s the better climber. He’s the better rope guy. And he’s the leader. So bravely, courageously, he climbs up. I take the climbing rope, wrap it around my waist, kind of curl up in a spindle, and lay in the snow, trying to make these two lines as taut as possible.

Suddenly, I feel the rope move and hear him yell, “Falling!” In that instant, the rope is free. We coil up the rope. We’re ecstatic. Now we can move on to the next rappel.

At this point, we’re on the Icefields Parkway, which is this road that runs between Banff and Jasper along the Saskatchewan River. Right next to the river is the road, and right next to the road is this climb, so it’s very close to the highway.

This truck comes down the highway—its headlights, with no traffic all night—pulls into the parking lot, and turns to face us. It’s the warden because the night before, we had bribed the warden into letting us spend the night in his cabin with him. We signed into the log as we went out into the wilderness to climb the next morning, but we didn’t sign out with all the other teams at sunset.

At some time in the middle of the night, he came looking for us. He pulls into the parking lot and flashes his lights. Now the moon’s up, a three-quarter moon or so. We jump up and down and wave our arms. He flashes the lights, and we can see him and he can see us. We’re heartened. We’re like, “Oh my God, thank God. He knows we’re here. He’ll—you know… we’re going to make it. We’re going to make it.”

Rick: But there’s nothing he can do to help you, because he can’t climb the thing, and he can’t bring a helicopter in in the dark and whatnot.

Peter: Nope. Nope. But it was just enough to be known. It was enough to know that at least they know we’re here.

So we make the next traverse over to the next rappel. In this rappel, we’re off the ice. Now we’re on granite, and there’s an iron pin into the mountain with a ring on the pin. You run the rope through the ring and descend down this kind of craggy, rocky space.

I clip into the one closest to the rope, and Tim’s off to my left because he got there first. The warden flashes his lights and drives away because we’re only one rappel left. We’re 150 feet up. At the bottom is our tent and safety.

Now my feet are blocks of ice. They’re blocks of ice. My hands are hard to move. My fingers, my jaw, my lips—I’m frozen.

I take the other end of the line, called the bitter end. Ironically, I take the bitter end and toss it out to the side with the intent to grab the line and pull it through. I grab the line, and it’s freaking jammed. The first yank—it’s stuck. I pull it a couple of times, and I’m sure it was in a cleft. The rope just got tighter and tighter every time I pulled.

We dove deep into our willpower. I don’t even know how to describe this. The drive for survival was so powerful inside me that I had a singular focus of my entire will. It was life. Everything was stripped down to living. Everything we did was driven by this will for survival.

We dove deep into our willpower. I don’t even know how to describe this. The drive for survival was so powerful inside me that I had a singular focus of my entire will. It was life. Everything was stripped down to living. Everything we did was driven by this will for survival.

I kept pulling on the rope, and then I got hot, which is the last stage before sleep. Even though I knew better, I lost my ability to reason. Craziness set in. Even though I knew that I wasn’t actually hot, that I was actually freezing, I didn’t really care. I unzipped my coat, which made this happen faster.

I realized that I wasn’t going to get the rope free and that I was going to die there. I remember looking out over the beautiful sky and the mountains that I could see in the distance.

I got up. I was peaceful. I was sad, but I was peaceful and accepting. I thought about my parents. My sister had run away and hurt my mom, and here I was—I was dying, and they were going to lose me. It was going to be worse for them.

Then I began to fall asleep. I would pull on the rope, fall asleep, collapse, hit the ledge, slide off the ledge, wake up, and pull myself back up. I’d pull on the rope and repeat. I don’t know how many times.

Then I pulled myself up. As I stood there, about to pull on the rope, this very wide black circle appeared in my peripheral vision—all the way around me, like a fade to black on a spotlight on a stage. This spotlight was coming in on me, and I couldn’t see any more of the world outside the edge of this collapsing black circle. It got smaller and smaller and smaller really rapidly, until it was all black.

I thought, “What is this? What is this thing?” When it went black, I thought, “Oh, it’s gone black.” I felt myself collapse, but I thought, “I’m still awake. I’m still conscious. I’m not asleep. Why am I not asleep? I should be asleep. I didn’t feel myself hit the rock. Did I hit the rock? Why am I awake? How come I can think?”

As I’m thinking all these thoughts, my vision—this blackness—becomes an infinite darkness. In this infinite darkness, at the greatest distance from me, I see an entity. I can hardly describe it to you. It’s a consciousness that is independent.

In an instant of a thought, from the 13.7-billion-year time span of the universe, from the Big Bang’s beginning, that far away and farther—in the space of a thought—it rushes toward me and expands to fill my entire horizon while also being very localized. It communicates to me telepathically, without language: “I’m taking you.”

I thought, “No, you’re not. I don’t know what you are, but you’re not taking me.” I took all this willpower, this drive to survive and strength of myself to be alive, and put up my will against it. It just took me, like my will was nothing.

I traveled with it. I traveled with it at the speed of thought. Then I was suddenly alone in a greater darkness that was illuminated.

This first fade to black was not illuminated darkness. It was just darkness. But this new place was darkness and illumination at the same time.

From here on out, I need to tell everybody that I’m speaking in metaphor, in concepts and in words, but there are no words there. There are no things. I was not a thing. I had no thingness. I had self-awareness as a consciousness, but I had no physicality. There was no thing there that I could conceive of as being a thing here.

I tell it in a sequence of events, but there was no sequence of events because there was no time. It wasn’t like it was out of time. It was like all time and no time at the same time. It was.

I’m now much bigger than I am. My physical Peter—and I know I’m big. I know that I’ve expanded. I am utterly unafraid. I’m completely calm. I’m content. I feel like this is me.

I am one big eyeball, I am one mind, I am one—my whole physicality of my spiritual soul, my consciousness, is all of me all at once. I’m an ear, I’m a tongue, I’m an eye, I’m every—I’m all of this, all at one thing. And I can see in every direction at once, and I’m alone and content, and I know that I’m in an eternal place.

And then a portal opens, like a doorway, a gigantic doorway, as an opening, like a womb opening. But it’s a tunnel, and this tunnel goes off into infinity. I look through this transparent and translucent opening, and I see this tunnel, and I know that I’m welcome to go through it.

And the first thing I do is touch this translucent flow. It’s this flowing, sort of shimmering, translucent, transparent covering. And I touch it with the beingness of my soul, of my consciousness, and it’s living. It has life in it. And as soon as I touch it, all—it’s not just like with a little “l”; it’s like living with a capital “L.” It’s the totality of all, all livingness. And it’s flowing of all energy, of all, of everything. And it flows into me.

And as it flows into me, I hear my name called, but it’s not Peter. I know that I’m a creature created by the Creator, and the calling of my name, which I cannot pronounce, but I know because there was no—it wasn’t a word; it was a description of my created being.

And I could see lots of things all at once. I could see that I was absolutely fully known, that there was nothing about Peter that was unknown, that my entire existence was fully absorbed. I knew by the all-knower—I could see that my consciousness, that I was sort of riding on the top of, was actually this long, long, sort of conical snake tail of my everlasting soul, extending back into the moment that my name was called into beingness as a photon of light, like a wave and a particle at the same time.

And I was spoken into being, and I had this soul form, and I could see my life passed before me. Only it wasn’t really before me. I watched all of the suffering that I gave every single person in my entire life from their point of view, times 10,000. With all the pain that I’d caused intentionally and all the pain I caused unintentionally—and there was more unintentional than there was intentional, because you just hurt people and you don’t know it.

But every single drop of pain that I’d caused was 10,000 times more than I thought it was. And so not only—I didn’t witness this from the outside; I witnessed it from the inside of the people that I hurt. I felt their feelings, times 10,000, simultaneously experiencing all of my justifications or reasons for causing that pain.

But every single drop of pain that I’d caused was 10,000 times more than I thought it was. And so not only—I didn’t witness this from the outside; I witnessed it from the inside of the people that I hurt. I felt their feelings, times 10,000, simultaneously experiencing all of my justifications or reasons for causing that pain.

Rick: Let me ask you a question here. Why should it be times 10,000? Because it was so brief and it had to be magnified in order to do it all in such a short flash of time, or what?

Peter: Maybe it seemed to me that the pain that I caused was much more extensive than I had any idea. That was what it seemed to me.

Rick: You weren’t a particularly bad guy. I mean, a pretty, pretty nice guy by some standards.

Peter: Right. I wasn’t a bad guy. I haven’t killed anybody or, you know, I wasn’t manipulating, narcissistic, you know, a sociopath, genocidal kind of—I was just a guy.

And simultaneous to experiencing all this pain that I caused, I was also experiencing all the justifications, and I judged myself shameful. I was not just ashamed of the pain that I had caused because now I knew that I had caused the pain. There was a bunch of other stuff going on.

I knew that all the love that I’d given away in my life was brought with me, was part of my treasure, and all the love that was given to me was part of my treasure. And somehow this lens of love allowed me to see the infinite amount of love that was the Divine. And it was in comparison to the Divine that I felt shame.

It wasn’t so much just that I hurt people. It was the purity of the One, the purity of perfection, was not me. And simultaneous to all of this, I could also see the structure of humanity’s sinfulness, which is causing—when we hurt other people, that’s what sin is. It’s hurting other folks.

And it seemed to me from this heavenly view that I had that the sins that I had committed were no worse or no better, no less or no greater, than anyone else’s. And that there was this equality of brokenness between all humanity.

And because I could see from a heavenly view that this is just the way we’re made, it’s not bad. It’s not good. It just is who we are. And it’s not really our fault that we’re made this way. Therefore—therefore forgivable.

And the voice—a nongendered voice with no breath and no words, no language, direct communication—was saying inside me simultaneously:

I love you. I’ve always loved you. You’re my beloved. I love you. I forgive you. I love you. I know you. I’ve always known you. I’ve known you since the moment of your creation. I love you. I’ve always loved you. And my love for you is a septillion times greater than anything you’ve ever experienced.

And so, you know, all this love that I brought with me, this little tiny bit of treasure, was nothing in comparison to the immensity of the Divine love, the abundant storehouse of love that exists everywhere, all the time, unending.

And so, was it the love that I brought with me, the key that allowed me to see this? It seems to me that the love that I brought home with me allowed me to see the Divine love, but that I needed to go through the hell of my own making.

I went through hell. And the hell that I went through was the hell that was the pain that I caused other people, but it was a necessary hell, because I needed the Divine fire of purgative love to cleanse me for what happened next.

I had not—I did not have enough room in me to be infilled with oneness. So I experienced God, the Divine, as the oneness of being, predominantly as beauty and love, but also joy and knowledge, information, data processing, wisdom, glory, awe, radiance, blissfulness, wholeness, health, truth—all smushed into one thing.

And that oneness entered into me, and I was infilled. I was already this large, expanded self, but I was like a balloon that was pushed even further, to the point of popping. Like, if I had one more drop of oneness infilling me, then I would have gone to the state of obliteration of being.

And it was beautifully painful. It’s sort of like—it’s like when, in pre-orgasm, where it’s so pleasurable, it’s almost painful. And that’s—but I was so to this place of awe and absorption of knowledge. Anything that I could want to know and did want to know was instantly downloaded into me. I had no brain in the way of my thinking. I processed information that fast, and I was beloved, utterly beloved.

Rick: It’s interesting, with all this that you’re describing, to contrast that with the doubt that skeptics usually air, which is that, “Oh, a near-death experience is just the reaction of a brain to oxygen deprivation as it’s dying.” I mean, how could oxygen deprivation result in experiences like this?

Peter: So what happened next was I was infilled, and I said to the voice, “Am I dead?” And the voice said, “Yes, you’re dead.” And I said, “Well, I haven’t gone through the portal yet.” And the answer was, “No, you haven’t, but come. Welcome, welcome.”

And I said, “But my parents, my parents, my sister’s ran away, my mom’s broken, it’s 10 years of suffering for her. I can’t take another child.” And in an instant of a thought, I was transported to Earth. I could see Earth like a hologram, and I could see every single person on Earth, 7 billion people, sleeping, eating, wars, violence, lovemaking, every single human action, all at once, everybody. And everybody’s covered by a veil.

And the voice says to me, “In the way that I now love you, you now know I have always loved you, eternally, was, is, and will be. And that my love is a trillion times anything you’d ever experienced, and that I love you in particular. My love is healing love, it’s wholeness love, it’s beauty love, and all is well with you, was well, is well, and will be well with you, eternally, because of my love. And so will be everyone, because my love is so vast.”

Then I could see my parents’ faces in particular, but I could also see their suffering on their faces. And I said, “Well, I got another reason. I was in this theater company. We’re leaving on this national tour. I made a promise to the director, who told me not to get hurt. There are no understudies—it’s a big show, it’s 24,000 miles, we can’t replace it, no understudies. So here I am dying. I’m not hurt, I’m dead. So I’m not even going to show up.”

I had made this promise, and God made no response. And I said, “Well, I still haven’t gone to the door yet.” And the voice said, “No, you haven’t.” And I said, “Well, do I have to go?” And the voice said, “No, I want you to come. You don’t have to go, but I want you. Come home now, come home.”

And I said, being the argumentative, troublemaking kind, “Well, if I go back to my life, can I come back here to this place of divine oneness of being?” And the voice said, “Yes, you can come back, because I love you.”

And I said, “Well, then I choose to live my life.” And the voice said, “You’re not going to live your life.”

Boom, I’m sent back. I felt myself approach my body from the outside, like I had no willpower over this. I had no choice over this. And I felt myself crushed down from this much larger self into this tiny, very uncomfortable package that was painful to be in, and screwed back into my body.

Suddenly I’m inside this physical form, and I know that I’m not this thing, and that I’ve been reduced into this crude corporeality of mortal frame. I don’t like it. I’m in pain, and I don’t even know how it works. Sound and feeling and movement—I’m completely at a loss in this thing.

At some point, I start to come up to the surface, and I hear this noise, and it becomes the voice of Tim, I later learn, screaming, “Don’t die, don’t die.” And he’s got me, and he’s jiggling my body.

At some point, I’m able to stand, and he gets me up. I don’t even really understand what he’s saying still. I’m looking at him, and I’m like, “What is this place? Where am I? Who am I? What is going on here? What are thoughts?”

I suddenly come clear, and I hear him say, “You were dead. You were dead. If you died, I’m going to die.”

I’m standing there, and at some point, he convinces me to work on the rope again. I pull the rope, and on the first pull, the rope comes free. He takes the rope, puts it through the pin and the ring again, like I described before. He unhooks himself, and he descends.

Because the car is right across the street, and because I’m trained in first response, we can’t just get in the car and fire up the heater. We get the tent, fire up the stove, heat up the tent, make warm water, get in our sleeping bags, and bring our body temperatures up slowly, slowly, until our feet can move and our hands can move. When we’re able to move again, then we get in the car and blast the heat.

The next morning, the warden shows up as we’re packing up our gear. He gets out of his truck and says to his boys, “Are you the boys in the mountain last night?”

“Yes, sir. We thank you for coming and seeing us.”

And he said, “Well, I came to see if I needed to get the helicopter to get your bodies off the mountain.”

I’m like, “Oh my God. That was serious?”

Tim—I didn’t mention this—is an atheist. So I can’t talk to him. We actually made a rule early on in the trip: no talking about God. And I’m a meditator. I’m reading the Tao Te Ching. He’s like, “No, let’s listen to jazz.”

Driving south of Calgary, we totaled the car, hit a semi, blew the car apart, spent the night in a hotel, and begged our way—the Mountie helped us get into the hotel.

I should also mention that before that even happened, we got arrested and spent time in jail for speeding, then bribed our way out of jail. Tim’s driving this whole time. I’m exhausted.

We’re driving south. I wake up in the middle of the night. I’m like, “Tim, you’re on the wrong side of the road.”

He’s like, “No, I’m not.”

I’m like, “Yeah, man. You’re on the wrong side of the road.” His headlight’s coming toward us.

He’s like, “Oh, oh.” He steers off.

He was on the wrong side of the road. I go to sleep. I wake up again. Then we hit the semi because I wake up and see we’re on the wrong side of the road again.

I’m like, “We’re on the wrong side of the road.”

He’s like, “No, we’re not.”

This time, I jerk the wheel. I reach over and just grab the wheel. I jerk it. Boom. Suddenly, we’re up. We’re off to the side of the road. We’re back over here.

We go past the front of the semi. Now we’re in slow motion. Everything’s flying around inside the car—cassette tapes and pens. It’s all going really slowly. We’re screaming. Stuff is flying by my head.

I see my life review this time, but only it’s like a movie. I see a movie go by me. Everything, the good and the bad, goes by my eyes like a movie.

We go past the front of the semi, right past the front end, up on our wheels and underneath the flatbed into the rear wheels, and blow the car apart by hitting the rear wheels.

The front of the car is totally shredded. I’m into the front side here, looking at the flatbed, which is this far up against the glass. I didn’t hit it. I’m bruised. I’m whiplashed. We’re not hurt otherwise—no broken bones, no blood.

The next morning, we split up. Tim is so angry at me for ruining his car. We have enough money for one bus ride back to Bozeman. He gets the bus ride with the skis because I totaled his car. I make a little sign that says “Bozeman” and stand out on the side of the highway.

I’m in a foreign country. I died. I don’t even understand what had happened to me. I have a stutter now. The car wreck gives me a stutter. I’m a nervous, crazy wreck. I’m wondering inside me.

While all this is happening on the outside, inside me I’m still hearing the voice of God speaking to me. This soundless, voiceless voice is still coming into me, pouring my name into me like I’m overfilled with this sound, like tinnitus.

The voice is calling me, saying, “I own you. You are mine. You are my messenger. Your job is to speak me.”

That’s like, no effing way. I don’t even understand what this is. I can’t even articulate it. I don’t even understand in my head how I can possibly do what you’re saying. I’m not your guy. I’m not your guy.

Then I hitchhike back to Bozeman. Tim and I meet up. I go on this theater tour. I’m supposed to be a driver of the van. I’m like, “I can’t freaking drive.” So I take my camping gear and my sleeping bag and my pad, and I spend the entire 24,000 miles in the back of the pickup truck by myself.

All I can think to do is meditate. What am I going to do? I have no tool set for this thing but meditation. I meditated and meditated and meditated and kept this thing a secret for 20 years.

I went back to Boston and later didn’t tell my parents what had happened to me. About three years ago, I said, “Mom and Dad, what did you experience with me?”

They said, “Well, we knew that you had changed. We knew that when you came back, you were a different person. We didn’t know why. We knew something had happened to you. You wouldn’t tell us.”

I said, “Well, how was I different?”

They said, “Well, you were kind. You were just kind all the time.”

I changed my career plans. I was an English major, but my family had an architectural firm, and my dad was the president. I was going into the firm like my sister. I escaped to the monastery.

I hung out with the monks. I decided that I would go to divinity school to put off the monastery for a couple of years because the monks were the only people I’d ever met who radiated light that I could see.

I went to divinity school instead to study mysticism, which wasn’t taught at Yale. But I got into Yale and talked to the dean of admissions about creating a three-year independent study for me.

Utilizing university resources, bringing in other professors, and doing independent study, I studied the history of Western mysticism in order to create a conceptual context, a containment unit for what had happened to me—to explore it.

I realized that I felt alone. I felt like, in this time period, there was no internet. I didn’t know about near-death experience. I didn’t even know the name of it. There were no books out there for me.

But I knew, having read enough, that there were mystics and that there were mystical geniuses throughout history who’d had divine, transportive, and unitive experiences that I could learn from and maybe find a way to understand what had happened to me and go from there.

Living between two worlds

Rick: One thing I heard you say in several interviews was that after your near-death experience, the world seemed flat and sad. Life was dead, you know, and here you were in this beautiful place in the Canadian Rockies, but everything just looked two-dimensional, as if black and white, kind of drab compared to the heavenly experience you had just had.

Peter: Yes.

Rick: And I thought about that, and maybe you would like to say something about that before I say anything more.

Peter: Sure. That very first morning, when I was hitchhiking back, I was in this incredibly beautiful place. It was at sunup, and there were clouds, a million colors, and I felt crude. I felt two-dimensional, like you described. Like this place here is flat and broken and less than—and not by mere percentage points, but by cosmological factors, like that kind of measurement. It’s so reduced here and so cartoon-like.

I felt like I’m inside a biological machine where I am outside looking in and having two perspectives at once. I know that I’m not this thing, and yet I’m stuck inside this thing.

Let me explain it this way. The first time we had pizza in Calgary, we went into this place, and I was like, “This is so broken. It’s so ugly.” And I had to take this pizza and put it in this, and machinate it and swallow it in order to… It was disgusting to me. It was repellent and repulsive to me that it was so not what I know was real.

And so I’ve adjusted now. I still have that perspective, but I’m better adjusted to the world at this point. But I’m always in the experience here as an outsider. I’m always like an alien, like a stranger in a strange land, like I can’t wait to go home.

Rick: Yeah. That experience reminded me of a verse in the Mundaka Upanishad, which reads:

Two birds living together, each the friend of the other, perch upon the same tree. Of these two, one eats the sweet fruit of the tree, but the other simply looks on without eating.

And the interpretation of that verse is that the two birds are the Jiva, the individual entity or identity, and the Ishvara, or the universal spirit or God indwelling within us, and that both exist within the individual. And people often speak of the experience of witnessing, in which they feel they’re engaged in the world, but they’re not. They’re doing stuff, but they’re not. The world exists, but it doesn’t. And both of those experiences happen simultaneously without really conflicting with one another.

Peter: Exactly so. That description is accurate for my life from the moment I came back. And I was pretty upset that I was sent back to this… I felt like I was tricked. Yeah, you can go back, but you’re not going to live your life.

But really, I came to the conclusion through decades of reflection that I was youthfully angry at God for letting me make my own choice, and that I chose to come back to this crude place and live this life. I live in a duality. I live in two places at once. I see from the outside; I see from the inside.

Here, any emotional experience that I have—joy, love, beauty, anger, pain—it’s so… There was no anger and pain on the other side, but it’s at such a small level that I can’t help but compare it to the oneness of being. Everything is always compared to the oneness of being, and everything here is just so much less than.

Bringing Heavenly Perception into Everyday Life

Rick: But I would suggest—and you must know this—that that oneness of being, or that heavenly quality, can be lived in the midst of earthly experience. You know the line from the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” and that the grossness of perception that usually characterizes people’s lives can be refined to the point where the heavenly quality that you experience in the transcendent, or that you experience in your NDE, actually characterizes everyday living.

Peter: That very well may be true. My experience of that is twofold. One, I know that through long practice of prayer, meditation, and yoga, and based on my near-death experience and the multiple mystical experiences that I’ve had subsequent to that, I am a carrier of divine light. I am a channel, I’m a lens, and I work to make that happen.

And I think that every single human being has the capacity to open a channel to the divine heaven of light here. And the more of us that do that, the more of heaven becomes present for everyone.

Rick: Sure. And two people can be experiencing the exact same situation, sitting and looking at a sunset, for instance, and one of them can experience it as this divine play, just seeing God in action, and the other is depressed and miserable, and the whole thing just looks drab and ugly. So much depends upon our individual orientation.

Peter: It does. And don’t misunderstand, please, that just because I feel like an alien here and that it seems drab and ugly to me, that that is in any way my primary perspective, because it’s not.

One eye always sees the divine, and by one eye always seeing the divine, when I look over here, everything is less than, but that doesn’t mean that it’s bad. It doesn’t mean that it’s a negative thing. It’s an experiential reduction.

And I find that my interior practices of seeking the oneness inside myself give me the stability and capacities to live a more stable life in balance in this world.

Rick: True, but ultimately, if all is one, there are no sides.

Peter: Oh, right.

Rick: And so, not this side, other side, but you read beautiful accounts by mystics of seeing the divine in a garbage pile or a pile of cow dung or something like that, because obviously God can’t be sequestered off into some transcendent realm. He or she or it pervades everything. So I think the name of the game is to get to that level of perspective.

Peter: Well, I totally agree with you. The divine is transcendent and immanent at the same time, simultaneously.

And I think that the saints who say that they see the divine in the dung pile—which is true—is an experience that may or may not be a continual experience in their life. You can see, because I’ve had those kinds of experiences, where, in a flash of a moment, I see the totality of the divine being in the experience of great beauty or even ugliness.

I worked in the homeless movement for a long time when I was in grad school and afterward, and in the eyes of the most desperate, I sometimes see the light of heaven’s light. But I also know that Teresa of Calcutta, Mother Teresa, had one divine experience in her entire life that drove her actions till the day she died, by serving the poor, and never had another one.

Whether we can live in a constant state of oneness of being, where everything is beautiful in life, is possible, but it’s not my experience. My experience is that in individual moments of life, I can see the light of the divine in the purity of itself.

And I’ve seen it directly in people. In particular experiences, I see the oneness of self. And when I see that oneness of self, I see in that other person that I am no longer me and that she is no longer she, and that it’s God seeing God’s self. It’s the eye of God seeing the eye of God.

Rick: For you so far.

Peter: For me so far. But what I do experience in a daily way is that the radiance of God—I live in a very rural place on purpose. I live in a rural place because every time I step out my door, I get nature bathed with the radiance of the divine that pours through every twig and stick, and bug and bee, and hurricane and cloud, and vicious fox that takes ducks.

Even the fox—which is beautiful and intelligent. So I live in this constant state of the divine’s presence, inescapably so now for me. But to have the intensity of the eye of the self seeing the self, it’s new for me.

Rick: A question came in from Sebastian Lund in Trollhättan, Sweden: Why does God not reveal himself in an obvious manner through his creation? Why were we created indirectly through impersonal processes such as the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution, as opposed to being sculpted directly by God?

Peter: Good question. The first assumption there is that human beings matter. I don’t think human beings matter one single bit. I think that we’ve just been on this planet, on the surface of this planet, for 100,000 years. We, of course, evolved into this particular form that we have, but I’m pretty sure that we’re not alone in the universe.

With the trillions of galaxies and star systems and planets and water and DNA and all the rest of the stuff that’s out there, we’re not the only ones sculpted into this form. Probably billions of years before we were, others were. So that’s the first thing.

And the second thing is, why not reveal it? It seemed to me when I was in beatific vision that the perfection of the divine oneness of being is so total that it cannot have any sort of “less than” in it. And so, for the entire universe to exist, it can’t be perfection. It has to be imperfection.

We know this because we age and we die. We get wrinkles. Terrible things happen: cancer, and star systems and planets get swallowed by supernovas, and black holes consume entire star systems. From the microcosm to the macrocosm, it’s all based in imperfect matter.

It seems to me that if the divine light presented the divine light in its total perfection anywhere in the place of matter, then it would not be matter anymore. It would be perfection. And if it’s perfection, then it’s not existence as we know it.

So why does God not allow it? I think God does allow it. I think as much as can get through gets in. And we have a responsibility as individuals to seek the one who seeks us, to pursue the pursuer, and to know that in this physical corporeality of energy and matter, this is totally temporary.

The perception that it is a long time is a false perception. In the moment of my death, I perceived that the length of my physical life was the wink of an eye.

But here’s the thing: I had this long conversation with a woman who rescues people in trouble in Southeast Asia. She’s worried that her life of meditation is always set aside because she’s always having to go off into these dangerous situations to rescue these people. Even though she doesn’t feel connected to the divine because she’s not practicing her meditation, her action of selfless giving and charitable love creates a treasure that she doesn’t even know she has.

So I think there’s a lot of God showing in this world. It’s just masked by all the suffering here.

The big takeaway for me from Jesus is that love is the access point to the divine.

Those who know love know God, for God is love.

So if you’re a human being and you’re an atheist, like my buddy Bob, who was backpacking with me and is still my friend, he loves his children. That’s the treasure of his life.

Even though we can’t perceive the oneness as clearly here, or as easily as we’d like it to be, we see it every single time we love. Every single time we give of ourselves in a selfless way for the sake of another, every time somebody loves us back, but also in the ecstasy of merging in sex, or loving your grandchild, or any form of love whatsoever, there is the presence of the divine.

Even though we can’t perceive the oneness as clearly here, or as easily as we’d like it to be, we see it every single time we love. Every single time we give of ourselves in a selfless way for the sake of another, every time somebody loves us back, but also in the ecstasy of merging in sex, or loving your grandchild, or any form of love whatsoever, there is the presence of the divine.

Instead of calling God “God” or “Allah,” maybe a better word is love. I’m in love with love. I’m beloved by the beloved.

Rick: Yeah. I would say, as an addendum to that and as a response to Sebastian, who’s to say that the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution are not the hand of God? Maybe it’s not obvious to us, but there obviously is a profound intelligence in orchestrating the functioning of every little molecule in creation.

From my point of view, the divine intelligence pervades everything, including all the natural processes that science tells us about.

Peter: I absolutely agree. Some near-death experiencer said, “The universe seems to be made of matter, but secretly it’s made of love.”

What we know of the existence of the universe, or how things work, is very little. But if we begin to see God’s presence on a daily basis inside our own lives, inside of love, maybe then we can begin to see it in the flower, or in the bacterium, or in the electron.

Rick: Yeah. It’s obviously there, because if you look at any of those things closely enough, you see something marvelous taking place that is obviously not random. It’s not just little billiard balls crashing into each other randomly. The whole thing would fall apart in no time if that’s what it were.

It’s this evolving, intelligent expression. Even a single cell, they say, is more complex than a large city like Tokyo, and it can repair itself and replicate itself and so on. So obviously, the divine is functional in every little particle of creation. But if our perception is on a more crude level, we may fail to appreciate that.

Peter: Which is why prayer really matters. The more you open up the temple of your heart, the more space you make in the temple of your heart, the more you perceive the divine presence, not only inside yourself, but everywhere, all the time. That’s kind of the way it works.

Rick: I had a guest on named Mark Gober, who wrote a book called The End to Upside-Down Thinking, and the whole conversation was about the possibility that consciousness exists beyond the brain.

A simple metaphor would be: Are the Beatles actually in the radio? If you smash the radio, did you kill the Beatles? Or do you just turn on another radio, and the same signal, which is mediated through the electromagnetic field, comes through that instrument instead of the other one?

Peter: I like it. I like it.

🛤️ Is an NDE the end of the journey?

Rick: A few questions came in. Is there a difference between almost dying and really dying? Maybe you go on to even further realms if you totally die, as opposed to being in the sort of lobby, as you were, and then coming back from the lobby into this life.

Peter: Yeah, I mean, I guess I don’t know yet, and if I did, I wouldn’t be able to tell you because I wouldn’t be here. But there seem to be different cultural contexts for the experience of the near-death experience.

I don’t think it’s the end game, that’s for sure. My experience of the divine was that I was in a place of non-being. There was no corporeality to it at all. Some people go to this place like Eden; I didn’t go there. I went to a place where I was pure soul and so close to oneness that one more drop would have obliterated me.

So this leads me to the conclusion that there is more to go. In the beatific visions that I’ve had, I’ve been compelled to understand that the deeper one goes into the divine, the further the divine recedes, the bigger it becomes. So it’s like this ever-deepening, ever-widening, ever-broadening journey within multiple levels of heaven, as it were, layer by layer.

Swedenborg, this Lutheran, talks about these levels where, in each level, you think you’ve reached the highest level of heaven because it’s such pure love. And then you die in that level and you move up to the next level, and you’re like, “Oh, this is it!” And then you die in that level, and you’re like, “Oh no, this is it!”

Rick: Like the infomercial, “But wait, there’s more!”

Peter: “But wait, there’s more,” that’s right! Exactly. I think that that’s true.

Rick: My attitude is, whatever God wills. If coming back is what’s best for me, or if it’s how I can best serve, great. If it’s not, then fine. It’s like I’ll just kind of go along for the ride.

Peter: Well, that’s what I chose to do twice. So I keep choosing to come back, even though I say I don’t want to come back.

❤️ The second death and choosing love

So the second time I died—the second time I died—I had a heart attack. I live an hour from the cath lab, an hour and a half in summer traffic. And I’ve been praying for my own death for 30 years. As I’m on the gurney, leaving the urgent care center to take this hour-and-a-half ride, the doctor expects I’m going to die on the way and not come back.

I told my wife, “I’m out of here. I die, here’s my chance, I’m going home.” And she’d expected me to do that that day. As I was going out on the gurney, I squeezed her hand, looked her in the eye, gave her the goodbye wink. “See you, honey. You’re going to be fine. You know this is what I want.”

And then I chose to come back for the sake of love, for my granddaughter’s sake, who had just been born in a bad situation. There was domestic violence going on, and I couldn’t leave my daughter and my granddaughter without protection, and I couldn’t leave my granddaughter without a male figure that she could love and be loved by.

So even though I say I don’t want to come back—and I don’t, really—I will, of course, because I’ve done so twice already, that I know of, and I’ll do what I have to do.

Rick: If we, our souls, are perfect in the heavenly realms or dimensions to begin with, then why choose to incarnate on Earth? Why choose to become imperfect humans when we are already perfect to begin with?

Peter: I know, I know. When I was dead, everybody said to me, “This is a learning place. You come to Earth to learn.” Okay, yes, I’m learning stuff, but when I was dead, I was in the best school in the universe. Anything I wanted to know, I knew instantaneously.

Why would I want to come and incarnate here into this carnal form? I don’t know the answer to that one, and I wish I did.

Rick: Well, I’ll take a stab at it, and that is that the universe is multidimensional, and spiritual evolution, for some reason, entails being able to incorporate, being able to fully appreciate and retain the sort of vastness of wisdom that you experienced on the other side while functioning in all dimensions simultaneously.

So, as a flesh-and-blood human being, having that kind of vast awareness and wisdom, as perhaps Christ and Buddha and Shankara and Ramana and some of the great saints had, that’s something more than just being able to know all that when you’re out of body or without a body.

Peter: Sure. Yes, I see that. That doesn’t answer the question for Joe and Jane Doe, who have to incarnate back down in here. It still leaves the question: Why incarnate in the first place?

Maybe it’s to purify this realm. Maybe it’s to bring more light here. Maybe, by being here, by loving each other, we increase the capacity of our spirituality. And so the conclusion that I’ve reached is this: Love really is the reason. Love is the treasure, not only for individuals, but for all of humanity.

Love really is the reason.

It’s the gift we give to ourselves that doesn’t belong to us in the first place. It gets poured down through us from the storehouse of abundant love. And so it’s like the divine loving the divine through us.

Rick: The Vedic answer is lila, play. It’s for the sake of creative expression. And presumably something is gained that’s more than would be had if one were just to reside in the unmanifest state.

Peter: To me, it’s really interesting to talk about these things and to create language around them so we can begin to think about them. But ultimately, they don’t help me in my pursuit of the oneness, which is a direct, nonlinguistic connection that has nothing to do with my intellectual capacities for understanding any of the mythologies of the globe.

Really, the two things that matter most to me are the pursuit of the oneness, being wide open to letting the light through, and loving as best as I’m able.

Because the answer to all these questions, you will have them when you die. I had them when I was dead. So I don’t spend my time trying to discuss philosophy, and I’m really not interested in theology. I’m a theologian by training. I’m not interested in theology; I’m interested in the divine connection.

Rick: Yeah. I think where you’re coming from is that you have an empirical, pragmatic, scientific approach to spirituality. It doesn’t do you any good to believe anything or to understand anything if it can’t be experientially validated.

And that’s what any kind of spiritual experience or state of consciousness or realm or anything else is ultimately: experiential, not conceptual or belief-based.

Peter: Yes, and all of the books that have been written over the thousands of years and across all of these cultures are based in individual divine experiences. Somebody had a vision and wrote it down. But that writing came through the filter of the human, through the brain and the training and the language and the cultural context. Metaphor and symbol and myth are the tools that we have to explain the unexplainable, and they’re very helpful.

Ultimately, it’s about the divine individual experience and the pursuit of that. Access to the divine experience can be had by anyone, I think, who pursues a life of prayer.

Rick: Yeah, prayer or its equivalents in various spiritual practices. If this stuff interests you, keep your attention on it. Do whatever you can: listening, reading, meditating. The more you have your attention on it, the stronger it will grow in your life.

So, what would you like to say in closing?

Peter: Yes. The nutshell is: love really matters. If there’s any innate access to the divine among all of humanity, or even between humanity and animals—dogs and cats and pigs and chickens—it’s love.

Long before religion was a factor in human existence, love was present. Love is innate to the human being. We’re built that way. It’s part of our survival. It’s the way we pass on our genes. It’s the way we create community. But it’s also the access point to the divine.

So, if you don’t have or you can’t practice meditation, or you don’t go to some sort of religious organization, or you wish that you had a divine experience, you are having one. Every single time you love, that’s where it really is. That’s the center that’s built in the temple of the heart.

Every single time you love, that’s where it really is.

So, love really matters. What you give, you get to keep and take with you when you die. What you get from others, you get to take with you when you die. God is love. If you know love, you know God, and seek heaven first. Because if you seek heaven first, you polish your lens.

And that’s what meditation does. You’re polishing your lens, you’re polishing your lens, you’re polishing your lens, you’re creating a cleaner channel for the divine light to pass through you. And remember, it’s not your light. You are not the oneness of being. You are part of the oneness of being.

The light flows from the divine, and that becomes who you are. And to understand that particular thing removes all ego. It’s not my light you see. It’s the divine light that is.

Rick: Perfect. Okay, just a couple of practical points, then. What do you do that people watching this in England or Florida or someplace far away could benefit from, could connect with, aside from reading your books?

Peter: I run a global-sized counseling service for mystics.

I have clients around the world who are real mystics—people who have theophanies and beatific visions, or God talks to them, or angels come and visit them, or they have out-of-body experiences, or all the stuff that you can’t talk over coffee about in the local café when you’re showing up for breakfast in the morning because everybody will think you’re crazy. I specialize in that.

So I run a global counseling service. I help people reflect on their experience. I don’t tell people what to think. I try to help people understand what’s happened to them or what’s happening to them.

I have a YouTube channel, PeterPanagore.love. My focus right now is on my third book, which is going to be a lot about what we talked about today. I’m kind of coming out of the closet now about being a mystic.

Near-death experience has become so popular globally. There are 10 million in the United States—there must be 50 million globally—because of science, cardiac care, and everything else. Now that this is in the forefront, near-death experience is becoming more socially acceptable. I feel safer talking about mysticism.

And that’s what I want to see break open. I want to see the cultural conversation accept not just near-death experiences, but also see that spiritually transformed people who’ve had out-of-body experiences are more common, and that we’re all part of one big club.

We’re a global movement with a capacity for cultural influence at a time when humanity needs it the most. And the message is love.

Rick: That’s really exciting, Peter. Keep me in the loop and let me know when that book is published.

Peter: Aye, aye, sir.

Rick: Maybe we’ll have another one of these conversations about that.

Peter: I would like that very much.

Rick: Yeah.

Peter: I’ve had a great time with you, Rick.

Rick: Yeah, me too. I’ve really enjoyed this, and also the whole previous week listening to you and reading your book and stuff. So, thanks.

Peter: Peace.

Rick: Yeah. Let me just make a couple of quick concluding remarks. So, I’ve been talking with Peter Panagore, as you know. This is an ongoing series of interviews, as you know. Check out the website, batgap.com—B-A-T-G-A-P. Just poke around through the menus.

You can sign up to be notified of things by email, or you can sign up for the audio podcast. There are some interesting little indices of past interviews and some other resources if you look under the Other Resources menu. So, just explore. It won’t take you too long. You might find it interesting.

And thanks for listening or watching. We’ll see you for the next one. Thanks, Peter.

Peter: Thanks, Rick. Thanks for having me.

Rick: All right. Talk to you later.

Peter: Peace. [Music]