Episode 46 – Mr. Peter Panagore

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what’s up folks we are here with yet another brilliantly crafted episode for you guys in this episode we spoke to mr. Peter or pan Tagore he has quite the story to tell he has been canvassing these various radio programs he’s appeared on NBC to tell the story and when you’re finished listening to this episode you’ll find out why this was a fun episode Peter is super easy to speak to just a really warm hearted human being I highly

suggest that you check out his book heaven is beautiful how dying taught me that death is just the beginning otherwise please make sure you get to our Facebook page give us a like subscribe to us on YouTube follow us on Twitter at the human XP if you enjoy the content and you want us to do more shows get to the members section of our site the human xpcom become a member it’s 5 bucks a month which is the equivalent of the cost of a cup of coffee it tells us that

you actually care about what we’re doing here but I digress thank you guys so much for listening the human experience is blasting through the Byzantine conduit in your brain making the drums in your ears vibrate as we transition into the afterlife with my guest mr. peter pan Tagore Peter my good sir welcome to hxp thank you very very much glad to be here thanks for having me Xavier Peter your your story is harrowing your book had me turning pages

I mean I flew through your book but let’s set a premise let’s create the stage for your story and start with your education where did you go to school Xavier I want to sink John to high school and throughs Barre Massachusetts which is where I learned how to meditate from my senior year religion teacher who had gone off to a monastery nearby and come back with this lesson that began my whole life as a meditator and then after that I went off to the University of

Massachusetts where I studied English literature I spent a year at Montana State University on exchange and then I did my graduate degree a master’s in divinity at Yale University okay all right so I mean you I mean we’re talking about death here I mean this is the fundamental thing that we share beyond religion race creed geographical location I mean invariably we are all going to die so I mean your your let’s talk a little bit about your your fascination with ice

climbing because that’s how this this experience all started for you I mean can you tell us a little bit about ice climbing what is involved and kind of how it works my fascination with ice climbing was short-lived I had one climb my real fascination was with mountaineering technical climbing and backpacking but I found myself with an opportunity to try myself on ice and so what was involved were the skills that I’d already developed as a

technical climb ropes and harnesses and concentration of my fear into courage so that I would pay attention to exactly what I was doing ice climbing is like a a single-minded sport where at any moment you know that something terrible could happen and if it does happen some the end result could be the end of yourself and so that type of sporting experience focuses the mind and a meditative way it makes you single-minded and that’s what really

attracted me to it I wanted to prove to myself that I had the the inner fortitude to focus my brain and strength to ignore the possibility of death I mean this is a highly dangerous activity sport right it is it’s it’s as fewer people get hurt ice climbing than playing football and football everybody gets hurt and ice climbing some people get hurt so on a percentage basis it’s not quite as dangerous as football but the difference is is that you tended

people tend to die ice climbing as opposed to in football so so okay so at the beginning of the 1980s you embarked on an ice climbing trip that to put mod ly didn’t go quite to plan and had consequences for the rest of your life including writing this book that detailed your experience what happened on that day and how did it affect you I’ve been out on a an eight day backcountry snow caving experience with my climbing partner Tim a fella that I got to know

very well on this backcountry experience but previously didn’t know at all we had planned this trip together but we got together because of the opportunity to take this trip together so we had only known each other about a month before we headed out into British Columbia and Alberta and we finished our trip with a one-day ice climb Tim my partner was an a lead climber technical on rock and on ice and I was a technical climber but I’d never been ice

climbing before I talked him into thinking that I could do it because I’ve done so much rock before and it’s true I could do it and I did do it but I made a bravado cocky twenty-one-year-old choice on my equipment I chose to use an ice axe and a hammer they’re unequal length and you really need two hammers like you need a hole in the head I had one hanging from my belt and one in my hand which really actually needed as one hammer and two axes but I didn’t

have two axes I had two hammers and one axe and the way that the axe works is that it has a shaft right and has a like a hummingbird beak on one end and a on the top and a like a blade from an adze on the other that hummingbird and you you plant the hummingbird end of it into the ice and you take the shaft which has opinion at the bottom and you drop that into the ice at a 45 degree angle with the hypotenuse and there’s a strap

Midway up the shaft maybe a third of the way up through a ring and you can put your hand through this loop that’s attached to the shaft and slide a bead down the loop to lock your hand in so you can actually let go of the ax can plant the ax let go of the ax and dangle on the ax by opening your hand up a little bit and rest your arm that’s the way it works that’s what I did with one arm the other arm I use this much shorter hammer that we planted in the

ice it sets the same way at a 45 degree angle but the strap is on the bottom of the shaft and so if you dangle on it it automatically pulls the hammer off of the ice so what that meant was that I couldn’t rest mm-hmm and because I couldn’t rest I burned myself out rapidly and it was it Tim Tim told me it wasn’t a great idea but we both thought I could do it and I did do it I we successfully climbed it was that wasn’t the problem the

problem was that it took us so much longer because I was so exhausted because I used this hammer but that by the time we reached the top of our climb it was sunset and all the other teams on this climb had already left the ice and the stragglers were leaving to the parking lot okay let’s let’s fast forward a little bit and you know what was that point in your mind where you kind of had this knowing okay I’m about to die well the first point happened

when we were at the top of the climb and we realized that we were in serious trouble and if we stayed where we were which we discussed that we were going to die there and so we decided that our best chance of survival was to try to get off the ice or die trying we knew we would die we decided that we would struggle so that we might not die but the the moment came when we had forced our way across and down the mountain face to our last rappel we’re

about 150 feet up and I had gone through the stages of hypothermia to the point of being hot and then to the point of falling asleep and between the point of being hot and falling asleep with the rope around the corner jammed and in a place that I couldn’t get to I had one bitter end which is at the end of the climbing rope tying to my harness and I had dropped the other bitter end so that I could pull it through the the eye ring

that was way up the mountain and this was this was in Canada right you guys were climbing in Manitoba Canada sorry to interrupt you Oh nuts right wasn’t Manitoba it was north of Banff kind of Northwest to banth and south of Jasper and Alberta and a March and there was 10 feet of snow on the ground and it was wicked cold it was it was very very cold and you know cold kinky Leah and I it wasn’t something I didn’t know I knew that I’d been on ski patrol since I was

a maybe a sophomore or a freshman in high school and experienced a training and experience with removing people from mountains when they had frostbite and hypothermia wasn’t the first time I’d seen it well first time I’d seen it to myself though scratch so you’re you’re on this rappel you’re going 150 feet down you’re with Tim and that is the second time that you realized there’s something deeply wrong or oh no no the this was the third rappel – I sped you

up to the to the last position we were in ok we had gone from the very top of the mountain through a harrowing evening of violent shakes the Rope became a 300-foot knot we descended from our first rappel and the Rope froze and position up above us we couldn’t get it free Tim tried to reassigned up on a on a free ascent with no protection from a fall on the rope off the rock like shimming sort of shimming up the rope that’s not an exact description he was

using certain types of knots hitches actually that there were friction based but once we retrieved the rope from that we then traversed across to our next rappel which we descended to the last rappel which is where this story really begins for me in terms of my end hmm and we were on this ledge 150 feet up it was a couple hours before sunup the temperature was very cold the moon was about three-quarters it had come across the sky we could see almost in color

because of the moon but there’s still a million stars overhead of every brilliant color and I could see off in the distance the Columbia glacier and I had I had gotten warm as I mentioned and had unzipped my coat and I knew that that was a bad sign all the blood rushes into the core of the body in order to protect the essential elements and I knew that the Rope was stuck and I knew we were done that’s really what happened I I became

resigned and even peaceful thinking to myself that it was a beautiful place to die and that I was not going to get out of this and that my parents and my siblings were going to suffer as a result but there was nothing more that I could do and so I began to fall asleep and would fall off my perch climb myself back up to my perch again when I after I hit the rock because I was harnessed in and I wasn’t really paying attention to

temp at this point I was mostly in my own world and and that repeated a few times until this last time when I was standing on the ledge again and I watched the world fade to black like the end of a of an old time movie I watched my peripheral vision circle in on me and I wondered what was going on I had never seen anything like it before and I thought to myself this is this is it and I remember falling but I don’t remember hitting the rock and I remember thinking

why am I not asleep why am I still conscious so your body fell my body felt I was harnessed in there’s an iron pin and an iron ring in the mouth and that I was clipped into so I fell only a couple feet every time I fell off of this ledge that’s not a bunch but I wasn’t going to fall on hit the ground though what I figured was going to happen is is that I was going to be found so early in the night and the evening before on after

our second rappel the warden provincial park warden where we had signed in to hit a log because we’re going into a wilderness area came looking for us we knew that we were on this climb the climb wasn’t very far off the ice Palisades Highway there was a parking lot across the street middle and nowhere like seriously maybe one person per square mile you know it’s like nobody’s there and um he had parked across the street after our when we get

down to our first rappel to the bottom of the first time and we were we have lost our coordination which is a hypothermic thing we were losing the ability to think clearly a confusion and our lips and our jaws were freezing as well so we could hardly speak but he came and we saw him across the street we assumed that it was him and we jumped up and down against the ice he could see us he flashed his lights and we waved that gave us heart to continue off to the

next rappel which was down this dark crag out of the moonlight around the corner onto this ledge where we now stood so I thought as as I was dying as I was beginning to die that the warden would find me the next day dangling or the or the or the early team the teams that that got there first would see me and probably Tim dangling from our harnesses frozen um Wow all right let’s let’s keep going man I mean um so the the world had faded to black for me

and I had fallen and I didn’t lose consciousness every time I fell asleep I fell asleep you know and what woke me up was I smacked into the mountain but this time when I fell I felt myself fall but I didn’t feel myself hit the mountain and I still had was awake and I would remember wondering why am I still awake and and then spindly I could see through the mountain MA though I knew my eyes were closed I could see through the mountain and I could see a vastness and

in this vastness this darkness a amorphous grey black being that was immense rushed toward me like like like a tidal wave like a the wall of a river broken from a dam rushed right toward me and it and I knew that it had intelligence and intent because it communicated to me that it was going to take me and I very clearly that that it wanted me and it was so infinitely powerful I didn’t want to go I put up my willpower against it to

block it and I’d spent all night being driven towards survival and for anyone who’s on that listening audience has ever been in a real serious survival situation you will know what it’s like to dig ever deeper and discover inside yourself a huge amount of willpower to survive against all the odds and I put that barrier up against this this intent to take me but it took me anyway as if I was just a little twig in a river I think my mouth and and the next thing I

knew I was in this infinite darkness that was also illuminated I and I could see in every direction but I didn’t have any eyes and I didn’t have a body and I didn’t have a brain and I remember thinking that that because I didn’t have a brain I was thinking so much clearer and so much faster and that I had so much more knowledge that I didn’t understand where it had come from and in front of me was a gigantic door like a darkness well but the darkness was

translucent and transparent and there was the proverbial tunnel which was darker than the greater darkness and I reached out with my being and I touched this translucent and transparent flow it was like a shimmer like a river flowing down and and it was living and and and it was as paradox I I could see that it was I I could see was both transparent and translucent but it didn’t really disturb me that it was so and when I touched it it had life in it and when I

touched it I heard my name from deep down inside me erupt and it wasn’t my name Peter it was the the ground of the essence of my being this it was my created name it was the thing that made me me it was the name of my soul and in that instant I knew that I was in the presence of God it was outside of me and next to me but I couldn’t see God and I heard my voice I heard the voice inside me and the voice had knows no sound and it had no words

and it had no sex it was not male and it wasn’t female it just was loved and and I was in filled with love and beauty and hope and truth compassion all wound into one thing and I knew that instantly I was in the presence of God and and in the knowing of myself as a being as a created being I knew all the pain that I’d given everyone in my entire life I knew all the love that I’d given everyone but more importantly at this time which was timeless by the way this

is a place of timelessness and no thing and no space we no dimensions and it I suffered all of the pain that I’d given everyone in my entire life it was like a life review of all of the bad things that I had done to hurt people and I felt their pain I didn’t feel as if I was feeling their pain I felt their actual pain and it was cumulative and it was every single person I’d ever caused pain to and particular people stood out like my

sisters my sister Cynthia in particular featured because I knew her longest and best and all the times that I’d hurt her with intent and all the times that I’d hurt her without intent and all of it was immensely painful to me and and I judged myself as shameful for having caused this pain to them because in the presence of God it seemed so ugly to me this pain that I’d caused and that God was so beautiful and my humanity had caused other humanity to suffer so this

I mean this this being was displaying to you reflecting back at you that the paint you would cost and your vision is 360 degrees you can see everything around you and your mind is capable of absorbing all this information knowledge and yet you’re looking back through your human life and you’re reviewing all the pain that you caused yes and I didn’t cause myself to review my life it was done to me and it was it was I know you is what God kept saying to me I know I

know you I know everything about you there’s nothing hidden from me about you there never has been anything hidden from you about me from me about you and I had immense self-knowledge of all the things that I had done and God kept saying I love you I know you you’re my beloved I forgive you because I know you because I made you this way this is not a surprise to me I already know you suffered and caused suffering and I was forgiven for that not because of

anything I had done but simply because I was loved and while I was ashamed – I was ashamed I mean this is such a powerful powerful story and I’m just you have this you have the sense of just humbleness in your voice but you know it’s almost like a supernatural quality as if you know a secret that we all know but we just don’t recognize and I mean how did this experience I mean was there was there something inside the experience that that showed you what you

had to do next I mean I I could only see myself in comparison to the divine it wasn’t it wasn’t so much humility as it was a recognition of the immensity of the Divine Being and love it’s it’s not so much humility isn’t this I bow my head before you because you’re my brother it’s it’s that I see you as my equal because God is our parent the one who made us who is so far beyond us and and the comparison of myself to God is like a a speck of like

a like a molecule floating in the vastness of the universe and God is the universe and I am just a tiny speck and and I I said to God am i dead and this is without language and I set it inside my being and God said yes you’re dead and I said well I can’t die God said why and I said because my sister had vanished and my parents were suffering greatly for that my mother had had a bad break down the family was in turmoil for a decade

Andrea her name she was at every meal at every Christmas but we could never mention her name because if we ever mentioned her name my mother would break down my mother spent every single night for half a decade crying standing in the living room with the lights off staring down the street with the curtain pulled back looking for my sister crying herself to sleep every single night and we couldn’t talk about it because any time we talked about it she’d break down

so in order to protect her we had a rule in our house don’t ever mention Andrea and never talk to anyone about her ever in our city my dad was pretty prominent where we lived and and everybody knew something had happened but we we were locked down and so my parents I watched my mom suffer and my dad get angry and I said to God I can’t I can’t take another child for my parents and my god swept me over to see all of Earth I could see every single

human being on earth at once and and I could see that every single human being like me was beloved in particular especially and that not one of them could see as I could see because they were still in the flesh and they had this veil that prevented them from seeing what I could see and God said to me in the way that I love you now you’ve always known now you now know that you I’ve always loved you and I love you now and I always will love you and that my

love is what you are and what fills you and gives you beauty in and and forgiveness and and makes you special and beloved and I knew that eternally I still know that I don’t know it to the M to the immensity because I’m stuck back in this body again but the memory of being loved is overwhelming and I knew that everyone was loved and God showed me my parents in particular and the suffering they were living in their lives right then and and I knew that

they were beloved and because of that love and because of where I was I knew that all would be well God said all is well all will be well all has been well because of my love and he asked me you know that don’t you and I knew that to the core of my being that in the end the suffering that my parents would experience by losing me would end in beauty and joy and love in the same way that I was experiencing it but but I could see their faces and I couldn’t I

couldn’t make them suffer more so this was I mean this was the reason that you came back you couldn’t make your parents suffer molar loss yeah I knew also that the length of my life was the wink of my eye that time time isn’t as a total delusion just like spaces and that an eternity the length of my life amounted to nothing and so knowing that I figured that it would be instantaneous for me to come back but it hasn’t been that worked out that way and at least

not yet maybe when I die it will feel that way but not yet and so I I then said to God you know I got another reason I’m and the theatre company we’re on a tour going on a national tour we’d been in production for a year pre-production going into production 24,000 miles 64 shows all over the United States went and what the Mississippi and um I I met a promise I made a vow to my director that I would not be hurt because we had no understudies and and I said God do I

have to stay here and God said no you don’t have to stay here and I said well if I go back can I come back here God said yes you can come back here and for me that meant the love and the beauty and the joy compassion faith all wound into this oneness and that was inside of me that filled me and I said can I come back here and God said yes you can come back here and I said well then I choose to live my life and God said you won’t

live your life and the next thing I knew I was being screwed back in my body again it was painful and I remember wondering what was going on and I I swam to consciousness inside my body but I didn’t even know what a body was anymore I was so disoriented I didn’t know I didn’t know what I was let alone where I was or who I was I didn’t even know what matter was huh Wow I mean why would you from I mean how did you how does a person process and experience

like this I mean you just touched the divine and I mean you’re this 21 year old kid and you’ve just died you’ve encountered what you call God and the lack of a better term for lack of a better term and I mean it it just it it blows me away I’m still processing it it’s it’s you know happened in 1980 it’s it’s 2016 every day I try to figure this out and how older how do you know turn in 57 tomorrow no well happy early birthday thank you

thank you so I mean and I mean in in all this time you you know you have been sharing your story and well not quite I kept it a secret for decades and I I started sharing it publicly about 15 years ago to my congregation I’m a United Church of Christ minister I so so wait wait what what made you not want to share it because it’s crazy so so I was on that I came back to consciousness and and I didn’t even understand language and and he as I swam back up I I became

cognizant as I slowly began to process that that I heard the words I thought you were dead you were dead don’t die if you die I die and and I it was 10 my partner and he helped me back up and I was completely didn’t know who he was or what I was and and I don’t know how long we stood there as I tried to figure out what was good we hadn’t talked all night because we were trying to save our energy to survive because every time we spoke

our fuel and our bodies went down noticeably and and I pulled on the rope which had been stuck and it came free first pull like a miracle and we descended we got into the tent we treated ourselves for till after sunup which wasn’t that long away and then we decided we’d be warmer in the car so we went and we got the car and we defrosted my feet were like ice blocks my hands were were were movable it I can’t tell you how cold that was they had frostbite

fingertips to my toes my feet my face and and this is after the experience is your back yep and and to not only not only am i trying to figure out where I’d been up trying to save this body that I’m in and and then I the next day it was a terrible day as bad as that night was it was it was almost worse the next day and you know I don’t wanna I don’t want to give too much wish because it’s in the book but it was really it ended

up with me and Tim splitting up while still in Canada and me having did at sunup the day following hitchhike back to Bozeman which is about eight or ten hours away from where I was when and we used a little money we had left for Tim to take a bus back to Bozeman and I hitchhiked and Tim was extremely angry at me for for what had happened that day not that night but the day following and and I remember standing at Sun at sunrise and thinking to myself as I

began to process this because most of the day before I slept I was exhausted I just slept in the car as we drove and Tim drove and and I and I remember thinking that the world to me look like a cartoon I’ve kind of figure out it’s like being in a two-dimensional space I’d been in and four dimensional space and now I’m in a two dimensional space and it was and it was a most beautiful place the sunrise was gorgeous and to me it was not

beautiful nothing was beautiful anymore I wasn’t afield the sky wasn’t beautiful the mountains weren’t beautiful at nothing it was all like black and what to me like going from a color world into a black-and-white world and I I knew that something had happened to me but I didn’t understand what I knew it was God but I didn’t know where I had gone or so it it sounds like you had a near life experience not in your death experience

I would call it a death experience it’s not nothing near about it when I was when I was eight years or six years old I went swimming in a river and I went down for the third time and some guy hauled me out that was a near-death I would have drowned I almost got knocked off the mountain by a boulder the size of a refrigerator another on another climb it swept by me with inches within inches of me that was a near-death experience if I had turned

it would have smacked me in the back and swiped me off the mountain that would have killed me for sure this this was death and when I came back here to this world this world was flat and ugly by comparison and and most of me was still on it’s still on the other side and but in that in those early days I was so disoriented and confused that I I had enough rational capacity to understand that if I talked about it people might think I was crazy so so you kept it in

the closet like tit down I didn’t tell anybody and and I my career life change I went back to Montana went off on this theatre tour instead of riding around in the 15 passenger van with all of my peers or even driving which is I was signed up to be a driver I refused to drive I took myself off the drivers list we also had a pickup truck with a trailer with all our costumes and electronic gear I went in the back of the pickup truck with my winter gear

and I I sat in the back of the truck I didn’t talk to anybody and I performed at night I had we stayed in people’s houses and I was sociable but I I went by myself into myself and that was that was my next question I mean how did this how did this affect you I mean how did this this change your life well in a practical sense I I come from an architectural family my dad had a one a one-man firm but it was a significance outside of Boston he was big in the

National AIA our American Institute of Architects and my whole life had been even though as an English major my whole life had been oriented towards going into my dad’s firm I’ve been drawing my whole life in his office and art classes and was working construction as a carpenter’s helper for three or four or five years I don’t really remember I’ve got my head did it for a long time with the idea that I would go to graduate school and architecture like my sister

who was ahead of me another sister and that I’d be able to converse with the blue-collar guys swinging the hammer but I would have the Graduate School architectural degree and the capacity to run a successful business because I could work both ends stick I could design the building and talk to the guys I came home and I couldn’t do that I ended up going to this monastery this that I mentioned early in our conversation the monastery near my

Catholic school I started going there on retreat in order to figure out if anybody could help me and thought were you trying to understand I’m trying to understand this and I’ve been meditating already you know for 3 or 4 years before this happened that I just don’t ever do / in meditation became my my salvation it became how I I with the contradiction and the paradox of being here and not from here it was turmoil and it was depression and it was darkness and it

was isolation and loneliness and alienation and nobody could possibly understand what I’d been through nobody could even if I told him they couldn’t understand it and I knew that much and and so I went to Divinity School and I went to Divinity School applied to Harvard Yale and Princeton and I got into Princeton and Yale and I chose Yale and because the Dean of Students took a personal interest in me and when I got to the diff school I asked her if I

could begin to study mysticism even though it wasn’t a primary course or a course at all a course of studies at Yale there were a smattering of courses around the University and she let me take them and also she let me take independent study with her so that I could study systematic theological thinking while studying the history of mysticism of the West in order to gain some knowledge of language and experience of those who went before me

that I might be able to find somebody like me right and and so I was in Washington over the weekend this past weekend doing a book event speaking events and a show a great day Washington and but my host was a div student that I had known long ago and she’s a reverend now and has a church down there and we got to talking and I didn’t know her extremely well when I was at this school but I knew her pretty well and she told me over the weekend that unbeknownst to

me my div school friends were talking about me even my close friends kind of behind my back because I was an oddity I never went to Chapel on three years of school I never went to Chapel but once because there was a special speaker I wanted to hear I I spent my Chapel time in meditation on my own all i did at disco was study practice meditation practice yoga and play Ultimate Frisbee um I founded the team with my co founded it

but um I like fun I still like fun um but I they all thought I was stoned all the time it because like like walking around she she her name’s Kathleen Kathleen says you Peter you were walking around with this little smile in your face all the time and and you had such an otherworldly ‘no stu you and all you did was meditate and wherever you were if you weren’t studying you were meditating if you weren’t doing meditation you were doing

yoga and and we didn’t understand what you were and you were barefoot all the time and we liked you but you were an anomaly and and and they didn’t know I mean I didn’t broadcast that I was studying mysticism I mean how do you relate to people after an experience like this and did you were you did you feel kind of isolated in after your experience I was isolated I still AM um the way I figured near-death experience people like me ours were our own tribe

um we live in these two different places all the time and and yeah in those early days it was very difficult I lost my high school sweetheart over this she she couldn’t I loved her too much you asked me how I dealt with people I love them and that’s that’s my my connectivity with them but but I was too intense for her and too distant I especially those first few years I I spent so much time in meditation and that when I wasn’t in meditation I was

still in meditation were you open with her or did you keep it from her as well I I didn’t tell anybody no one I told my wife the woman I married which was years later when I was in my between my second and third year did school um I told her in the night before a wedding not surprised yeah like if I have any regrets at all and it’s that it’s that I was completely unfair to her I mean it’s not like she didn’t know that I was straight

already um it weird things had been she’d seen weird things um like like like one day the northern goshawk I was out bird-watching outside of Boston there’s a Greenbelt outside of Boston it runs from the North Shore to the salt shore it’s in between 128 and 495 and I was in this very large town park forest that was connected to all these other state parks and town forests and it was a big area but but I wasn’t a small part of it Bluebird

looking for eastern bluebirds and by myself meditating while I walked in the woods and I got attacked by a northern goshawk that chased me for miles knocked me to the ground I wrestled with this thing um good stuff weird weird animal things weird weird other things um just what do you mean when from my point of view I’m back in the infinite darkness again having a divine experience so you still have a link to this I still have a link to this

I can’t unlink it and by god I tried to unlike it because it’s it’s been it’s it’s functioned in my life is a blessing and a curse and for most of my life it felt like a curse on only now in the past several years the last this past August in particular but a couple of events that have happened in the past several years have made me more integrated enough here that I that I can stick around and not fail so bereft of I mean what would you say to a person that

might be listening to this that has encountered something like you experienced I mean and are kind of keeping keeping them keeping it to themselves what would you say to them I would say that it’s not 1980 anymore and that you can talk about it you can find people you can talk to about it because I think that one of the things that happened to me is that is is that by keeping it a secret to myself it twisted inside of me you know one of the things that I have

lots of gay friends and we talked about before they were in that when they were in the closet when they’re out of the closet when the when the culture gay culture was in the closet and when gay culture was out of the closet and there’s this big huge transitioning going on now where marriage is acceptable culturally and socially and so they don’t have to hide anymore and pretend anymore and how being in the closet come by lying living a dual life

living a dual life can twist a person and I I got twisted a little bit by living a dual life not telling the truth it wasn’t that I was lying to people other than the fact that I told people that I believed in God which I didn’t as a pro as a minister um because I don’t need to believe in God I have trouble believing in here more than I haven’t believe that to me is the real and this is the illusion and so to tell someone who’s had a near-death

experience or something like that you know maybe they were in the operating room and they left their body and they watch the surgery and they didn’t go all the way down the tunnel or out into the vastness that I went into or maybe they’ve had an astral projection dream where they know that they’ve left their body and that they know that they came back into their body again your soul is a body and I’m thinking that in the 21st century that’s going to

become clear through science the soul is a real thing and those of us who live in an energetic soul that we feel it know that this is true and for near-death experience people the body is the illusion completely it’s not the real thing and I’m hoping in the 21st or maybe the 22nd but hopefully the 21st century science develops a way to see the essence of the human being maybe it’s made up of muons I don’t know what it’s made up of I just know that

it’s real and I hope that science can see it and so that would give validation to people like me definitely definitely I mean there’s this conversation it has flown by but there you know there’s an experience that you talk about in your book having is beautiful you talk about a situation where you you prayed over a badly injured person there’s a car accident you and I mean things got a little strange right yeah how I mean well I

left out the strangest part I wrote that part of the book after I’d written the book when my publisher came to me and said you know you need to add something else in that’s a little out of this world and so I struggled with what to put in there and I put that in and the the fellow who’s in the book Brian he doesn’t live far from me one of my best friends he still lives it was up here in Maine still and um he came to me and he said Peter I read

that I was there you left out you left out the strange stuff and the strange stuff is that what happened what happened is this we’d been on a retreat he was leading a retreat for kids that was my first beginning of trying to be a minister in the United Church of Christ the Dean of Students talked me into it the same Dean that let me study mysticism she talked me into giving us a shot and so I went on this I was a leader on this 8th grade retreat for all

these kids statewide and um I was I kids this is photograph of me from that time where all these kids are clinging all over me everybody’s leaning intimate has radiance that that Brian was talking about and and on the drive down back to New Haven he said Peter I love you and I trust you and I knew in that moment that I could trust him and then you know we’re driving down the road and I look ahead and there’s a car flipped over

just happened it flipped over and it was upside down on the medium strip on the railing upside down raised up off the ground on the the guardrail in between the two you know the North and the South Plains and there bunch of guys were standing there I doing nothing and I screamed at Brian to stop the car and he pulled over I was yelling at him and he didn’t he hadn’t seen what had happened on the on the highway and I jumped out

of the car and I ran across the highway and there were a bunch of guys or softball players standing around they all had cleats on and I I shouted out is anybody here a medical person and they nobody was I said well I’m taking over the scene I’m an EMT and um I which I technically wasn’t I was a licensed ambulance attendant but that’s okay Oh easier to say and and so I took over the scene and I went over to the old man who was lying on the ground and he was

semi-conscious and I palpated him and and his his belly was like rock and I knew that that meant that he had internal bleeding and internal bleeding and there was really absolutely nothing I could do for her and so I couldn’t treat him for shock I couldn’t lift his legs up because it hurt him too much and so all I did was I began to pray over him and I put one hand above his forehead and one hand above his chest and I just dropped into

meditation and I wasn’t praying for healing or anything else I was just being a channel and and it was like a lightning bolt came through me repeatedly so at the top of my crown opened up and this energy started blasting through which swirled my head and and and it just kept charging through me and the next thing I knew the ambulance had arrived and and the e/m the real EMTs paramedics were asking what was going on to me and I described

what had happened and so I I took his head into traction while they they collared him and backboarded him and we lifted him on a backboard under the gurney and they put him in the ambulance and off you went mm-hmm and I then ran across the street again and with Brian who had come over to see what was going on there’s a lot of commotion and get back in the car and and and I began to tell him what it was going on on and suddenly I my interior

started to hurt incredibly like someone had taken a knife and jabbed it inside of my guts and swirled the knife around and just cut everything and I started screaming in the front seat of the car and swear a squirming screaming like like in agony and Brian poor Brian was trying to figure out what was going on and and I was screaming oh my god it hurts so much aah and then I couldn’t I couldn’t articulate any mortar as much as just just primal screaming and and I

opened my eyes and I saw the steeple on a local church that we were driving by leap off and strike me in the chest and take my pain away mm-hmm and and of course the steeple didn’t actually do that the the cross on the top stay where it was but that’s not what I saw and then as we drove down Brian’s trying to figure out what’s going on and and I close my eyes to rest because it was exhausting me it had exhausted me and inside of me I

was back in the utter darkness again traveling it at light speed and in the fire distance the very far distant horizon allege I could see the light but I was so far away from it and I was traveling inside myself a bit like light speed and and this that experience lasted days that interior experience of being in this other place whenever I closed my eyes and and over the next week prayer would strike me it was like a hot sweet buzz and honey wood would

enter from my feet and sweep up through my legs and and over my eyes and I would I would collapse wherever I was standing I was a standing in a used auto parts store or or sitting at my desk in dr. Kelsey glass or and I spent those three days and it was like it was like it was like God was praying inside me like I wasn’t praying anymore but the prayer was praying me and it was wordless and and I spent the three days wandering around completely bewildered so much so

that Brian and our friends began became quite concerned about my mental status and after three days the intensity of it lessened enough so that I went back to class and um and and then Brian came to me and he said what was going on and and because of the conversation that he and I had had before the accident where he told me that he loved me and trusted me I decided to tell him the truth what had happened and why why this thing had happened to me and that I

wasn’t in control of it and that I asked him to keep my secret because I knew that it sounded crazy I was behaving in a crazy way all right and so I that’s why I was so guarded about it for all these years and that’s not the only thing that’s happened lots of other stuff that was the most public thing other other there’s been other things that have been other divine experiences that have been less public but witness I mean in your in your blog

you talk about using yoga and mindfulness to cope rather than painkillers you had a heart attack or you saw near death you know once again in August I mean so that was recently I mean did you five months ago I I ran 5k the day before and I was at I didn’t go out sailing I have a small sailboat and I was going to go solo sailing because I still like adventure um and but the fog rolled in and so I couldn’t go sailing and it was Saturday morning so I went to

yoga class late and in the middle of this yoga class because I got tired of practicing on my own because it was needed associate the socializing I had a heart attack and I self diagnosed because I’ve done on an ambulance working on an ambulance for all those years and volunteer and they rushed me to the hospital and which is an urgent care center where we live now because the hospital closed and the doc said to me I can shoot you up with this D

coagulant you have a hundred percent blockage in your Widowmaker but if I shoot you up with this it could kill you or it could give you a serious stroke that you’ll never recover from or it can maybe give you a chance to survive long enough to get to the hospital which was hour an hour and a half away I told him to shoot me up and so he shot me up and I got a trickle through like a five percent trickle through he told and then they were going to give me

morphine for the pain because it was an immense amount of pain in my heart and I told them I can’t take opiates because they make me sick and that I would meditate my way through my pain as I have done you know my whole life when I can I I used my meditation to control my pain and so my physical pain so as I was being wheeled out into the ambulance on the ride to the hospital my son came over to me he was in town for the summer

working in a college student and he squeezed my hands and looked me in the eye and said I love you dad and it was only later a day later that he told me that the doc the ER doc had told him to say goodbye to me say his last words to me and so I’m in the ambulance and I have I have mime in my right mind because I’m not on any medication painkiller and i’m meditating and in my meditation I see death come to me again the same the same being nice as

I saw last time only this time it didn’t rush at me to take me it hovered around me and offered to take me and as I looked at death death came toward me in a gentle way but when I looked back in my meditation death proceeded and inside my meditation I could hear my son saying to me I love you dad and I started thinking about my daughter and my granddaughter who had been born sometime earlier this year and I realized that they needed me here and

that I though I could go deaf would let me and take me I decided to stay once again for love and you know I’ve been the best dad I could be I know I’m not the greatest dad in the world but I’m the only dad they have and they still need me and so I chose to stick around although I’ve been praying for my own death God take me since the day I came back the first time Wow Peter I mean this is a beautiful conversation man I I we are at the end

here ladies and gentlemen the book is called heaven is beautiful how dying taught me that death is just the beginning my guess is mr. Peter Pan tagore Peter thank you so much for your time and your story sir where can people find your work your website to websites Peter panic or calm Peter panic or calm and daily devotions org I work for daily devotions that’s my work these days but Peter panic or calm yeah man thank you so much happy

birthday thanks man and we’ll have you back again next time the next time that you die just kidding God thanks so much Peter really really great conversation all right god bless you all love is the thing love is it