Speaker 1: You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
Speaker 1: and iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2: I'm Peter Panagor and in nineteen eighty in the Rocky
Speaker 2: Mountains in Canada, while ice clamming, I died. Coming back
Speaker 2: revolutionized my understanding of myself, radically changing me, shifting my
Speaker 2: understanding of the universe and every human being and everything here.
Speaker 2: And I've spent my life trying to find what I
Speaker 2: had become when I had died.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous account
Speaker 1: of human fragility and resilience from people his lives were
Speaker 1: forever altered after having almost died. These are first hand
Speaker 1: accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.
Speaker 1: Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories
Speaker 1: to remind us all of our shared human condition. Please
Speaker 1: keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering
Speaker 1: for some listener, and discretion is advised.
Speaker 2: I grew up outs out of Boston. West of Boston
Speaker 2: that I was raised simultaneously in two churches, Roman Catholic
Speaker 2: and Greek Orthodox, which I've quickly deduced were in opposition
Speaker 2: to each other, which left me wondering about why one
Speaker 2: claimed the truth and the other claimed the truth that
Speaker 2: both claimed the other was wrong. So I had this
Speaker 2: initial religious conflict that I lived pretty much. Every year
Speaker 2: celebrated two separate easters. One was the real Easter. No, no,
Speaker 2: this one's.
Speaker 3: The real Easter.
Speaker 2: So I was sort of set up for questioning religion.
Speaker 3: As a child.
Speaker 2: I had a mystical experience when I was five, my
Speaker 2: first one, and I had a series of them. I
Speaker 2: kept them to myself. I learned young not to talk
Speaker 2: about them because they were misinterpreted and misunderstood. Even as
Speaker 2: a five year old, I understood that, but that also
Speaker 2: left me with this deep connection to the divine, who,
Speaker 2: in my experience, wasn't at all like the one that
Speaker 2: was talked about in the church. It was an entity
Speaker 2: of pure love and light and welcome, but also vast
Speaker 2: beyond my imagination's capacity to understand. When I was in
Speaker 2: high school, during this very tumultuous period in my family,
Speaker 2: I became slightly suicidal, and I decided one day that
Speaker 2: since I couldn't actually take my life, we take some LSD.
Speaker 2: It led to this experience where I was in the
Speaker 2: woods on the snow beneath a beautiful blue sky, and
Speaker 2: the divine presence began to speak through everything, every molecule
Speaker 2: and tree and root and plant and sell of me,
Speaker 2: and it was saying the very biblical I am, I
Speaker 2: am the easiness of all that there is. And it
Speaker 2: was such an intense experience of the end of duality,
Speaker 2: this unity of all existence, that it changed me. I
Speaker 2: had a family that had some trouble. My sister, Andrea,
Speaker 2: was four years older than me. As I grew up,
Speaker 2: we became closer, and by the time I reached junior
Speaker 2: high she was the person in the family that I trusted.
Speaker 2: By the time I turned fourteen, my sister ran away
Speaker 2: from home, but from my family's perspective, she vanished. It's
Speaker 2: a long, sortied tale of grief that never healed and
Speaker 2: ongoing family decline of healthy dynamics. So by the time
Speaker 2: my junior year came around, I was ready to get
Speaker 2: out of Boston and go west. So I decided to
Speaker 2: go on exchange to Montana State University. I went to
Speaker 2: the outdoor club, which I was a member of, and
Speaker 2: found on the outside bulletin board a fellow who had
Speaker 2: planned a trip to go up to British Columbia and
Speaker 2: Alberta to do a ten day snow caving ice climbing expedition.
Speaker 2: I had grown up as a boy Scout, and I
Speaker 2: was such a boy Scout nerd. I stayed until I
Speaker 2: was two years past everybody else so that I could
Speaker 2: continue camping, and which led me to a lot of
Speaker 2: backpacking in wilderness. And I was on the National Ski
Speaker 2: Patrol because of Boy Scouts, was working at Bridger Bowl
Speaker 2: and Montana as a volunteer, and so when this trip
Speaker 2: came up, I thought, let's do this. We met and
Speaker 2: we discussed it and we took a little trip to
Speaker 2: test each other out. We had complimentary skills, and so
Speaker 2: we went. So he went about getting his gear together,
Speaker 2: which involved making purchases, and for me it meant borrowing
Speaker 2: and renting what I could find. It's a world famous
Speaker 2: climb called Lower Weeping Wall north of bamf in Alberta, Canada.
Speaker 2: The immensity of the Canadian Rockies divorce the American Rocky
Speaker 2: Mountains because of their sheerness and their size and their
Speaker 2: coldness and the wilderness of them. They are just hundreds
Speaker 2: of miles of majestic, awe inspiring, most beautiful mountains I
Speaker 2: have ever seen in my life. Ever, by the time
Speaker 2: we reached the climb that morning, a whole bunch of
Speaker 2: other teams were already climbing. There was about ten feet
Speaker 2: of snow on the ground, and by the time we arrived,
Speaker 2: all these other teams had begun this half day climb,
Speaker 2: maybe a whole day climb. It's about five or six
Speaker 2: hundred feet. We got there after sun up. We planned
Speaker 2: to get off before nightfall like everybody else, but my
Speaker 2: climb was slower. I talked Tim into believing that I
Speaker 2: could make the climb with a hammer in one hand
Speaker 2: and an axe in the other rather than two axes.
Speaker 2: Problem with that is that not only does the axe
Speaker 2: have a significantly longer reach on each swing, which means
Speaker 2: that instead of mincing along your taking strides, I could
Speaker 2: use the hammer to climb, but I could never hang
Speaker 2: on it like I could on an axe. An axe
Speaker 2: has a strap midway up the shaft that you can
Speaker 2: put your hand through, and once you set the axe
Speaker 2: at its forty five degree angle ish, you can let
Speaker 2: go of the handle and my whole arm and shoulder
Speaker 2: could rest with the hammer.
Speaker 3: That was not the case.
Speaker 2: I had to grip at the entire time, so my
Speaker 2: swing was shorter with it, and I had to use
Speaker 2: extra strength to hold onto it for the entire climb.
Speaker 3: By the time we.
Speaker 2: Reached three quarters of the way up, some of the
Speaker 2: teams had already descended and left. One of the things
Speaker 2: about ice climbing it's unlike backpacking or hiking, is that
Speaker 2: you can't turn around and go back the way you came.
Speaker 2: If you're on a trail somewhere and the weather turns
Speaker 2: or you get tired, you can turn and walk back
Speaker 2: down the way you came up. But ice climbing and
Speaker 2: rock climbing.
Speaker 3: That's not really possible.
Speaker 2: There are roots of ascent and descent. We couldn't turn
Speaker 2: around and descend the ice as we climbed. We had
Speaker 2: to continue to go up in order to follow the
Speaker 2: route down, but I couldn't speed any faster. Not only
Speaker 2: was my swing shorter, but I was exhausted from having
Speaker 2: to to the hammer. I had to use my arm
Speaker 2: that had the hammer in it, and that meant that
Speaker 2: this grip exhausted my forearm, which significantly slowed our time.
Speaker 2: So by the time a couple hours before sunset, I already.
Speaker 3: Knew that we were in a grave situation.
Speaker 2: By the time I reached the top of the climb,
Speaker 2: the sun set, and as the sun set, the temperature
Speaker 2: dropped about thirty degrees in an instant and violent shivers
Speaker 2: overtook my body and overtook Tim's body, And we were
Speaker 2: five six hundred feet up on a sheer cliff of ice,
Speaker 2: and there was nobody to rescue us, and we didn't
Speaker 2: have sleeping bags or a stove. It was a day climb.
Speaker 2: We had eaten all our food, we'd drunk all our water.
Speaker 2: Fortunately for us, there was ice we could suck on
Speaker 2: to keep our hustles hydrated. But I was a skinny
Speaker 2: twenty year old with no extra consumable fat on me,
Speaker 2: and the shivers. The shivers started sucking down my energy
Speaker 2: as soon as they started, and as the temperature dropped,
Speaker 2: I was expending more energy in order to keep my
Speaker 2: body warm, which was shortening the possibility that I would
Speaker 2: have enough energy to make the descent in the dark.
Speaker 2: So as we sat there, we tried to talk, but
Speaker 2: the thing about these shivers was clattering my tongue, and
Speaker 2: my tongue was getting bitten as I spoke, which complicated everything.
Speaker 2: And Tim hauled up the rope mighty fast, but in
Speaker 2: his haste mislaid it. It became a huge knot. I
Speaker 2: had to take off my gloves to untangle the knot
Speaker 2: in the starlight, which began frostbite. And we decided that
Speaker 2: we had to move that the only chance we had
Speaker 2: was to fight our way down on ice on crampons
Speaker 2: in the dark, rope together to a tree, and this
Speaker 2: tree was.
Speaker 3: The repel spot.
Speaker 2: We're supposed to take a piece of nylon webbing and
Speaker 2: tie it in a square knot. We're supposed to put
Speaker 2: it around the tree, put the rope through the nylon tube,
Speaker 2: and then descend on the rope and then just slide
Speaker 2: that rope right down to us. But one of the
Speaker 2: things that happens with extreme cold is that it begins
Speaker 2: to encourage poor decision making. So we made a bad decision.
Speaker 2: We decided that the value of the nylon tubing was important.
Speaker 2: Tim didn't want to waste the money, so we both
Speaker 2: agreed to throw the rope around the tree and descend,
Speaker 2: And the result of that is the rope froze.
Speaker 3: To the tree.
Speaker 2: So now we're down some hundred and fifty feet below
Speaker 2: it on the ledge the size of two boardroom tables,
Speaker 2: and snow up to our knees. Our feet were on fire,
Speaker 2: my hands were on fire, My face was on fire.
Speaker 3: Cold is this burn?
Speaker 2: And we lost our coordination, both of us, very coordinated people, couldn't.
Speaker 3: The muscles themselves.
Speaker 2: Were freezing, making movement difficult. And so Tim came over
Speaker 2: and we both pulled on the rope, and the rope
Speaker 2: stayed stuck with all of our weight on it. And
Speaker 2: so we're knowing how dangerous our situation was and using
Speaker 2: our willpower to squish down our fear. And there was
Speaker 2: no way out of the situation. We couldn't go down,
Speaker 2: no rope, but Tim decided he could go up. Tim
Speaker 2: knew this not called a persic hitch, and he tied
Speaker 2: it to the rope, one on the right side, one
Speaker 2: on the left side, with these huge long loops. And
Speaker 2: the thing about this particular hitch is when you slide
Speaker 2: it up the line, it has very little friction, but
Speaker 2: as soon as you apply attention to it, it locks
Speaker 2: in place at some outrageous number like ninety six or
Speaker 2: ninety seven percent friction. So he put one foot into
Speaker 2: the loop on the right and one foot into the
Speaker 2: loop on the left, and I took the rope and
Speaker 2: I wrapped it around my waist and I lay in
Speaker 2: the snow and I wound the rope around myself to
Speaker 2: try to make it taunt vertically, because the only way
Speaker 2: we were going to get out of this was he
Speaker 2: was going to ascend back up what we came down
Speaker 2: without safety. So this is super dangerous. And I could
Speaker 2: see the beauty of the Starlit sky and that gave
Speaker 2: us enough light to see. And you might think it
Speaker 2: was crazy for me to lie in the snow, but
Speaker 2: snow is actually an insulator, so I was warmer in
Speaker 2: the snow than I was in the air. And as
Speaker 2: I lay there, I suddenly heard him yell fall a hang,
Speaker 2: and in the next second.
Speaker 3: Or two he landed on me.
Speaker 2: Apparently hadn't fallen very far, but the rope came down
Speaker 2: with him. His foot was tangled in the thin line
Speaker 2: that he was using to ascend with and it pulled
Speaker 2: the whole rope down. So now we had the rope
Speaker 2: and he was unhurt, and we felt excited, and we
Speaker 2: coiled up the rope and down the road came a vehicle.
Speaker 2: And this vehicle turns out to have been the warden,
Speaker 2: and he pulled into the parking lot across the street,
Speaker 2: flashed his lights. We jumped up and down and waved
Speaker 2: our arms. He flashed his lights. We knew he saw us.
Speaker 2: We were heartened by this. Whenever you go into a
Speaker 2: World Inness area, you sign into a log, you say
Speaker 2: where you're going in and when you expect to come out,
Speaker 2: and we signed in, but we didn't sign out, so
Speaker 2: he came looking for us. We made the next traverse
Speaker 2: feeling better. But I had this transition happen. This deeply
Speaker 2: mammalion survivals switch flipped inside my brain, way down deep inside,
Speaker 2: and suddenly I had this animalistic need to survive, and
Speaker 2: this animalistic need to survive superseded my own will power
Speaker 2: by a thousand magnitude. I still was afraid, but suddenly
Speaker 2: I had this a super capacity, this ancient supercapacity for
Speaker 2: my own survival. And even though my brain was becoming
Speaker 2: confused from the cold, it provided me with a sharper
Speaker 2: attention to my situation. So we made this traverse, and
Speaker 2: we propelled down this rocky crag, and now I was,
Speaker 2: for the first time all night safe, and we looked
Speaker 2: down into the parking lot, and the warden was there,
Speaker 2: but seeing us in this situation, now we wave, he
Speaker 2: can see us where one repel up being sometime way
Speaker 2: half or midnight. He left.
Speaker 3: Thinking that we were going.
Speaker 2: To be safe in a few minutes, which is what
Speaker 2: we thought. I'm frostpitten, blisters, my nose, my cheeks, my chin,
Speaker 2: my toes, my feet stopped hurting, which is a bad sign.
Speaker 2: And meanwhile, I know how our hypothermia is advancing, because
Speaker 2: I had been on this ski patrol and trained to understand,
Speaker 2: so I was pretty aware. So I took off my
Speaker 2: gloves and I took the rope, which was kind of
Speaker 2: figurated through my locking carabineers, and I tied one end
Speaker 2: to my harness around my waist. I took the other
Speaker 2: end and I tossed it wide out around this corner
Speaker 2: that led to that crag that we had descended in
Speaker 2: the shadow, and I pulled the rope and I didn't
Speaker 2: pull it six inches before some where up above it jammed.
Speaker 2: And the more I pulled on that, the tighter the
Speaker 2: bind became, and the less slack pulled. It was stuck
Speaker 2: and jammed, and I couldn't pull it out. And now
Speaker 2: we are alone, and Tim can't help me pull the rope.
Speaker 2: There's not much slack where I am enough for me
Speaker 2: and being tied to my waist, and he's ten feet away.
Speaker 2: And we couldn't ascend back up because it was rock
Speaker 2: and not ice. We have crampons on and we don't
Speaker 2: have the other side.
Speaker 3: Of the rope.
Speaker 2: We got half a rope. Hypothermia continued to advance, but
Speaker 2: I got to this place in my thinking that I
Speaker 2: understood that we were not getting out of this. I
Speaker 2: couldn't go up, that couldn't go down. The temperature continued
Speaker 2: to drop, the hypothermia continued to advance, my energy reserves
Speaker 2: continue to I had no fuel, no food, no water
Speaker 2: now and I accepted my death. I just suddenly surrendered.
Speaker 2: And as I did this peace came to me.
Speaker 3: And I started thinking.
Speaker 2: About my parents and the loss of my sister and
Speaker 2: how it had caused them so much ongoing, never ending suffering.
Speaker 2: And I thought to myself, they didn't want me to
Speaker 2: go on this trip, and now I'm going to die
Speaker 2: and it's going to destroy them, but there's nothing I
Speaker 2: can do about it. And then I started thinking about God,
Speaker 2: not the god of my cultural Christianity, but the divine
Speaker 2: beings that through my childhood I had encountered, and I
Speaker 2: knew that the being there, And so I un zipped
Speaker 2: my coat, which happens to the hypothermic people hastening the cold,
Speaker 2: and I began to fall asleep, like a stage curtain
Speaker 2: dropping in a darkened theater, a boom blackness, and I
Speaker 2: would collapse and smack my shoulder and my helmeted head
Speaker 2: on the granite and startle awake and stand and pull
Speaker 2: on the rope which never budged, but I wasn't gonna
Speaker 2: give up trying. And then I stood up this one
Speaker 2: time after falling asleep, and there was this big black
Speaker 2: circle around my peripheral vision and it began to collapse,
Speaker 2: and I was confused, and I looked around and I
Speaker 2: saw tim and I saw the mountain, and that it
Speaker 2: continued to collapse, and I was thinking, am I falling asleep?
Speaker 2: And then it went to blackness, and then I disappeared.
Speaker 2: All of my pain was gone, the mountain was gone,
Speaker 2: and I had this sense that I was out of
Speaker 2: my body, but I still had my brain working. I
Speaker 2: was still thinking, and in front of me there was
Speaker 2: this sudden vast expanse of darkness, size of the universe,
Speaker 2: and I was wondering what is going on? And then
Speaker 2: at the distance, a single light appeared like a single
Speaker 2: are and rushed toward me.
Speaker 3: It filled my vision.
Speaker 2: And it communicated to me telepathically but not in language.
Speaker 2: You're coming with me. I'm taking you. And I thought
Speaker 2: to myself, I'm not going anywhere. I don't know what's
Speaker 2: going on. I'm staying right where I am. And I
Speaker 2: reached inside myself for this will power that I'd had
Speaker 2: that night to resist, but there was no resistance possible, as.
Speaker 3: If it had a hand. It reached to me and
Speaker 3: took me.
Speaker 2: And everything I'm saying is metaphor because there were no
Speaker 2: things there. I had no brain there, there was no language,
Speaker 2: just information. I was inside of this orb of light,
Speaker 2: and it was feeding me with the love and comfort
Speaker 2: as we whisked back up the direction it had come,
Speaker 2: and I had this understanding that this gigantic orb was
Speaker 2: a portion of the divine I experienced this being before.
Speaker 2: I had zero fear, the same entity that had come
Speaker 2: to me as a child.
Speaker 3: And then we.
Speaker 2: Reached the edge of this universe size darkness, and suddenly
Speaker 2: I was this gigantic orb, I was this being of light,
Speaker 2: and I knew myself. I knew this is who I.
Speaker 3: Had been forever.
Speaker 2: I've always been this, and I had never really been Peter.
Speaker 2: And I was content and unafraid and a hole and healed,
Speaker 2: and way far in the distance, I could see this
Speaker 2: darkness that was deeper darkness. The deeper darkness opened and
Speaker 2: light poured out, like a gigantic waterfall ten thousand times
Speaker 2: bigger than me. Every color of every single star I
Speaker 2: had seen that night ultraviolet rays, colors that I can't
Speaker 2: even explain by the billions, and it radiated.
Speaker 4: Love.
Speaker 2: And as I touched it with my being, it entered
Speaker 2: into me. It opened me up, and it split me
Speaker 2: open and flowed inside of me, and I inflated. It
Speaker 2: was everything there was. And then it looked at my
Speaker 2: human life, the one I had just lived, which apparently
Speaker 2: I carried with me every moment of my life. The
Speaker 2: divine had lived with me. And then I saw inside
Speaker 2: myself some darknesses.
Speaker 3: I tried to.
Speaker 2: Hide them, And as I tried to hide them, I
Speaker 2: entered into a life review of hell, where I experienced
Speaker 2: from the interior of each individual person that who I
Speaker 2: had hurt in my life. I experienced their emotions and
Speaker 2: their thoughts and their reactions. For every single action of
Speaker 2: pain giving that I had done in my entire life,
Speaker 2: I was all these other people, because the divine is
Speaker 2: all of us. And simultaneously I was also previous Peter,
Speaker 2: experiencing all of my jealousies and angers and envies. And
Speaker 2: as I had these simultaneous experiences, the voice kept speaking
Speaker 2: to me. I love you, I know you, I have
Speaker 2: meant you, this is you. I love you as you are.
Speaker 2: I loved you and everything you did. But I, in
Speaker 2: my smaller nature, judged myself in comparison to this unlimited purity.
Speaker 2: But it kept showing me love and mercy and welcome,
Speaker 2: and it showed me that there's this radical equality of
Speaker 2: our human brokenness. And not only had I brought with
Speaker 2: me all of the pain I had given in my life,
Speaker 2: I brought with me all the love I had been
Speaker 2: given in my life and all the love I had
Speaker 2: given away. And it was so much more because the
Speaker 2: love that I had lived in my life its source
Speaker 2: was the unlimited, abundant love. My countenance changed, and all
Speaker 2: of my previous pin was dematerialized. I was whole and
Speaker 2: well and beloved in a bliss that is beyond my
Speaker 2: ability to say, but lingers with me every day. And
Speaker 2: then I was somehow reduced again, and I said, with
Speaker 2: our language, am I dead? And the voice said, yes,
Speaker 2: you're dead, Welcome home. I said, well, I can see
Speaker 2: my parents and they're suffering. What about them? And the
Speaker 2: divine swept me across this illuminated darkness, this vast womb,
Speaker 2: and to this edge of heaven, and my attention was
Speaker 2: brought way far back to the origin of our universe,
Speaker 2: and in the origin of our universe was in the now,
Speaker 2: and out of this deep, infinite darkness, that this infinity
Speaker 2: in which I could not penetrate, out of this was
Speaker 2: pouring light, and this pouring of light was weaving itself
Speaker 2: into our existent universe, so that I could see that
Speaker 2: everything that was darkness and light in our universe was
Speaker 2: woven out of the light itself. And then it spoke
Speaker 2: to me. It spoke to me from its own infinity,
Speaker 2: and it showed me the vast love it was is,
Speaker 2: and that this vast love was creating all of these universes,
Speaker 2: and that all of the love that was in every
Speaker 2: single one of these universes, and all of the love
Speaker 2: that was in all of our universe spread wide, was
Speaker 2: all aimed right at me, and that I was the
Speaker 2: most beloved being, and that all of this unconditional, unlimited
Speaker 2: love was how much I was beloved, and I'd always
Speaker 2: been beloved and will be beloved, and because of this love,
Speaker 2: all is was and will be well eternally. And then
Speaker 2: my vision was brought to our galaxy, down to our
Speaker 2: solar system, down to our planet, and I could see
Speaker 2: Earth in live time, living as it was, with half
Speaker 2: the planet in shadow and half in light, and I
Speaker 2: could see every human being all at once, and every
Speaker 2: single person, no exceptions was made from this source of light,
Speaker 2: but the whole planet was covered with this fog, and
Speaker 2: I could see that no one could see the light
Speaker 2: inside of anyone else, and I understood that that same
Speaker 2: infinite love aimed at me in the same quality and
Speaker 2: quantity aimed at every single human being. And then I
Speaker 2: saw my parents' faces living a life without me, and
Speaker 2: I saw all of the pain and suffering they would
Speaker 2: have if I stayed where I was, And then I
Speaker 2: saw the life they would live with me if I
Speaker 2: went home again, and They both had suffering in them,
Speaker 2: but the former had destruction of my parents. And I
Speaker 2: understood that in the moment of their death, they would
Speaker 2: be where I was, and that all for them will
Speaker 2: be well. But I could see their suffering, and so
Speaker 2: I said, so I have to stay. Can I go back?
Speaker 2: And the voice said it's your time to come, but yes,
Speaker 2: you can go back.
Speaker 3: I said, I.
Speaker 2: Choose to live my life, and the voice said, you
Speaker 2: won't live your life. And as I went, I was
Speaker 2: compressed into a more material form, and I was carried
Speaker 2: down this very long tunnel. There were a million doorways,
Speaker 2: all of them probabilities of the life I could live.
Speaker 2: But I traveled down this tunnel, passed all these doorways
Speaker 2: to the end of it, and there was a body
Speaker 2: on a cliff and someone bent over, but they weren't me.
Speaker 2: I didn't know them. And then this angelic being took
Speaker 2: me like a light sword, like a light saber, and
Speaker 2: stabbed the body and opened a wound and forced me inside.
Speaker 2: And I was inside this thing. And then I felt
Speaker 2: this hum as this brain came back online and kind
Speaker 2: of wound itself back up again slowly, and all of
Speaker 2: my pain returned as the cold came back, and the
Speaker 2: life pain came back, the confinement of being human. I
Speaker 2: knew that I wasn't, but I was trapped by my
Speaker 2: own choice. And the sound returned, yelling, screaming and decipherable,
Speaker 2: don't die, don't die, don't die, don't die. And I
Speaker 2: open my eyes and there's Tim. I don't know him,
Speaker 2: I don't even know myself, and he you were dead,
Speaker 2: you were dead. And he pulls me up and he's
Speaker 2: talking and he's talking, and I have no idea who
Speaker 2: he is or where I am. All I know is
Speaker 2: where I am not. I'm not where I was, and
Speaker 2: where I was was infinitely greater and better than here.
Speaker 2: And after a time I came to understand, I'm Peter,
Speaker 2: I'm ice clamming. This is Tim, and he's talking and
Speaker 2: he's crying. If you die, I was going to die.
Speaker 2: And then he got me to pull the rope, which
Speaker 2: came free, and we descended, and we self treated for hypothermia,
Speaker 2: because by that time I was back enough to myself
Speaker 2: to know how to do that. And from that point on,
Speaker 2: my previous life had ended. I was a new person
Speaker 2: who looked like the same person, who spoke like the
Speaker 2: same person, but my perception of myself and of the
Speaker 2: world around me was entirely and permanently changed. We climbed
Speaker 2: in the car and we heated ourselves up with the
Speaker 2: engine and brought our temperature back up, and we drove away.
Speaker 2: The dominant perspective that I came back with is that
Speaker 2: the largest part of me remains above me and outside
Speaker 2: of me, and is me and sees through this physical
Speaker 2: body and feels through its fingertips, tastes through its mouth.
Speaker 2: It it's not me in this black and white, flickering
Speaker 2: world where light is pouring through. And I did not
Speaker 2: say a word to Tim about what happened to me.
Speaker 2: I couldn't. I didn't understand it myself. So we got
Speaker 2: to Calgary and we're hungry, and we coated this pizza place.
Speaker 2: It's all neon and it's bright and there's music loud,
Speaker 2: and everything in it to me is crass and ugly,
Speaker 2: and it's not just It was the epitome of this
Speaker 2: broken frailty that is all things around me.
Speaker 3: And I remember.
Speaker 2: Picking up this piece of pizza and thinking to myself,
Speaker 2: this body needs fuel. When I was dead, I didn't
Speaker 2: need fuel. I was fuel.
Speaker 3: It was bizarre.
Speaker 2: I had to masticate it with my teeth and feel
Speaker 2: its strange, jelatinous ready juice and swallow it down my throat.
Speaker 2: It's like, what is the crudity of this thing? And
Speaker 2: every movement I made was this strange, alien experience of wow,
Speaker 2: this is so so animal, not terrible, just crudd And
Speaker 2: then I was stuck in this thing. I couldn't leave,
Speaker 2: and I didn't understand where I had been. I didn't
Speaker 2: have any language to process my experience.
Speaker 3: There's no language on the other side.
Speaker 2: That's the first problem. And the second was I didn't
Speaker 2: have any constructs to think about it. I could only
Speaker 2: feel it and remember it with a portion of myself
Speaker 2: that wasn't even human. I could remember through my own
Speaker 2: soul what I I had lost. From then on, every
Speaker 2: single day of my life, I live above myself. I
Speaker 2: for decades, for decades, masked, pretending that that wasn't what
Speaker 2: I was experiencing, although it was with every single breath
Speaker 2: of my life I was.
Speaker 3: Near death.
Speaker 2: Experience was basically unheard of. This is back in the
Speaker 2: early eighties. I had no context for this, but I
Speaker 2: had my meditation life, and I found that in that
Speaker 2: space of my quietude, I could touch back into the divine.
Speaker 2: It became a doorway for me wherein I could see
Speaker 2: the light itself. So I began to practice my meditation
Speaker 2: deeper and deeper and more and more. When I go
Speaker 2: back to UMass Amherst, I studied my pantomime and my
Speaker 2: mind teachers. Teach teacher was Marcel Marceau, who taught hatha
Speaker 2: yoga as a mechanism for learning mime. And in this
Speaker 2: mime class, one day he had us find our chi.
Speaker 2: I felt it as we moved it through these yoga moves,
Speaker 2: this prana and so he said, who here's felt this energy?
Speaker 2: And I'm like me, nobody else. So he called me
Speaker 2: up to the front. He had me kneel and close
Speaker 2: my eyes and put my palms up, and he said,
Speaker 2: now what do you feel? I said, I feel pin
Speaker 2: wheels and he said open your eyes. I opened my
Speaker 2: eyes and his hands were an inch from mine doing
Speaker 2: these things pin wheels, and the class dropped jaw so
Speaker 2: much so that two of the people in the class
Speaker 2: who were evangelical Christians left the class, never to return,
Speaker 2: saying it was the devil.
Speaker 3: And so around that time.
Speaker 2: I began to practice Crea yoga and Kundlini yoga in
Speaker 2: addition to my.
Speaker 3: Centering prayer practice.
Speaker 2: And what I found is that it anchored me in
Speaker 2: the world, and I read everything that I could lay
Speaker 2: my hands on. Went on this retreat to this monastery,
Speaker 2: met this monk whose light was radiant from him, and
Speaker 2: decided that I was either going to be a monk
Speaker 2: or go to Divinity School to study mysticism. And so
Speaker 2: I dropped my family plan, which was get my graduate
Speaker 2: degree in architecture, joined my dad's firm, and abandoned all
Speaker 2: of that and go study mysticism, which gave me the
Speaker 2: tools to think about what had happened to me. I
Speaker 2: kept this a secret for close to twenty years because
Speaker 2: I know how crazy this is. I know how crazy
Speaker 2: it is, and I had a family at kids and
Speaker 2: needed a job and didn't want to risk my kid's livelihood.
Speaker 2: I told my wife on the day after we got married,
Speaker 2: which was unfair to her, but she already had witnessed
Speaker 2: a whole bunch of crazy things in my life. My
Speaker 2: relationship with animals, for one thing. Wildlife wild animals like me.
Speaker 3: Seals have come.
Speaker 2: Up to me, I have chickadeese land on my finger.
Speaker 2: I have a menagerie of animal friends who live outside
Speaker 2: my door, who come every day, who come onto my
Speaker 2: desk when I'm working.
Speaker 3: I've just got this.
Speaker 2: They are me, I am them. It's every single human
Speaker 2: being I have ever met has a radiance to them. Everybody,
Speaker 2: all the time, never goes away. Eventually, I was a
Speaker 2: minister and a church. I was hiding out in the
Speaker 2: church as a minister so that I could have a
Speaker 2: way to earn a living while I continued my interior
Speaker 2: journey and service was part of my job, part of
Speaker 2: my job as a soul come back here to help people.
Speaker 2: And there was this time period in our congregation where
Speaker 2: there was a big embezzlement that lasted decades and it
Speaker 2: caused great pain. The entire church had turned against me,
Speaker 2: but in the end we caught the embezzalor. But they
Speaker 2: came to me one day before I climbed into the
Speaker 2: pulpit and said, you must have had a lot of
Speaker 2: faith to put up with us for what we did
Speaker 2: to you over all these years. And so I climbed
Speaker 2: in the pulpit that morning, realizing that I now trusted
Speaker 2: the congregation that I could tell them the truth that
Speaker 2: I was actually not a Christian. I was not a believer.
Speaker 2: I hadn't been a believer since the day that I died.
Speaker 2: And I told them my story to a silent, unstirring
Speaker 2: congregation who listened to the whole of it and understood
Speaker 2: that the strength of my courage came not from me
Speaker 2: or my belief, but from my understanding that I'm always
Speaker 2: known by the all knowwhere, and that I could finally
Speaker 2: tell the truth and stop pretending to be who I wasn't.
Speaker 2: It was leaking out all over me, was being shown
Speaker 2: to everybody. It's just that I never named it. And
Speaker 2: by naming it, I could finally be unmasked. And within
Speaker 2: days in my town, five or six people came to me.
Speaker 2: They had the same secret, and so my loneliness began
Speaker 2: to end. I'll stick around here now and have as
Speaker 2: much fun as I possibly can till I'm called home
Speaker 2: for good.
Speaker 3: But I no longer prayed to die.
Speaker 2: I found my way to be integrated here by integrating
Speaker 2: back to where I from, where I came my path here.
Speaker 2: Most people strive to find heaven here. I had the
Speaker 2: opposite problem.
Speaker 3: I had to.
Speaker 2: Strive to find here here my integration was the opposite way,
Speaker 2: and and now I'm still continuing on my path. It's
Speaker 2: not it's not an end the day. The day I
Speaker 2: die is the day it ends in this life. And
Speaker 2: that death isn't like a People talk about it like
Speaker 2: a stepping from one world to the next, a doorway,
Speaker 2: which is kind of true, but it's more like an
Speaker 2: evolution from an amoeba to a human being. The leap
Speaker 2: is ginormous, it is, It is so other that it's
Speaker 2: all I want.
Speaker 5: Welcome back to a live again.
Speaker 1: Joining me for a conversation about today's story are our producers.
Speaker 1: Nick Takoski is an award winning screenwriter and podcast producer.
Speaker 1: He hosts the philanthropic competitive reading series Write Club Atlanta.
Speaker 1: He's also one of the editors of the Write Club
Speaker 1: based literary magazine Tender Blood Sport. Also joining today is
Speaker 1: Kate Sweeney. Kate is an award winning writer, journalist, and
Speaker 1: podcast producer known for her deep explorations of culture, history,
Speaker 1: and social phenomenon. Her book American Afterlife, which examines the
Speaker 1: rituals and traditions surrounding death in the United States, won.
Speaker 5: The Georgia author of the Year Award. She has also
Speaker 5: received multiple Edward R. Murrow and Associated Press awards for
Speaker 5: her public radio work, with her stories featured on NPR
Speaker 5: program's Late Morning Edition and All Things Considered. Britt Die
Speaker 5: is an award winning writer and story producer. He's a
Speaker 5: founding member of Atlanta's Whole World Theater and the Atlanta
Speaker 5: Dailies Film Project. Brent's work has appeared in national and
Speaker 5: regional publications including Pace Magazine and The Bitter sub And
Speaker 5: I'm your host, Dan Bush.
Speaker 6: Hey, it's Kate, Hey, It's Brent, Hi, It's Nack.
Speaker 4: We all sounds so happy. The Twilight Society is back again.
Speaker 3: Nice.
Speaker 6: That made me feel warmer when we met though at
Speaker 6: Waller's Yet the stories you selected. I was touched by
Speaker 6: the stories that you chose.
Speaker 7: I just feel so lucky that these people reached out
Speaker 7: to me, and I feel very, you know, moved by
Speaker 7: the fact that that they put their trust in this
Speaker 7: project because these are some of the most usually the
Speaker 7: most vulnerable stories.
Speaker 3: Of their lives.
Speaker 4: So in this episode we hear Peter Panagort's story.
Speaker 1: I love hearing his story because he's an every day
Speaker 1: He reminds me of myself but then he goes on
Speaker 1: to experience things beyond a horrific situation he was trapped
Speaker 1: in his He actually did have a near death experience
Speaker 1: account in a classic sort of textbook sense, where he
Speaker 1: actually experienced things and phenomenon beyond the veil, as it were.
Speaker 7: I found this to be really interesting because what happens
Speaker 7: to him is so beautiful. You know, he experienced this warmth,
Speaker 7: this light, beyond anything any of us could ever even imagine.
Speaker 7: And rather than this narrative that some of us are
Speaker 7: familiar with of sort of coming back and feeling like, oh,
Speaker 7: life is beautiful, instead of sort of simplifying things and
Speaker 7: helping him be simply seen his purpose. Now, Peter's experience
Speaker 7: complicates things for him. Now the world seems kind of
Speaker 7: lesser than right, and it always does. It feels like
Speaker 7: the shadow world to him. Eating when he first comes back,
Speaker 7: he tells that story about eating the piece of pizza
Speaker 7: and kind of cramming it into his mouth and feeling like, oh,
Speaker 7: the human body is weird. What's going on? And it's
Speaker 7: not so much disgust as it is, it's just this
Speaker 7: overwhelming strangeness of mortality and of bodies and sustenance and fuel. Yeah, like, oh,
Speaker 7: we didn't need this, but this body needs this. And
Speaker 7: so that's his task to come to grips with life
Speaker 7: an a mortal body. And I just find that to
Speaker 7: be fascinating. You know, Like he's already survived like this
Speaker 7: crazy ice climbing, you know, God incident.
Speaker 8: There's something that's maybe humbling about it, but also something
Speaker 8: that's just inherently absurd.
Speaker 3: It's like it's.
Speaker 8: This this cosmic joke on us that like we are
Speaker 8: beings of light walking around in decaying steak.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and I love that. It's ultimately this really human
Speaker 7: sense of impatience that is kind of threatens to be
Speaker 7: his undoing, right, yeah, you know, and what keeps him
Speaker 7: from fully experiencing life even though he's already had this
Speaker 7: like amazing experience. It's like, oh, now it's impatience, and
Speaker 7: and it's this sort of it's like Buddhist mindfulness that
Speaker 7: ultimately brings him to be able to let go of
Speaker 7: his desires. I would love to be able to get
Speaker 7: to that point. But I mean this has been a
Speaker 7: lifelong practice for him, years and years and years of
Speaker 7: meditating every day for hours, and you know, reading all
Speaker 7: of these texts and living this very spiritual life, and
Speaker 7: only recently has he been able to reach this sense
Speaker 7: of letting go and having this turning point.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and I think something that, something else that struck
Speaker 8: me is just instead of these near death experiences where
Speaker 8: suddenly you find what you've always been looking for, this
Speaker 8: did not come anywhere near that. It just it mirrored
Speaker 8: sort of the reality that we all live in, which
Speaker 8: is like, if you want to find enlightenment, you have
Speaker 8: to work, and kind of it kind of sucks. Spiritual
Speaker 8: enlightenment is a practice and not just something that like
Speaker 8: you don't get one epiphany and that's it, you know.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's you right, Like, yes, I love that.
Speaker 8: Yes, you strive toward it.
Speaker 4: There is no magic pill, my dude.
Speaker 8: Yeah, exactly. And he got a taste and then his
Speaker 8: experience was like if you want to get back to
Speaker 8: that point, you have to climb the mountain again.
Speaker 1: There is an intriguing sort of aspect to a lot
Speaker 1: of these stories where there are events, coincidences, if you will,
Speaker 1: that happen in concert with these near death experiences, and
Speaker 1: it does trick out your rational mind and you start
Speaker 1: to really wonder, like well, is there something at work here?
Speaker 1: Is there some force at play here. I've had experiences
Speaker 1: in my life with people that I've lost where there
Speaker 1: are events surrounding the death of the loved one that
Speaker 1: are hard to it's hard to go that, you know,
Speaker 1: that is a coincidence, it's hard to write it off.
Speaker 1: And then even beyond that, for me to impose my
Speaker 1: sort of philosophical beliefs on that experience and to say no,
Speaker 1: I need facts, I need proof. Sorry, you know who
Speaker 1: am I to do that? Because the unknown is so
Speaker 1: vast and so incredible that I have to give myself
Speaker 1: some liberty and go, well, maybe it's okay not to know.
Speaker 7: Right right, And I'll say, that's sort of like what
Speaker 7: you're talking about is sort of happened to me in
Speaker 7: working on this podcast, because I certainly do have my
Speaker 7: own set of beliefs. I am a natural born, I'm
Speaker 7: a skeptic. I don't know. There could be a lot
Speaker 7: at work that I'm not aware of, And basically I'm
Speaker 7: not going to sit here and and be a jerk
Speaker 7: about it. I'm not gonna you know, we always tell
Speaker 7: our kid like, don't be don't don't burst other people's
Speaker 7: balloons just because you happen to maybe know some facts
Speaker 7: about Santa Claus that your cousin doesn't know. You know,
Speaker 7: we're not gonna talk about that because that's bursting her bubble.
Speaker 4: Don't yuck my um, don't yuck my yum.
Speaker 7: I'm not gonna. Yeah, And there are things that there
Speaker 7: are things that we don't know.
Speaker 1: I had, and I did, I was, I was, I
Speaker 1: was my family growing my parents. My dad was a chemist,
Speaker 1: and he had a falling out with his church at
Speaker 1: a young age because he experienced some things that you
Speaker 1: described as racism, and he said, well, I'll never darken
Speaker 1: the doors of this place again if what you believe
Speaker 1: leaves you to this sort of hatred, and experiencing that
Speaker 1: during the Civil rights era in the South, that plus
Speaker 1: his sort of interest in the mechanics of the universe
Speaker 1: through chemistry and physical chemistry in particular, led him to
Speaker 1: sort of abandon his upbringing with Christianity and he became atheist,
Speaker 1: and my mom as well, and so they were like,
Speaker 1: literally my grandparents thought me and my brother were going
Speaker 1: to hell because we did not go to church. At
Speaker 1: some point we stopped going. So I grew up with
Speaker 1: sort of an atheist or at least a skeptical background,
Speaker 1: where facts and proof is the you know, faith is
Speaker 1: dangerous and facts and proof are the only thing that
Speaker 1: that you should ever tune into. So when these things
Speaker 1: started to happen, these sort of what I would say
Speaker 1: felt like miraculous events, incidences around when my dear friend
Speaker 1: and she was my lover for three years, we were
Speaker 1: living together, and when she passed away in a horrible
Speaker 1: car accident. There were events leading up to that that were,
Speaker 1: for no better word, miraculous. Like her, the things that
Speaker 1: she was doing that seemed to be in preparation for
Speaker 1: this event. She had hair down to her waist and
Speaker 1: she cut it off. The day before the event. She
Speaker 1: went home to say goodbye to us, her father, who
Speaker 1: was a Vietnam vet and who was just an alcoholic,
Speaker 1: and she was like, I'm not going.
Speaker 4: To enable you anymore.
Speaker 1: I'm going to move on with my life and I'm
Speaker 1: no longer gonna you know, So she said goodbye to him.
Speaker 1: That's why she drove down there before the accident happened.
Speaker 1: These things make me go, well, what who am I?
Speaker 1: You know, how arrogant do I need to be? In
Speaker 1: my atheism to balk at that and to say no,
Speaker 1: I need facts, I need proof. Why can't I at
Speaker 1: some point in my heart and in my soul just
Speaker 1: accept it and go, you know, okay, you know, and
Speaker 1: let myself believe in some weird way, to let myself
Speaker 1: have some faith in that, because why not?
Speaker 4: Is it dangerous to have faith in that?
Speaker 3: Why not?
Speaker 4: Anyway, That's that's sort of my own journey. But it's
Speaker 4: fascinating to me.
Speaker 1: It's one of the things that maybe want to find
Speaker 1: out more from other people who almost die.
Speaker 4: That's what I was gonna ask you.
Speaker 7: I mean, hard lines can be so damaging no matter
Speaker 7: what the hard line is.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I really think that one of the most important
Speaker 8: things that we can kind of come to grips with
Speaker 8: with ourselves is just I don't fucking know, I don't
Speaker 8: fucking know, you know, And I think that to be
Speaker 8: okay with that and yeah, and just to kind of
Speaker 8: go like, all right, man, that's what that's what it is.
Speaker 8: I don't know why it is, it just is, and
Speaker 8: you know, I'll just keep moving through the world.
Speaker 6: It seems funny to me as a Christian. It seems
Speaker 6: funny to me that so many of my fellow believers
Speaker 6: get hung up on questions of evolution, questions of the afterlife,
Speaker 6: and I'm like, I think the point of the religion
Speaker 6: is the example that Jesus gave us, you know, to
Speaker 6: love unconditionally, to serve the poor, to welcome the state.
Speaker 6: Those are the messages. I don't think how the world
Speaker 6: came about, or how many days it took for the
Speaker 6: world to form, or whether there was dinosaurs, or what
Speaker 6: happens to us after our die really has to do
Speaker 6: with the teaching you. So I think if we open
Speaker 6: ourselves to not knowing, and we don't know till we
Speaker 6: cross over, it opens a space where we can share.
Speaker 4: Just the wonder of just being alive.
Speaker 1: Next time on alive again, we hear the story of
Speaker 1: Manuel BeO Gisbert. In June of twenty twenty, Manuel was
Speaker 1: kidnapped and tortured near Mexico City. His survival has led
Speaker 1: him to document the stories of families affected by cartel
Speaker 1: and government violence.
Speaker 9: I was kidnapped by a drunker tilling the outskirts of
Speaker 9: Mexico City.
Speaker 3: I feel that torture really changes you. It really changes
Speaker 3: how you.
Speaker 9: Buried your own dignity and I'm jerown sense of self.
Speaker 9: It never leaves you ever. Since I was released, I
Speaker 9: began documenting the lives of the many families of the
Speaker 9: people who were also kidnapped and there in return. This
Speaker 9: is my story and the story of how Violince has
Speaker 9: corrupted our country, families and thousands of lives.
Speaker 1: Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent die
Speaker 1: Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren Vogelba. Music by Ben Lovett, additional
Speaker 1: music by Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick
Speaker 1: and Trevor Young. Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional
Speaker 1: production support. Our studio engineers are Rima el Keli and
Speaker 1: Noames Griffin. Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhart Slovitchka, Brent Dye,
Speaker 1: and Alexander Rodriguez. Mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Dan Bush. Thanks to Peter Panagor for
Speaker 1: sharing his incredible story. For more about Peter, his work
Speaker 1: and his books, visit Peter Panagor.
Speaker 4: Dot Love That's p E t E R.
Speaker 1: P A n A g O r E dot l
Speaker 1: o v E Alive Again is a production of iHeart
Speaker 1: Radio and Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative near
Speaker 1: death experience to share, we'd love to hear your story.
Speaker 1: Please email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com.
Speaker 1: That's a l i v e A g A I
Speaker 1: N P R O j e c T at gmail
Speaker 1: dot com.