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