"I was Shown the Origin of Universe during my NDE, Peter Panagore

But somewhere way far away this pin prick of light came and and it appeared and it rushed toward me and filled my vision with light and it made this uh faster than the speed of light. This distance was was the size of the universe and it it transsected this in a snap and I see all of our universe. I see I'm in the like in the middle of it and I see all these galaxies and great spaces between them and my vision is brought to its origin and and in this in the origin of the universe I see this darkness and this darkness is the same infinity into which I cannot see but out of this darkness is light flowing.

I'm going through like a chronology of my life from the inside of every single person in my life review whom who I have hurt in my life. I am I am experiencing the pain that I gave them to the to a level that I had no idea. It was showing me love that I cannot explain to you. Unconditional love of an unlimited nature. and its its compassion was so great that I felt so small in comparison. So I wasn't I wasn't judged. All I was was shown myself and loved. And so although I felt like I was the most important being in all the universe, I saw the same was true for every human being.

This is Beyond with Heather Tash, where we examine near-death experiences and life itself, hopefully making this life a little better. Hello to all of you. I am so happy you are here today. As you know, I've had so many spectacular guests with just marvelous stories, but every now and again, one really stands out, and that is the case with Peter Panagor. Such a great guy. Uh, I did an interview with him when my show was very new. There weren't a lot of eyes on it, and I really want to share it with you once again. So, I've got a new edited version of it. It's allin-one. before I had it broken into four parts and it's going to go over all of the most fascinating parts of his story. Peter is just a genuine great amazing guy and he had this mindblowing experience. That's what I would call it. We'll see what you think. Here it is.

I went ice climbing. I which changed my life entirely. I should also add that in my family situation, my sister had run away when I was 14. And from our perspective, she had vanished and it caused, as in many families, uh, we had a lot of trauma in my family. And so I was actually in Montana getting away from my family so that I could be by myself and not in the turmoil. And I didn't want to go home that March to uh, spring break. So, I went on a an 8-day snow caving, two-day drive, one-day ice climbing trip with a fellow who I I met through the outdoor club who had complimentary skills. He was also uh winter worthy. I had been backpacking also in the winter since I was in I started out in Boy Scout. So, it was not a new environ. It was a new environment like I was in the Rocky Mountains, but I'd been in mountains before in the cold. So, that's my background with that. Um, I was there because I didn't want to go home and we had this great snow caving trip. We ski back 70 lb packs, skied into the wilderness, dug out our snow caves, stayed a little bit in a cabin, uh, had some adventures, learned to trust each other in the wilderness. We were in the middle of the the real wilderness, the Canadian, nobody around for nobody coming to rescue you for a very far distance. And we had a great time. It was super. And then we went on this ice climb and my partner climbing partner Tim was a certified lead climbing climber having just completed his course in this. And he had all the gear and I didn't and I came up with what everything I could. I had everything necessary except I gulp. I came up with uh an axe and a hammer. And uh this was the thing that I convinced Tim to allow me to climb with an appropriate gear. You're supposed to have two axes and and so that when you swing your axe, you have a a longer grip, like a longer reach, I should say, and also you can rest on your axe. Set that thing in the ice and rest. Hammer is much shorter. It's like like I'm turning because the the head in my imagination is right next to my hand and you can use it to climb, but you can't but it's a shorter reach and uh uh the strap to hold it onto your wrist so you don't drop it is at the bottom of the handle so you can't ever let go.

This situation that I talked him into combined to me making the climb at twice the slower speed than everybody else. And by the time we neared the top of the climb, the sun was aiming to set. And we already knew the situation was grave. And when we reached the top at sunset and the temperature dropped 30°, hypothermia began almost immediately. Initial symptoms. And that cascaded through the night as the temperature continued to drop and the darkness got deeper. There was starlight. We could see by starlight, which is if you live in the city, it's hard to imagine, but you can. There's so many stars so far north, so far away that on a full star night with the galaxy showing, you can see in the dark. And that is what enabled us to make this perilous traverse and to three repels down with with open space beside us uh on ice in the dark with hypothermia stealing our capacity for reason because it freezes your brain and also steals your coordination. Stole my coordination while it was beginning to freeze me. And this pressure of the cold with the added pressure of we were out of food because this was a day climb and nobody brought extra food up. So we were we were our bodies began to consume themselves rather rapidly toward the end um rapidly. It usually takes a lot longer for that to happen. But we were expending our energy to get off the mountain while using hyperfocus so that so that every move that we made was as careful as possible to not fall. and also um with the cold stealing our energy and yet the only thing we had to keep ourselves warm was the our remaining energy and our movement. So we had this this lots of different pressures on us that were aiming us toward this demise that we were fighting against. We made this first we made we made mistakes. It stole our reason. Um I'm going to skip a lot of the high adventure stuff. It's in the book. I'm going to cut to the chase of the of the dying part. There's a a lot of things that happened. Um sometimes hope um but never help. H So we finally made it to the final descent. Uh we're at the top of this last repel. We're 150 ft up. There are iron pins in the mountain epoxied in with rings and carabiners and straps. And I'm harnessed to this and my Tim is harnessed to my left. We're standing on the ledge of like the size of a half the size of one of those big uh corporate boardroom tables that you see on television like half the size of that and below us is a steep you know drop and around the corner there's a corner to this the had I had the rope and I had tied one into my harness toss the other bitter end out around this corner to go to pull it down from the ring that was above but the rope somehow on the first pull jammed. And now we were stuck. We couldn't descend and we couldn't descend. And so now the rec I kept pulling on the rope, but to no avail, it kept getting tighter and tighter. The jam, wherever it was. And meanwhile, all these pressures that I mentioned were piling on us. So we're on this cliff. We're clipped in. The moon had risen so we could see a little bit better way. you could hear the Saskatchewan River which was just across the road like not even 100 yards away um on the Icefields Parkway and there was this beautiful scene and I'm pulling on the rope and and I get hot and I unzip my coat. I know better. I'm in the ski patrol but I don't care cuz I have I've lost my reason. I begin to um realize at that point that I'm going to die and there's nothing that I can do about it and and my animal survival single-mindedness went away. It it closed or it vanished. It was gone. And I had this peace settle a piece of acceptance settle on me. And I started looking out at toward the river and looking at the mountain across the way and thinking about my family and and cuz I was raised in the Christian tradition, God, but more about my connection that I started when I was a a child. I had an understanding of who I was. I re I wished that I wasn't dying because my parents were going to lose another child, but there's nothing I could do. And then I began to fall asleep. And I fell asleep a number of times like a curtain on a stage dropping to darkness and the whole place goes black. And then I would smack on the rock. I'd wake I'd wake back up. I'd stand up and pull on the rope. This happened several times. And then I stood up and then there was this big peripheral blackness in a circle around my vision. And this big peripheral blackness began to close in rapidly like a tunnel. And as it closed in, I looked around and looked around. It got smaller and smaller. I I didn't understand. I was like, "What is this thing? I'd never seen such a thing." And it went and as it went to dark, I thought to myself, I must be falling asleep. Only I didn't fall asleep when it went to dark. I all of my pain was gone. Cold and hypothermic frostbite cold is like a fire. It's like sticking your hand in a and a a bed of coals until it stops hurting and there that happens too. But it was like I was on fire for most of my body and that pain was gone in an instant. And I was in I was I was wondering where I was. I knew I wasn't on the mountain anymore. I wondered where the mountain had gone. And in front of me was this immense darkness. This darkness that extended and to infinity. I couldn't see the end of it. But somewhere way far away this pin prick of light came and and it appeared and it rushed toward me and filled my vision with light and it made this uh faster than the speed of light. This distance was was the size of the universe and it it transcted this in a snap and it filled my vision and as it came to me it communicated to me directly that I'm taking you.

So this this being enveloped me and this envelopment was this was familiar to me because I'd been inside this orb of consciousness as a child several times. And but this time I was severed from my body. This time there was no silver cord, the so-called silver cord of connection that was gone. And I was no longer like I I was not a human being. I had the shape of a human, but I was my substance wasn't molecular. It was energy light. I was I was a being of light. I was a light being in my shape, in my form. And I didn't have a brain. And this this entity was pouring intelligence. It was showing me its immense intelligence. It it gave me comfort. It took away all of my agency and I was in like uh locked inside of this with 100% comfort as it spoke to me in like a whisper. Uh I I I love you. I'm giving you comfort. Come with me. All these sorts of things. And it was superp positioned. So it was and this is this the whole everything I'm talking about is metaphor. But there's also some superp positioning in it. It was both this reduction um and a limited form of light that I knew that I could relate to still immensely much more powerful than me by a factor of a million or a trillion. But it was also less than the fullness of the divine. And in it as I heard its voice, I also heard the voice of the divine. I felt the presence of the of the infinite. I felt the so it was both this unlimited and this limited at the same time and I I could sense its its original nature and meanwhile as I'm being carried back up this uh shaft uh to the divine uh I can see myself inside this entity. I am also superp positioned. I am outside it. I am seeing my light body inside. I'm seeing the shape and size of this immense uh containment of me um that's transparent and translucent. And I on the light body on the inside can see out into the darkness. But I can't see my own eye seeing me. I am this other eye seeing myself inside. Then from inside I can't see the eye that's seeing me. But I know in my consciousness that I am both this immensity and this reduction. And scooting right up to the top there and and this entity unfolds and I am now inside this um in Christian language I'd be in the belly of the whale. But this whale, this divine being is the size of our universe. It's this cosmos of darkness of nothingness. And I'm in a timelessness. And I am expanded. And no longer am I a light body. I am an orb of consciousness. And my consciousness is my being. And my being is my thinking. And I have no language. I there's no concepts I'm thinking in. I'm thinking with my beingness. And I I'm not I I don't know how to explain this, but there's beyond language. And And I am also my seeing. I can see in every direction at once. And I am my feeling. And what I feel is comfort. And what I know is myself. I know that this is my original self. I know that this is who I am. I know that my human self, my recent human self, was not actually me. That this has always been me. It's not like I was that and then I'm this or I was this and then that and then this again. I always been this. I am all this is myself and I am in contentment and I'm in comfort and and I can see in all these directions but there is a point at which beyond the darkness becomes so dark that I can't penetrate it with my with my super meta human meta no that's the wrong word not human meta soul capacities there's an infinity that is dark to me but I am not afraid of it but I see that It is also the source and I am inside of it. And then it opens and like like a rip or a tear or a waterfall or a doorway and and it it it shows me the light that is inside it. And this light is the most beautiful, the most seductive, the most desirous, the the the reflection of that I am made of. And and and it and I move toward it. And as I move toward it with thought, I'm moving at the speed of thought. I I think it, I want it, I go to it. And it moves toward me. And it is I'm big. Okay? I'm I'm immense in comparison to my human size. This is so much bigger. It's ginormous but not as big as the infinite that I'm inside of. And it's and it's again two things at once. It is it's more than two things. It's but in in terms of color, it's two things at once. It's white light, but it's also all of the colors of all of the stars I'd seen that night. And not flipping from one to the other, but like a zero and a one in a quantum computer. It is both at the same time. And it's not just the colors of the stars. It's all of the frequencies that the human eye can't see. It's the X-rays and the infra infrareds and ultraviolets. And it's not just those. It's a it's so many more colors than I can even describe to you. And it has this surface layer. It's got this transparency and depth. And it's got this trans uh translucenc I can see through it. I can see into it. And I can see the surface. And all of these things exist at the same time. And I want it. And it comes right to me. And I touch it with my being. And as I touch it with my being, I tear open and it pours in. And as it infills me, all these things happen at the same time. I'm I am inside of it and it is surrounding me and I and it is inside of me and I and it's like suddenly I'm on the glare eye of of an all knowing, allseeing, all penetrating, no hiding, no shadowy places, no cellar, no attic, no closets, totally illuminated being seen as a human being. I see all of my life as my human self and there are no hidden places. And as I try to hide these hidden places, they all are shown. I can't hide them. And as they're shown to me, I am in them. And when I'm in them, I'm going through like a chronology of my life from the inside of every single person in my life review whom who I have hurt in my life. I am I am experiencing the pain that I gave them to the to a level that I had no idea that that it felt like all their emotions, their psychology, their chemicals running through their bodies, their jealousies, their angers, their hatreds and and I and I am simultaneously again I'm super positioned. I'm in my own human self experiencing in a chronology all of the reasons and emotions I had and actions I did for causing this pain. So I'm in these two places and the divine knows. People talk about the aashic records and the the book of life. I am the freaking book of life. I I myself and my own book of life and so is everybody else. and and the divine the ultimate unlimited is knows because it is us. It's not like looking up there taking notes. It is the experience I was having and I was making choices of causing pain and this pain that I experienced was shameful to me but not shameful because I um was a bad person. It was shameful because I was less than the divine itself. Because simultaneous to this, it was showing me love that I cannot explain to you. Unconditional love of an unlimited nature. And it's its compassion was so great that I felt so small in comparison. So I wasn't I wasn't judged. All I was was shown myself and loved as I was in every circumstance. So, I'm I'm causing all this pain and it's the voice is saying to me without sound or language, I love you. I've always loved you. I loved you. And not like, oh, I loved you when you did when you did that and when you did that. Sort of like that, but but but but in the present tense. I I love you as you do these things. It wasn't like they had happened and I was looking back through a book or a movie. I was in them and it loved me in them and every moment. And then it showed me all of humanity and all of humanity's brokenness. And there was no this person is worse than this person or I'm better than that person. It's because all of this humanity had this limited nature in comparison to the unlimited. And so my my point of view shifted from I'm better than you and my sins are less than yours kind of point of view to I am just this human being who is living in this uh and this is an analogy this is a metaphor in this coded universe that I didn't write the code for and I am part of this much larger system of of living inside of brokenness. ness from uh you know if if an if a if the the most powerful star in our galaxy swung toward us with its magnetic radiation it would burn earth up in a blink of an eye. Um that is part of the brokenness of of that I share that microbes share. It is this reduction this less than the ultimate being itself. And so even though I made these choices to cause this pain, also it wasn't my fault and and that's why I was still beloved because I didn't write the program. But in order to accept the light, I had to merely listen to it. And when I listened, when my when my focus shifted from my own when my focus shifted from my own self and my own pain and swung to listening to the voice of love and light, all of that went away and in the in this forgiveness that had always been on offer. It wasn't like, oh, I'll forgive you when I the forgiveness was built into the very structure and nature of my existence and all existence. And and when that happened, I heard I could hear my name being called and it wasn't Peter. It was the essence of the of the original self that I am being called into being in the now and eternally. And all these things happened at the same time. And so I I I hear my soul self being called into being. I inflate in in bliss and beauty, love, paradise, knowledge, understanding, truth, joy, adoration, peace, and I expand with this infilling of this unitive love of light. I see myself as my original self and I'm like a a photon um superp positioned with a zillion cazillion septillion bazillion times infinity number of individual photons the them of great depth and height and width and breath and I am one of them it's like I had a cord to them but I was also outside of them and the fullness of the oneness was in me in the as in the Christian language in the image of the divine. I am a photon one of of a bazillion of them. And while this is going on, I see like a lower lesser self of me. And this lower lesser self of me is the self of me that is incarnating into all of these previous lives. And so I see this long stack of all these previous lives and all of them are like um kebab spears. And this how I'm using this is my analogy these days. A kebab spear and a and a gigormous baguette. And I am the baguette. And the kebab spears are um their lives I'm living. But my nature extends before, beyond, above and below any of my incarnations. And my the length of my self is eons long. And and this self is is also a little less than my photonic almost union self. And so I've got these layers to myself. And as I look down, I see inside um two of my incarnations. And so I see inside inside two incarnations. I'm shown I'm flown down and I'm I'm put inside this body and I'm a man and I'm dressed in uh like eastern clothes. Could have been the Levant. It could have been India. I don't know where I was but there were palm trees and there were little houses and it's a dirt road. I'm walking with a bunch of buddies and it's obvious to me that we're all spiritual people and we're poor and we're somehow together and and I'm seeing through these eyes and I can hear the language being spoke but I can't understand the language. Um, and if I did understand it when I was there, I have no idea what it is now because I could only I can only I've only came back with like a thimbleful of of what actually happened to me. And and then I was out of this life and I was into another life. And in this life, I don't know what I don't know what I was. I was a lizard on a like on a tree branch and everything looked completely strange to me. And I don't know whether I was on Earth or any I have no idea. All I know is that I was not a human being and that that I had this uh sort of lizardly feeling. Um and then I was out of that and I lived in these incarnations and I saw all of these different lives I had lived and what I understood is that I was none of them. I'd never actually been any of them. And although they impacted the bread loaf, they weren't actually me. Only I am me. I am this photonic superpositioned being that is one of the many, part of the a section of the oneness. And and then that part of my experience um sort of ended and I got I got I got reduced back to this self that could see my humanity, my my recent humanity. And and in this state I saw, felt, understood the loss of my parents again. And I said to the divine, "Am I dead?" And the voice said, "Yes, you're dead." And I said, 'Well, apparently I haven't gone all the way through yet because I can still, you know, remember this thing with my folks and what about them? And the voice kept saying to me all the time mixed into this love was this welcome, come home. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome. And there's this end of suffering, this wholeness and healing and wellness and and well-being and and times a million. And I think about my parents and I'm swept across this darkness. I'm still in this knowingness that is also illuminated. So, I'm swept across this gigantic uh illumined illuminated nothingness and my part of my consciousness is sort of poked through this energetic field where where this heaven becomes this realm, this dimension becomes our universe. And so, part of me is sticking out like looking around and I see all of our universe. I see I'm in the like in the middle of it and I see all these galaxies and great spaces between them and my vision is brought to its origin and and in this in the origin of the universe I see this darkness and this darkness is the same infinity into which I cannot see but out of this darkness is light flowing and there is light flowing from this darkness and this light is weaving itself and weaving itself into and as part of this other kind of darkness. But this other kind of darkness becomes the matter of the universe. And so woven inside all these galaxies and I see some up close and I I can see the weaving of the light that is hidden within all matter. And as it's showing me this, it's speaking love to me. It's speaking this light is love woven inside of everything. It's showing me its own infinite nature of love. as much as I can contain because it is there's still this infinity into which I cannot penetrate but there's so much love pouring out for all that there is and as it's pouring out our universe it's popping out universe after universe after universe after universe there's like thousands of them un unveiling from its own self and I am inside ours and inside ours all of the love that is concentrated and all of our universe is aimed at me and I become the the the same of the same immense love itself. And then it swings around and it shows me our galaxy and our planet and I see Earth in a like a hologram but it's in live time and there's a you know dark night on and it's raining in places and it's sunny in places and there and there are babies being born and there are ships on the ocean and there's life going on and I see inside of every single human being this same light that we that is woven through all things and this same light is the heart and core which is my same original self. It is the photonic center of every being that exists. And in them it says to me in the way that I love you with this immense love. I love all of myself. I love all who have this light inside them with a a radical equality. And so although I felt like I was the most important being in all the universe, I saw the same was true for every human being. And that earth was covered with this fog. And this fog was impenetrable to the inner eye of the divine being. And nobody could see this inside them as I could see it. They had it. They were it. They are beloved. They were beloved. But people were blind to it. And and then I saw my parents' faces. They kind of rose up from North America. And I could see mom and dad and mom and dad. Two sets of moms. I mean two set a set of mom dad and another set of mom dad. And in the first set of mom and dad, I am with them in that life. I see the rest of their lives with me. And I see their suffering. And in the mom dad number two group, I see their lives without me and their suffering is just magnified. It's it's broken bodies everywhere and pain. And I see their deaths and their deaths of group one and group two are the same death. It's not how they die, but in their death, it's they're in the same beloved state that I'm in. And I understand the length of my human life is the snap of a finger. And the voice says to me, "Choose." And I say, "If I go back, can I come back here?" And the voice said, "Yes, you come back here." And and I should add also that I wanted to understand all of the knowledge of all of the universe. And so I had this download of the structure of all of how time and molecules and chemistry all this knowledge was available to me and still there was there was this impenetrable part of the infinite that I couldn't see into and so I had this immense trust of this promise. Yes, you can come back here. And I said well if I can come back here and I know that uh human life is the wink of an eye. I choose to live my life. And the voice says, "You won't live your life." And threw me out. And as I get thrown out, I'm back inside this angelic being, which is the divine itself. And it keeps reducing and reducing. And I get smooshed and smooshed and smooshed. And there is a a million doors in front of me. And in the center of all of these doors is a beam of of immense white light. And this white light as I look back through this transparent being is emanating out of the infinity and it it is illuminating all of these doors sort of super bright in the middle and then fading out to the outer edges of these billion doors. And the voice says to me, "Choose choose light." And and I am inside of this very tightly contained and and and speaking right to me. And I choose I I choose to be I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to to be a communicator. I wanted to bring the message. I wanted to have be flawed. I wanted to have fun. I I made all these choices. And this door opened, not in the center of the white light. But off to the side of it, still in the brightness, but not in the center, which is what I was being encouraged to choose, which is what I refused to do. And I chose instead some sense of self. And this door opened and down this tunnel I went. And inside this tunnel there were a million doorways. And all of these doorways led to all of these other tubes of of lives that I could live by choices that I make. I then get to the end of it and I'm I'm at the end of it and the door opens and meanwhile I can still see the beam of light coming and I'm now at my body and I'm outside my body and I am I don't know densified. I'm back to my body of light again. This this shape of I had some substance to me and but I was out of control. I couldn't I was ragged raggedy and doll in a river. I was like being done to. I had no choices at this point. And and I'm sort of dangling on the edge of the cliff. I can see myself. I got the harness. The harness is uh the strap is tight to the mountain. And Tim is bent down over me, grasping me close to my face, screaming, but I can't hear him. I I don't hear. I just see this scene. And and and I can feel his uh I can I can see his emotion, but I am completely unaffected by it. I'm like, "Oh, look at that guy. Oh, look at that body." And then the divine pierces the bo my body's chest and and opens me and drives me inside and like forces me like I I felt like I was being twisted twisted inside. And now I'm stuffed inside this thing much reduced and I can see out of that same hole. And there is this entity that I can see back and I can see back to the edge of infinity. But it closes. And now I'm stuck. I'm trapped. I feel encased. And and I feel my brain come on like a worring motor. And and I begin to hear sounds. I begin to feel my body shake and pain returns immediately and I am I am astounded by pain and suffering. I'm like, "Oh, this is what I signed up for. I didn't mean to do this. This was a total mistake. I want to go back. Take me back. I don't want to be here. I want what I had. What happened to what I had? Why am I so reduced? All of this going on inside of me. And I begin to hear, "Don't die. Don't die. Don't die. Don't die. Don't die." And I open my eyes and there's Tim and he's suddenly sees that my eyes are open. He's like, "Don't." And I still, he's still saying, "Don't die. Don't die." And then he's like, "You were dead. You were dead. You were dead. You were dead. I thought you were dead." And he pulls me up and he's talking to me and I'm like, "What is going on here? Who is this guy? What is this thing? And where am I?" And I begin to remember as he's talking to me and and and gets me to pull the rope. It's after some time and the rope comes free, the first pull. And it's either a miracle. That's what a lot of people want to say. And I'm not sure. Maybe it was because of the angle I fell on the cliff. I don't really know. All I know is that the rope came free and that's good enough for me. And we descended and because the car was right across the street uh in the parking lot, we got our tent and we self treated for hypothermia and brought our temperatures back up to a level where we could um get in the car and turn on the heater.

There are dimensions that we know of in science that are proven of multi-dimensionality. these other heavens. If you if you listen to lots of near-death experiences, you'll hear uh of a number of types of experiences. Some people pop out of their body and they see themselves and they pop back in. Where are they when they're out of their body in this place where nobody can see them, but they can see everybody else? They're in a different realm. They have a a conscious body. They're in a different level of our reality. Then there are the people who go to this uh sort of semiquaporeal place where there are colors and butterflies and and a field or a house and there's sort of this structure to it. And then there are people that that go into this to the they meet the they go off into somewhere into the cosmos and they're they're like surrounded by galaxies or stars and they meet this this other group of of elders or their soul family or something. And then there are people like me and there's probably lots I don't know about. But then there are people like me who go to this place of non-being. And so within the even the stories of near-death experience, there are levels of realms. And I can't I can't prove any of this. I'm not I'm not here to try to argue theologically or um pull out my test tubes and show you where this thing is with, you know, some kind of radioraph or whatever I'm using. Um, I can't prove it. All I All I have to show and all any near-death experiencer has to show is how they live their lives. That's it. And how they respond and how they relate and how they grow. And why do you think there are such different experiences? Well, this guy named Michelo, Dr. Mishe love won a half a million dollar prize last year from the Bigalow conscious the Bigalow Foundation for consciousness studies. This billionaire set up this foundation to give a million dollar prize a year um for research by scientists into near-death experience. and Michel won this prize. And in his paper, he talks about that 70% of his of the people he surveyed, he talked about lots of things, but the thing that jumped out at me was that 70% of the people he surveyed, hundreds of people, talked about two words, light and love. And that those two things, light and love, are most important to us as near-death experiencers. The variety of experiences we have are secondary to the experience of light and love. to us to me it's the secondary thing the my if if I look at my if I step back and look at my NDE uh portion of my NDE my my life review is very Christian up until the point at which I'm not judged God isn't the judge in my what happened to me I judged myself um but it has it has aspects of Christianity in it and why is that I ask myself why did I go to hell and other people I'm not like why did I go to hell and he didn't have to. Not like that at all. It's why me not them. I don't know. Um what I think is this is that the divine is compassion. My experience of the divine is compassion and gave me the experience that I needed whether I came back to life or I stayed in heaven. I was given I was shown what I needed for my evolution, for my advancement. And so maybe it's God is so compassionate that God comes to us, the source of all being comes to us in ways that we that are best for us, best for our learning. And one way I think about this is the the people who go into a hellish experience and don't get out before they come back. They come back from hell and what you see in their lives is a reformation of action. They become new people. They become born again. And what they experienced changes how they live. And I think this is true for all of us. And my I my experience is my two experiences. One is short and one is immense. In both of them, love and light dominate. In neither of them does my explanation to myself of what happened to me even approximate what I feel on the inside. Every story that every nieer tells is a construction of their mind. And this has been true in mysticism in every tradition around the world. Whether you look at the uh the yupanesads or the gospels, each mystical experiencer struggles to put into language that which cannot be spoken. And every nie ear, the brain of the end ear uh takes the experience and uses the tools that it has to interpret and understand what happened to it. Because when you're dead, you don't have a brain. There's no interpretive uh faculty through which the experience filters but there is when you come back and I I think that the the divine gives us what we need and everybody's individual and when you say that you experienced hell it was when you felt what you had done to other people. In fact, in your book, you wrote, "It was hell inside of me, my personal hell. It was the hell I created for myself." And in that experience, you felt all the pain that you had ever created for another person. You also though felt the love that you had given to other people and the love that you had received from other people. I did became the lens through which I saw my true self and the the weight of the love that I gave away and that was given to me far outweighed my misdeeds. It was not even in any measurable proportion because the same love with which I loved others and the love with which they loved the love that they gave to me was the same originated and was from the divine love God. I love God because God loved me first is one of the sayings in Christian Protestantism. The love that was given to me became when I when I saw the love of how do I say this? That the treasure of my life became apparent to me in the seeing of the suffering that I caused. And the treasure of my life was all the love given to me. And when I saw that love, my orientation toward love became instantaneous. The power of the overwhelming power of the presence of love was irresistible to me. It was and I know that title being swallowed up in a tidal wave or in a flood. These are scary negative uh ideas cuz you never see in a movie where it's a good thing. But the immersion of the power of the gentle flood of love was so immense and overwhelmingly incomprehensible and giving and welcoming that nothing stood against it. Not even my own weak little links of uh of karmic pain that I caused that created this chain locking me to myself. Nothing stood in its way. And so as I live my life, I know that I hurt other people. I have hurt other people. I expect that I will hurt other people. I try to mitigate that to the best of my ability. But I'm a human being and I also know that all the love that I share and is given to me remains the treasure that I carry with me. I can't take my gold bricks through the pearly gates with St. Peter. But the love weighs nothing and it has no substance, but it is the treasure of all that there is there and here. And some pains are not fleeting. Some pains are deep. Some pains last a long time because it's usually from the people that you love and that's the hardest part of all. And so then whenever this thing arises in me and I'm like, "Oh, you know that time that that person hurt me and then they hurt me again when I was seven and then it was and and you know I can run through a litany or I can interrupt that litany with my own thoughts and say take a breath. Remember the peace. Take the pain that I feel and transmute it and breathe out peace toward them. And the reason why I do this is because I saw my own suffering when I died and I saw the suffering of humanity. I recognize that I'm just like everybody else and everybody else is just like me. I I I re I respond through my traumas. I respond through my own pain. I respond through my own egoic attachment. And they do too. And why should I blame them for that? And if I don't blame them for that and I'm in this long practice of not blaming myself for that, it's a much uh it's a a pattern I live in my life that's driven by this desire to lessen the hell that I need to go through again to get home again. If I do have to go through the purgative fire of love again, I want to make that as small as possible. Not because I'm afraid of it, but because I just want to get home faster. And part of getting home faster is bringing that here now to me as I live. And part of that bringing that here now, bringing heaven here now for me is the as best as I can to treat all with kindness and compassion, but not be a milk and not be a doormat and not let people stand on me. And I know that I'm not alone. I know that there are 10 tens of millions of near-death experiencers and other kinds of mystical experiencers. People have who have had shared death experiences and out-of- body experiences and uh visitations from the dead. All of these experiences that contain light and love. We are all these individual nodes at the end of our own fiber optic cable bringing light into the world. And I know that I'm just one of us. But I have a I have a I have a goal and a mission. And my goal

And the mission is to get everyone to speak. If only to the people you love, if only where you are. Because the more of us that talk about this, these events in our lives, the more normalized it becomes in the public square. The more normalized it becomes, the first chance we have in the history of humanity to bring this ineffable love forward.

Whether we're Iraqis or Israelis or Russians or Ukrainians or Chinese or Japanese or Argentinians, it doesn't matter. All over the world, there are people who are experiencing this light and this love who only need an opportunity or to have the courage to say so to the ones they love. And when they do this, you may discover that the people in your family have had similar experiences that they're keeping to themselves. So there's this level of communication. We have the internet. We have shows like yours, Heather, where we can um speak, but there's this other thing that happens too because the light speaks for itself. You know it when you feel it. And for some reason, some people don't feel it. They don't know it. Maybe there's a biological thing. It's totally cool because they are beloved as well. In the end, they end up as the original light being itself because this, that's all there is. That's like super good news.

But in terms of our humanity, we're a blip on the planet when you look at the evolution of life. And if we are to survive, the strategies that we've used in the past have not succeeded for all of us. We are a single planet. We are a single race of people. Our cultures and our belief systems and our politics, they're all conceptions and decisions, they're not this thing itself. This thing itself inside us supersedes all of those. And the more of us that pursue this inside ourselves, the more it shows itself in the world. My, my choice of singleness and not the pursuit of my own manipulation of the energy in the world, manifesting what I want in the world, is because I know myself as not a human being. I am a temporary passenger here. I am this original self. This is my goal. This is myself. This is my frame of reference. The more we find this one light inside ourselves, the more opportunity we have for our, our species' survival.

Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, all of them are founded by mystics. All of them. All in the root of all of them, you'll find talk of oneness of being. And it comes in lots of different languages. It comes in lots of different forms, but it's always the same oneness. And when we find this inside ourselves, which is what all the masters were always teaching, when you find this inside yourself and when it becomes real, experiential in you, it can become dominant. And when it becomes dominant, then love rules the heart. You still make mistakes, still have emotional responses, still have, you know, the, the metallic feel of metal rushes to my mouth when I'm in a car wreck, but I'm not afraid of death, not afraid of dying. My body still has responses. It doesn't eliminate those things, but what it does is that it changes relationship not only to the divine, but to the other people around you and brings peace in a relatable, relational, mundane, everyday sort of way when you hold the door at the grocery store instead of slamming it in their face. And you do it to the person who tried to slam the door in your face. And you don't do it out of vengeance or revenge or "I'm better than you." You do it because of love. Not because of the love in them, but because the love you live inside yourself. And it becomes this mountain base that one stands on through which one sees everything there is. And it is, it's the most powerful thing there is.

Every single time a person loves another, it's like at the end of It's a Wonderful Life when uh, they're all standing around the Christmas tree, this famous movie from the 1930s. And uh, every time uh, the bell rings, an angel, it gets its wings. Every time a person makes a choice for love and kindness and compassion, whether they're an atheist or whether they're a, a guru, the impact of karma is the same. Love becomes more manifest in the world.

Peter is the best. I just love him. Now, when I interviewed him, that was the first time that I had really met him. But since then, I have had the opportunity to get to know him better. And he's just such a great, down-to-earth, genuine person, really believable and trustworthy, and just so kind. I hope you enjoyed his story as much as I did. I learned so much. First of all, he had this fascinating near-death experience and then he just had other insights that I really enjoyed listening to him and just discovering some of the things that he has learned. So, please share what stood out to you among the many things that he talked about. Or if you prefer, just to say "I made it to the end," that's great, too. As you know, any comment helps the channel. So, thank you for those of you that do it week after week. And if you're new, I would appreciate a comment if you like. Also, do give it a like and share it with a friend if you know someone who may like my channel. I really appreciate those of you that support me.

Another way to support me, by the way, is you can become a member. Now, it's totally up to you. Um, but you can check it out if it's something that you are interested in. You can also buy merchandise. I do have a shop, so that's something you can check out, too. And if you're interested in Peter's book, it's really good. Um, I will have a link to that in the description. I've read it more than once. It is great, as I said, and um, you can just find out more information about Peter in the description as well. To find the description, you see the word "more" underneath the video. Click on that, and then there's another word "more," and you can open it up even more. So, that always has some great information in it, including links to all of my other fascinating guests that I've already had on. Please join me in the coming weeks and months. I have some fabulous guests. Remember, I do drop a new episode every single week and right now that is on Thursdays.

Thank you everybody for being here today. I'm really grateful for each and every one of you. Thanks for joining me on Beyond with Heather Tesh. Please add comments and questions you'd like future guests to answer. Also, if you liked what you heard, please hit the thumbs up button and subscribe. That'll help keep this podcast going. You can also go to Beyond with Heather Tesh to look for more episodes.