Please note, this is an automated transcript so it is not 100% accurate.

Peter:
You can’t control mystics. When you have a mystical experience, when you have a direct connection, it destroys doctrine and dogma and belief. And so now you have this direct experience of God, you can’t be controlled anymore once you begin having a. Mystical life, you won’t have any choice but to face your shadow side.

When I was dead, I was the most beloved there ever was, and I could see that everyone was the same as me. And I also understood that in my life. Review that. I didn’t live my life alone. Everything that I am experiencing right now, the divine is experiencing in me and through me, present to me. It’s that old saying, the the absolute is the center of everything and the circumference of nothing.

Guy:
Guy here today. I welcome back to the show Peter Pango and what a legend this guy is. Honestly, his story is mind blowing and we didn’t dive into that so much today ’cause of naturally had this conversation on the podcast before, but there will be a link below if you wanna check out our original conversation.

Uh, and this story of how he died and what he saw the other side and came back, it was phenomenal. We do touch on those topics today of course, but we also get into. Mysticism, mystical insights, how this information has been suppressed from us for hundreds of years, and how it’s all coming back to the forefront now in the soup of change of what’s going on in the world.

We took get into life reviews, all sorts of stuff. Um, fabulous conversation. Peter is a fabulous. A person of relaying information across. I’m definitely gonna get him back on the podcast in the future. Please be sure to let me know what you think in the comments blow if you’re watching this on YouTube.

And of course, let me know where you are in the world as well. In the comments blow. It’s nice just reading, connecting, and other people can read your comments as well. And of course, if you feel the. Podcast is worthy of a subscriber and a like. If you’re enjoying it, please do so as it continues to get these conversations out there, which I, as you know, if you follow me, I feel very passionate about.

Um, all that being said, uh, we are around the world. We got retreats, events, and stuff like that. If you wanna come and meet us in person and dive in for some of this work that we discussed on the show for yourself. Um, yeah, links are below is Free. Meditations Blow as well, so it’s all available for you as we continue to create opportunities together. Anyway, myself from me, enjoy this conversation with Peter. It’s awesome.

Peter. Welcome back to the podcast, my man.

Peter:
Hey, thanks for having me, Guy. I’m very glad to be here on another continent around the

Guy:
I know. Isn’t it amazing? And we’ve been chatting for 15 minutes, almost off air as well. And it’s always the same. We’re like, we got to record this. I, um, I’ll start the way I always start the podcast, even though you, I mean, I think it’s been like four or five years since you’ve been on the show. So there’ll be a lot of new listeners, but let’s say we were at an intimate dinner party and somebody asked you what you did for a living and they were a complete stranger. How would you respond?

Peter:
Uh, it would depend on the party and I would probably say, uh, I’m an author. I’m a published, I’m a best selling international author, writer, podcaster, uh, and I used to be in television and I had been a minister before that.

Guy:
Wow. And now I would automatically, I know what you’ve written about, but I’d say, what have you written about as an author?

Peter:
Well, I have this international best selling book. It’s a memoir of how I died when I was 20, ice climbing in Western Canada in the winter from exposure. I died from exposure. So it’s a, it’s a high adventure, inspirational, true

Guy:
Yeah. And it’s amazing. Your story is amazing. And we might get into it a little bit today. I know we covered it on the last podcast. How long was it before you wrote the book after the experience? Did you keep the experience to yourself for a while? Was that your first spiritual experience? Had there been experiences before? Because it was pretty profound.

Peter:
it was, sorry. Uh, it was not my first experience. I, I, as a boy a teenager and in my early, late teens, I had other mystical experiences. I, I seem to have a, a predisposition for it. And so by the time I had this near death experience, All these other experiences that preceded it didn’t, they changed me, every single one of them, but they didn’t have a context until I died.

And after I died, I could see that there was a progression, a preparation, to get me to this place. Uh, so I had this, this near death experience that, uh, reoriented everything about me, changed my life, changed everything I did ever since. Um,

Guy:
Wow. Did you, um, Um, you spoke about as well, I don’t want to get into this topic a little bit about afterwards. You studied mysticism as well. I didn’t know that was a thing that you could go and study it for a start. What are you studying and how would you describe mysticism? Because even at our workshops, I’ll ask people, um, a mystical, mystical experience or whatever. Are you familiar with it? Most people will put their hand up and say no as well.

Peter:
Well, it’s been, um, mightily repressed by, uh, and I’m going to put stop there and say, I love science. I read a lot of science all the time. This morning

Guy:
Oh no. that, uh, they’ve measured electrons at Cornell University, for instance. But, uh, science has repressed mysticism, religion has repressed mysticism, and society has repressed it.

Peter:
It’s been, there have been mystics throughout history around the world, they’ve just been silenced. And so, the study of it, I went to Yale Divinity School at Yale University, and the Dean of Students allowed me a three year independent study of mysticism, because you’re right, they don’t teach mysticism. There are classes here and there, but there’s no degree in this. I Was able to utilize the university system, and she found money, uh, off, off budget money to hire a professor for me. And, uh, I was able to write a, a dissertation essentially, uh, on for after a three year project. But mysticism is, uh, I’ll tell you what I studied, I, I, I read into the, there’s a series called the Classics of Western Spirituality, John St.

John of the Cross, Theresa Avila. Uh, but the list is very long. of Genoa, John Roosebrook. Meister Eckhart a woman named Evelyn Underhill, who is a scholar of mysticism, a brilliant woman. I read into the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Vedas, uh, Dao Tzu, uh, Eastern, uh, Middle Eastern Sufi poetry.

All of, all of it was piled into my, my project. what I was looking for were, uh, First, I was looking for language. After my near death experience, I had an undergraduate read American and English Romantics and Transcendentalists. So I had been exposed to the idea of free thinking transcendentalism. And I realized after reading, uh, not Walden, but, uh, I, uh, I’m blanking on his name, but anyway, after reading a Transcendentalist, including Emily Dickinson, um, that there was a wide world mystical literature that they exposed me to on the edges. And so after my near death experience, I came back and I took a class my undergraduate in East West mysticism, which gave me a broader exposure, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, Jainism, all these different ideas. And I, I decided that what I was looking for were, threads of similarity. I was looking for threads of similarity. I was looking for language to conceptualize what happened to me because on the other side there was, there’s no language. It’s, it’s, there’s no concepts. There’s no physicality, but there’s information and information and knowledge and, and love and beauty and a whole lot more. But when I came back, I came back with a thimble full of the, of what I had on the other side. But it was enough to tantalize me, to drive me from my longing to try to find language to speak about it, to find a peer group, people like me. I knew the moment I came back, I was entirely different than everybody else that I knew.

This is 1980. was seeing, I was seeing light emanating from everything.

Guy:
Oh really? see light and and and and I could see that the physical structure of the world was like celluloid film Thin fragile black and white flickering and it was very unreal to me I’ve been to reality with a capital R and now I’m in reality with the lowercase r and everything was very Confusing to me. And so I I didn’t tell anybody I I told I kept my secret Well, I told my wife the day after we got married, which was unfair to her because I, I was like, I’m not the guy you thought I was. This is really who I am. Because I was scared to tell people because I, I had read enough by that point that I knew that people like me might be institutionalized because I see things.

Peter:
I came back, I came back with psychic ability and it’s not like something that I wanted, All right. I didn’t even know what it was. What I was experiencing was everyone’s around me, uh, everyone around me. I could feel their emotions. I could, I could. I, I didn’t even know where I ended and they began. I, I couldn’t tell if I was sad or depressed or they were angry, or I, I was very. of discombobulating. And so I went to divinity school to study mysticism, to find my peer group, and to study tools. Because as I studied these mystics, I, one of the through lines that I found was that throughout the world, and all of these religions, one, the first thing is all religions, major religions are founded by mystics. And then the theologians come along and, you know, kind of muck everything up. they all had breath and mind practice of one form or another.

Guy:
Huh. the Sufis, breath and body dancing, the, the, Kung fu uh, the Daoists had formed Tai Chi. Uh, the Zen Buddhists have sitting, the, uh, Jewish rabbis have the, have the rocking at the west wall. Uh, Christians have Gregorian chanting. It’s all this breath and chanting and movement, and they all lead to, and this includes Jesus. Jesus, I think completely misunderstood. Uh, it all leads to single-mindedness. They’re all practicing the dissolution of the egoic self, that non attachment to the egoic self. what happened naturally is that as one breath by breath practices, the divine naturally expands. When you step aside, it just expands. And so I was looking for tools, peers, language. I I was at the Div school, I was definitely, I’m walking around barefoot, I got long hair, um, I don’t really dress, I don’t dress like anybody because I had, my whole idea of what culture means and, and politics and religion was completely gone.

Peter:
I was no longer a person of faith. I was, uh, I was, I got kicked out of the library at the Div school for a week for standing on my head doing yoga in the back of the library when nobody could find me, the head librarian found me, and he kicked me out for a week, um, which was terrible because, because I needed the library. So I was the guy who, I was always meditating, um, I was an oddball, but beloved, okay, I have very good friends from the school and we’re still friends, but I was definitely odd man out.

Guy:
Wow, wow You’ve raised a few questions already and all all of that one was about Jesus. But before that was um Why do you feel or what have you learned that a lot of this information is suppressed? It hasn’t been easily accessible It certainly feels like there’s a momentum now in this day and age like with platforms like this and people are becoming hungry and hungrier But what are your thoughts and feelings around that suppression?

Peter:
You can’t control mystics. And so as, as the church, as, and you see, you see this in, um, Islam as well, uh, there’s, there’s fights against the Sufis, Sufis are on the outs with most of Islam because when you have a mystical experience, when you have a direct connection, it destroys doctrine and dogma. and belief. And so now you have this direct experience of God, you can’t be controlled anymore. You don’t fit into the, into the paradigm. And so in the, in the Western monastic tradition, they, that’s what they did. They put all these kinds of people in the monasteries and convents. Now, Eastern Orthodoxy and Christianity, they maintained some larger thread of mysticism the, in the daily life of the people, but it was rigidly controlled.

But they at least had it. Protestantism cast it out completely. So it got tossed out, baby with the bathwater, after the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and it, you know, it just had no fit for it anymore. And so if you were at a cocktail party, if you’re at a cocktail party and you’re with a bunch of your peers people you don’t know, professional people say, and you’ve lost your mother, Six months ago, and three months ago, your mother came to you in a dream, but it was unlike any other dream that you had.

You knew you were in a dream, and you knew she was there, and she came there to talk to you, but she didn’t use words. She radiated, uh, telepathically, a message of love, or beauty, or forgiveness, or whatever the message was. From that moment on, You knew that she wasn’t dead, and, and that your grief practice, the practice of your grief is transformed, because you now know that she’s not dead. You’re still grieving, you still miss her, but now you’re, you’re, you’re, you’ve changed your course. You’ve, you’ve shifted five degrees, which means your trajectory, well, on the long term, is gonna be, you know, 40 degrees off of where you were headed for in the first place. And, imagine you’re at this cocktail party, and you say, you’re sipping your cocktail, and you say, well, Well, it’s, you know, I have something to say.

My mother came to me in a dream, and she communicated to me that she loved me. And most people would be afraid to admit that they had that experience. And so if you’re in a group, uh, and someone had that experience, they probably wouldn’t say it. And two, the other people would be like, What is this person’s problem?

This is, this is not rational. This is not materialistic. and so it becomes socially isolating. So people nowadays, people are talking about it. But even 10 or 15 years ago, when I, when I, when my book came out in 2015, I was in the forefront of people’s coming out about near death experience. And I came out purposefully to try to shatter the, the, Prohibition About talking and I kept I kept it a secret for 20 years.

I told my wife I told two friends One because he was my best friend from childhood and he could tell that I was Something was wrong. Um, and, and then I told my wife cause I should have. And then I told somebody because he, I had to tell him because if I didn’t tell him, he wouldn’t have understood what he witnessed.

He witnessed something and I, and he was, it was no context for him. And then I, but I kept it a secret for 20 years and I, I wanted to build my credibility. So I got this, you know, Ivy League degree, I became a professional, I worked in these highfalutin churches, I worked in television, I became, I published a lot of material, I built my credibility, and then I came out because I didn’t want to be cast off. And my family, when I came out finally, my family didn’t believe me. As the book is being published, my, my dad died five years ago. He didn’t believe me in the end. and questioned why I was doing what I was doing. Which is fine, I mean I don’t, I don’t expect to be believed. But I, it goes to show that talking about it puts you on the outs with people. And so, Part of the whole thing that I’m doing now is trying to, what you’re doing here, what your podcast is doing, what your retreats are doing, is bringing, I want to bring it into the public square. I just want to talk about it. Let everybody talk about their mystical experiences so we can see that, oh, PhDs and doctors and janitors and bus drivers and bartenders, they’re all, they’ve all had some kind of experience that are afraid to talk about. But if everybody’s talking about it, it becomes safer to talk about. And that’s what I’m after, is safety, to talk

Guy:
Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. It’s critical. Hey, like, uh, I mean, once you have an experience of some kind, it’s, it becomes undeniable, but until you, until you have that experience though, it’s, it’s extremely challenging. And you don’t even realize how much your beliefs, your ego, cultural beliefs, everything is entwined within you.

That’s actually shaping your perception of reality at any given moment. And that’s what’s mind blowing. And I’m. I’m curious to ask you a couple of more questions that were coming in then were should, what are your thoughts on people going after it, looking for mystical experiences, wanting to connect to the divine as opposed to, because obviously spiritual bypassing can be a thing where we don’t face the things that are going on in our life to explore the wounds within us.

But, you know, it’s, I find it, uh, A dance between the exploration of this, but also dealing with what’s present with us. I mean, what are your thoughts on all of that?

Peter:
Well, uh, when, once you have a, a deep mystical experience, and there are, there are variations of it. I should describe mysticism

Guy:
Please.

Peter:
Mystical experiences, they are, um, experiential. They have a beginning and an end. They’re noetic. And they’re ineffable. So, they happen to you. They start and stop. They leave a mark and knowledge inside yourself that’s unspeakable. You can’t really articulate it because it happens in a space where there’s no language. And so all the language of all the mystics throughout the history of the world, myself included, it’s all metaphoric. simile, allegory, myth, symbol. That’s the only language. That’s why poetry. Rumi Hafez. That’s why these, uh, Emily Dickinson.

That’s why their poetry works so well. Uh, the, uh, To answer your question though, it’s a thing, because if you, if you have a desire, so I was listening to this podcast the other day, I listened to the telepathy tapes, I don’t know if you’re familiar with those, um, they are a research project into autistic non speaking people, and it turns out that they are telepathic. communicate with each other, and that they might be trilingual. And even though the education system, at least in the United States, keeps them at like a third grade level till they’re out of high school, they’re actually turns out to be highly educated because they have other capacities that we don’t normally have. So if, and I was watching this podcast, this guy who goes out of body all the time, and he wanted to, he wanted to, you know, be psychic. and he wants to be psychic for his own self. And when he encountered some of these autistic people in their realm, they kicked him out because you can’t have ego and have this experience. If you have a desire for it, like an egoic, I’m going to, you know, I’m going to be the magic man, you won’t actually have it. You, the desire of, uh, mystic is to be in the presence of the divine, period. That’s it. It’s not to have any super magical powers. It’s not even to have an experience. It is by practicing the presence of the divine, it makes you available to the experience.

But if you’re after the experience while you’re practicing the presence of the divine, then you won’t get it. So it’s this, this, you have to. have the intuitive desire for the divine, and you can work at it. But if you’re after it for egoic reasons, it won’t grab you. Because the one thing that it can’t do, or won’t do, is, um, allow selfishness. And so that’s, that’s part of it. And the other part of it is, is that mystical experience, once you begin having a mystical life, you won’t have any choice but to face your shadow side. it’ll it’ll kick your butt and it’ll, it’ll do it in a way, in ways that, um, say for instance, I was just talking to this guy earlier today and he went through a period of and fasting for about three years in a rural, remote Alaskan cabin on purpose. And he had all, he wasn’t, he was after the presence, not after psychic experiences, but he had a whole ton of psychic experiences because that’s what happens. You go after the gift, you go after the giver. but then a few years go by and the hundred percent of his experience is now down to 25%. And so he’s in what’s called the dark night of the soul, where he, where it, it, it, it reduces your capacity to have the experience which drives you into a, into a, a longing for it. And that involves having to be in your darkness, your own shadow self. You have to look at you, uh, and it’s, you have to look at the things where you’re still attached.

I, just this week, I, made a mistake this week. I based in my egoic self and I had to face that and I’m facing it right now and it’s and it’s good I’m i’m to the place in my practice where I Recognize i’m able to recognize that now with help and i’m Understanding of my own Immortality and the own frailty of my human nature so I forget I can forgive myself and progress You I, I think that in a more superficial form of spirituality, spiritual bypassing, uh, will actually do you damage because you won’t actually have to, you won’t grow the way that you need to grow you don’t look at the dark sides of yourself.

Guy:
People will fear that, avoid it, run away from it. You know, we’ve got so many distractions in our world now to keep us emotionally numb to feel what we need to feel. What would you say to that? Like in terms of what are we, what are we actually healing here within ourselves?

Peter:
Well, that’s a really good question. I there’s only one healing. People talk a lot about healing this aspect and healing that aspect, and that’s good, and there’s place for improvement in those, but I think that the real healing is, is the, the understanding that you’re not really a human being. You’re in a human body, and the mind, the, the, the, the, Nature of the animal mind of the human brain, of a human being is necessary for survival. The egoic self is necessary for survival, but it’s the thing that stands in the way. And, uh, the, the, the way to, the way to move forward is to lead back into the divine again and again and again and again over and over and over again and allow one’s attachment to oneself to fade.

And that’s the healing. When, when the, when you understand, when a person comes to understand that you are, and this isn’t an intellectual thing, and I didn’t work at this, okay? This came back with me. I know that I live in my body. know that I inhabit this form, I, I, every time I look at it, I see that I’m in like in a biological robot machine. I know that my, that my, I have an app inside of me, but the, the whole of my software is in the cloud that, um, but when, when a person comes to understand the light inside themselves is actually them, well then that is the healing. It doesn’t take away my, you know, the fact that I stubbed my toe or I’ve got allergies.

It doesn’t, it doesn’t fix any of those things. It fixes my fundamental identity. And, and that’s the source of all the problem, is that I believe that I am myself. And I’m not. I live in this thing, and, and my, so if a person is practicing mindfulness, and, and this mindfulness practice you’re watching your emotions rise up and pass by and you’re not grasping, that’s a part of this. Where you’re witnessing the things that you are, that you think that you are, you discover that you’re not. They’re part of you. You’re, those emotions are real, but they’re not the center of you. And the healing is, the healing is divination, self divination. And it’s not, I am God. I, it’s not that. That’s still egoic self.

It’s that I am no thing. I am no thing, I am, uh, channeled by, the light is me, but the light is so much bigger than me, I’m just a little tiny bit of it. It’s, it’s humility, it’s compassion and kindness and love.

Guy:
So it boils down to it. Look, I love what you’re describing here, Peter. And what’s coming through to explore is when you describe what you were describing, then there’s an app and I’m in the cloud and I’m having this experience. How do you see that? Like, especially from your near death experience as well, what you experienced during that time, because I believe you had a life review as well, or per se, however you say that, but how do you see it all fitting into the larger universe, divine, god, consciousness, whatever you want to call it, from our experience that little me here is having? How is that related to that, and what’s the goal?

Peter:
Oh, the goal is love. The goal is, is, is, is being, is, is, stepping aside and letting the, the divine be here. That’s my purpose. My purpose, my purpose I came back for is speak about it, but to be it, not, not anything else. And, and in terms of my role in the universe, I am a nothing. am a tiny speck in the cosmos of the history of the universe of seven, what is it, 70 billion light years age? Uh, estimated something like that. I’m just a moat. But I am beloved. When I was dead, I was the most beloved there ever was. And I could see that everyone was the same as me. And I also understood that, in my life review, that, I didn’t live my life alone. I, everything that I am experiencing right now, the divine is experiencing in me and through me, present to me.

Same with you. Same with everyone. I know that the, the, no matter what I do, I, I to lean toward goodness. I try to lean toward the light, but I’m beloved at the very core of my being that is the divine self. The, the oneness, the universe, it’s that old saying, uh, the absolute is the center of everything and the circumference of nothing.

The circumference is nowhere and the center is everywhere, Buddhist saying, I think. Um, and so I, I, I view myself. in several ways. I see, I’m a human being and I live a human life. I’ve got a family and a, you know, a house and fixing the thermostat and we’re all the kind of practical stuff I got to do. and, but my true self is lived many, many other lives.

I saw when I was dead, they were all concurrent and I was none of them. I was this light itself. I’m a particle, a photon, entangled with a septillion other photons that make up the the mind, the cosmic mind itself, which is way beyond this universe. It’s, this universe is just a portion of it, and it’s a small portion of it, because it’s infinite. I’m beloved, and that’s the most important thing to me, and I know I’m beloved. I’m loved.

Guy:
Wow. Just going off of what you said then with the photons, that’s just how my mind is going. But is, is there an infinite amount of versions of us that are coming back to source? Was that happening, what you saw, or was it more choice points?

Peter:
Will I? I had some choice. I chose to come back. I, I died twice and I chose to come back both times. But otherwise, IWII didn’t have a lot of choice. I, I saw many incarnations of my life, of my soul. I saw, I, I went into two of them and, uh, and they were all happening. There was like this chronology to all these lives. on a timeline, but they were all in existence at the same time. And I’m talking millions of years. I’m not talking like 20 years. I’m talking like over a very long period of time. They were all concurrent. Um,

Guy:
Wow. of them were really me. I was, I was, I was in the state of, of, and I was in inflated with peace, beauty, love, joy, knowledge, understanding, um, compassion, truth. awe, paradise, bliss, ecstasy, understanding. It’s just, I was all of these, all these things at once. And I was also this, uh, entangled photon and, and a lower part of me was, was living all these lives. And, and so one of the things I saw was that nothing is lost. to God. Everything is made of love and everything folds back in.

Peter:
There’s no loss at all. Every, everything, my pencil case is beloved and will fold back into the energy of, of the, of the source, the prime, the primordial, um, ultimately. But I also know that I’ve come back a whole bunch of times But they all seem all those lives that I had lived previously according to my being in this time zone right here When I was dead in timelessness, they were all at the same time. I can’t explain it. It’s paradoxical, but that’s what happened

Yeah, wow, do you feel that we are heading towards love that this is the direction we go in as humanity because when you look outside like and if you get caught into the news and and what’s happening in the world right now this is chaotic it’s like oh my god I can’t even take it in I don’t even go there to be honest you but I’m curious what are your what are your thoughts you well since the 1960s medical science cardiac care began bringing people back from the dead They call it resuscitation. I call it near death experience. And that number has expanded exponentially around the world in the last 60 years. And so there are now in the United States and probably in Australia and definitely in Europe and all over the world depending on the number in the population, we make up about seven, five to seven percent of the population, which is actually a pretty huge number. It’s 10 to 20 million of us in the U. S. estimated, and the percentage is also estimated. And so, we’re all waking up and, and all the, that’s on top of all of the other people, which is a much larger number, who’ve had mystical experiences. One of the studies that I came across by this woman named Dr. Marjorie Woollicott from the University of Oregon, and she’s a neuropsychologist, I think that’s her field, um, was that 60 percent of grieving people have after death communication. But if you, if you talk to the, you know, the bloke on the street, you won’t know that because they won’t tell you. So there’s like this huge open secret mystical experiences that people want, don’t want to talk about.

So all of that put together, I think that this is, we’re having a great awakening on our planet. Part of it is driven by medical science because there’s so many near death experiencers and we’re all starting to talk. all starting to speak up, and part of the reason why we’re speaking up is because love and light, and that’s reality. Meanwhile, terrible things are happening, uh, all over the world. Politically, economically, climatologically, things are in disarray, and they’re probably not going to get better before they get worse. Uh, but meanwhile There’s this great awakening going on and I think that the stage that we’re in right now is the popularization of it. the conversations around it, is the public square of it. Because if everybody can come out of the closet at their cocktail party, on the subway, at their business meeting, how was your weekend? Well, my mother came to visit me in my dream and transformed my grief, of masking that that fundamental part of yourself isn’t real, to have it, have the permission to bring it out.

And I think that as we begin to be able to converse about it, we’ll be able to, um, talk about the other parts of it, which are the, which is the, the psychic end of things, the radiant energy that near death experiencers as a collective, we, as far as I know, and I’m not speaking for everybody, but as far as I can tell and to know among my friends, I live in a different world than my other people that I live with. I live in, I live in a, I, I, you know, nature, I live in a, this is my example, I live in a very beautiful nature place and I do because when I step outside, birds are talking to me, the trees radiate energy, I, I’m feeding off of, I got, that’s why I have plants in my studio. Um, I, I, I, they, they are my, they feed me with the spiritual energy and that’s because there’s this radiance around people. You’ve seen paintings with auras, pictures with auras, everybody has it, it can be developed and grown, and that is actually how it communicates. And so as you, as you step aside in your meditative practice, and you allow the space to grow inside yourself, for the radiance to grow, it becomes a bubble of heaven, and then everybody’s walking, more and more people walking around with a bubble of heaven, and when we bump into each other, the radiance is triple, not doubled. And so there’s the, there’s this other component, the more of us that are in pursuit of this, um, we have an opportunity to, well, shift the planet,

Guy:
Hmm.

Peter:
shift humanity, not the planet, but humanity.

Guy:
Yeah. It’s listening to you. Like, especially when you’re talking about the radiant energy. I mean, we were speaking off air a little bit, but what I found, you know, I had my awakening in 2015 really, which builds up to it. And then I started to feel energy and it was freaking me out. It’s like, what is this?

And, and then once I started leaning and listening to that information, because it has no language, it has no words, you know, and I’ve only been using my intellect to get through life. It’s like there’s a new learning and understanding and relationship with that. And interestingly enough, Pete, as it was really starting to guide me into running retreats and events in which we, what we’ve been doing now.

And every time we bring people together, There’s an amplification, like you said, it doesn’t double it, it, it amplifies. And when you bring, I mean, we had 60 people at our Croatia retreat recently, and it was, it was incredible. But what I’ve noticed through each and every time is that that level of energy is developing continuously.

Continuously within myself, and I, and I find it, and it just blows my mind, my Welsh analytical upbringing still goes, what is going on half the time, especially when you start feeling presence and other things coming in to work with you through that field of energy in group environments. Now, I guess where I’m going with all this is to try and normalize this.

We’re having a conversation for listeners to know that these things are possible. But the second thing is, is what are your feelings around. The body, the biology, the development, like when you came out of your near death experience, you said you were just emanating light, like there was an opening within you that started to see and you were receiving information at a different, through a different sensory experience.

Do you believe that there’s a biological thing happening as well? Can the body develop? Can anyone do this if they choose to? Um, What has your experience has been with it? What have you noticed over your years since having that NIDA experience?

Peter:
Well, I, I think there has to be a biological, um, component to it, because when I died, I left my body. My consciousness was not attached to my body. And I still was. And so there has to be some kind of interface. How does this, how did I, how did I, this is the big question, I had this experience on the other side where there was no language. How did, how did the, how did that experience come back to me in my brain? How did my brain remember this thing that happened to me when I had no brain? And so there’s definitely some kind of interface going on. I, I don’t know whether everybody has the capacity, probably everybody does, but some people have more of a capacity. And, and, and in some families I’ve seen, the kind of, the collect, the whole family is kind of spiritually mystical. in other families, they’re not. You know, so maybe there’s a DNA thing going on there. Um, But, meditative practice with breath and mental focus changes the neurological structure of the brain.

The brain is plastic, it, uh, you grow these neurons through the practices of, of focus and attention, and it naturally allows this to arise. So I think that it can be trained into people. I, I didn’t know that when I began my journey. When I came back from my NDE, I was alone in the world. And I’m, and I’m scared of people.

We’re going to find out. And, and I didn’t know where to turn to. I read, uh, primarily the, the two big books that really helped me, the Yoga Sutras by Pantajali and the Autobiography of a Yogi. And after reading those two, I adopted the practices of Pantajali. This is 45 years ago. And I did it in secret, and I used them all the way through the time in the church. And I didn’t let anybody know, I didn’t want to get kicked out. Um, and I called them by different names. Um, but the promise of Yogananda was that if you practice this, these will be the results. And so I liken it to a hammer. You got a hammer. It has a certain function. If you learn how to swing that hammer and hit that nail, which pretty much anybody can do, you’ll be able to drive the nail in with practice. And that’s the way I approached it. Yogananda talked about the practicality of the science of yoga. And what he meant by that is So if you practice this, this is the result. And so I’ve spent the last three years, four years, I didn’t teach yoga. The, the crea yoga that I’ve learned over 45 years, I kept it to myself.

I continued to practice. I waited until people told me in my town they could feel the radiance from me. And apparently after I died the second time, when I told all that my friends in the yoga group that I wasn’t coming back, the teacher’s like, you gotta come back. And I was like, why should I come back?

I, you know, I’m not feeling great. I practicing on my own. I need a break. She said, because you practice in the studio, everybody feeds off your energy and we’ve known this for as long as you’ve been there. We’ve just never told you. And when I learned that that was true, then I realized that the practices that I’ve been practicing had the result that I had hoped for. And that maybe then if I taught them to people, they could have the same experience. And so I’ve been running this Kriya Yoga group for We’re coming into our third year and we’re, uh, our second year, we’re coming into our second year of studying the Yoga Sutras, along with Kriya Yoga, and their people and my group are reporting that they are transforming. Their, their brains are transforming, their capacity for feeling the energy is transforming, their ability to move from linguistic meditation, use a word and a prayer, a prayer and a chance, to body meditation, to, um, uh, mindfulness meditation. They’re all learning how to do this. And some of them, one of the, one of the women that is in our group is a super materialistic rationalist, like autistically rationalistic.

And, um, she’s reporting changes. So I think that, yes, I think that you can train your way into this, but I think that it, and you can take, you can take a psychedelic. You want to do a shortcut? You can take a psychedelic, a big dose. I did that in high school. I took a triple hit of LSD. I had this major experience, one of my mystical experiences. I was stupid, okay? I had no idea what I was doing, and for me, God looked out for me. But. After that experience, I realized that unless I continued on, if I, unless I started on the path of meditation, that I was, I risked losing the connection. And I found that with the practice of meditation, I increased the connection.

Guy:
Love it. Love it. Yeah. It’s interesting, isn’t it? What do you feel? And there’s a word that’s jumping out on your notes here was chakras, right? And what do you feel the chakras come into play with all of this of what you’ve just shared?

Peter:
Well, I, I was raised Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox, two churches in eastern, in northeastern United States. I didn’t know nothing about chakras. I’d heard of them, but I didn’t know anything about them. So, I, I was, my NDE, was back at my university, I was on exchange for a year when I died, and I got back to my university and I took a mime class, a pantomime class, and my teacher was in Marcel Marceau’s school. And Marcel Marceau taught yoga as a big part of mime training. And one day in this class, this is, this is the semester after I died, and Uh, he had us sit in this yoga form, uh, left foot out, straight foot up, right foot tucked into the groin, uh, right hands. Uh, and a blade hand, uh, left hand, and a flat hand, uh, above my navel, and he had us, uh, focus our, our mind and our breath, actually it wasn’t in a blade hand, it was in a cup hand, focus our mind and our breath into our palms, and as I’m doing this in front of my navel, my hands start to tingle like fire. I’m like, what the heck is this? And he says, now put it into a blade hand and raise this thing up. And it was like, I was stretching this big, huge piece of taffy. I could feel this energy. And so we did this little exercise, he said, who’s, who felt anything? And I said, I did. Nobody else did. He said, what’d you feel?

I said, I told him what I felt. He’s, he said, come up in the front of the class. So I came up in the front of the class. He had me kneel down, close my eyes. So I’m kneeling, um, in front of him. I close my eyes. He says, put up your palms. I put up my palms. He says, what do you feel? I say, I feel this. And then he says, no, what do you feel?

I said, I feel this, and then this, and then this. And then I opened my, he says, open your eyes. And I didn’t know this. He was kneeling in front of me with his palms this far from me. and I was mimicking, because I could feel it.

Guy:
Uh huh. and he said, how did you know how to do that? I said, I don’t know. But I was reading the Yoga Sutras. and reading Pramahansa Yogananda about chakras. And what I decided to do was not learn anything about chakras, not their names, not their colors, not their meanings, but instead use what Pantajali was talking about, bringing my mind and my breath into focus. here, went to here, went to the

So, third eye, throat, and down. Yeah, and I would just, for decades, okay, this is, this is the fundamental practice that I practiced in all of my, and I integrated into my Hatha Yoga, became a Yengar, and all these other different forms I practiced, I integrated into my sitting practice. And I would bring my mind to my chakras. And eventually what happened was, is that they began to go from these pinpoints to like plates, to like balls, to like tubes, to like balls, to like connecting. And then I could run them all over the place inside of my body. And, and one of the things I learned was, is that by focusing on my physical body, so I was, I was, when I bring my, my, my mind to my throat chakra, I’m feeling my physical body, feeling the back of my spine, I’m feeling my esophagus, I’m feeling the frontier, and I’m using my, my physical body my breath, my chant falls away, I use my body as my mantra, and I bring my breath to it, and they just reveal themselves.

What do I know about chakras is the same thing I know about the divine is if you step aside with your mind out of the way they show themselves and They can be connected and they can grow in radiance and they are useful. So I I came back with Like, I have eyes and ears, and I hear with my ears, and I see with my eyes, but I came back with a unified sense. I have one single large sense, and it’s my auric self, and I hear with, I, I, I see with my hands, I hear with my tongue. It is, it is one, it’s like a synesthesia, only there’s not a difference between them, they’re all just one sense, and the practice of the chakras allow me to feel the energy of others.

Peter:
Because I’ve learned to drive it into my palms. I’m not trying to manipulate it. I’m not trying to use it. I’m just trying to feel with it and it, uh, well, it, it brings God to my body. Uh, it makes me, it opens my, uh, receptivity. to the fullness of the divine. And, and I don’t, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, and the one last thing I’ll say is that I, I worked, I worked in television for 15 years.

I was, I was a writer and I was on camera every day for 15 years. And, uh, as I wrote my scripts, would meditate before, and I’d write them in a meditative state, and then I’d meditate before I got on camera, and then I would use my throat chakra, not, not anything other than bringing my mind and my breath to my throat chakra, and just being in there as I read off the teleprompter and spoke what I was writ, what I was writing.

And then I started getting all these letters to the TV station from mothers and fathers and Buddhists and, and atheists and, and, uh, and my, like, When you, when you come on camera, my dog stops and sits in front of the television. My baby stops crying. I’m an atheist, and I don’t know what’s going on, but when I listen to your voice, I get so calm.

And I know that it’s not me. I know that it’s the energy of the divine woven into the words. And so there are useful tools for the chakras that are for the service of others. And I think that that’s the, that’s the bottom line for me. It’s of, it’s of service to other.

Guy:
thank you for sharing. I, um, I, it really catches my attention is because, uh, that was a pivotal experience for me. They played such a pivotal role in, and I would literally just bring my awareness to each one every morning and imagine breathing through them. And over time, I started to connect with them, feel them, and experience them and over time and the way you described the pinpoint to the plate to the tube to the interconnection to this torus of energy it’s it’s quite phenomenal and it all interlinks and plays and once people have that experience again there’s no there’s no and you know there’s no denying that they exist and it’s just how do we get there right you know it’s the practice yeah yeah

Peter:
your mind and awareness to those places. That’s all that it is. It’s so people talk about unblocking the chakras. never tried to unblock my chakras. I just bring my mind and my awareness to them. They unblock themselves. I’m not really doing anything except for that one thing.

Guy:
Yeah, exactly and I want to wrap the podcast up soon Peter But I want to touch on one last topic along with all of that because there’s a few things you’ve been through But that’s about prayer and you spoke about centering prayer And i’d love you to talk a little bit what you’ve discovered about the power of prayer intention Period

Peter:
I, I, I, because of my, I had a union experience when I was dead, and what I came back with was this longing, grief, uh, this bereavement for the oneness of being. And what I learned from Centering Prayer is that intention of the heart leads direction of the soul. And so my intention in my heart has always been toward the oneness of being, just to be in the presence.

That’s my intention, to be in the presence of the Divine. the, uh, that has resulted in the presence of the Divine coming to live with me. to be inside of me so that I’m not, I’m not bereaved anymore. When Jesus was talking about, uh, heaven, he was talking about this. He was talking about, he was talking about this. The prayer is to bring as, as, as, as in heaven and on earth, thy will be done, not my will be done. That’s what he’s talking about. Now, in terms of its usefulness in life, send, uh, shakti toward projects, toward people. I pray for people, but I, when I pray for a person, I, I pray, maybe I’ll think of their name, I might see them in my imagination, uh, I might feel of them, and I pray that the divine will be done. And if, and if I have an influence, I’d like this, but the divine will be done, not my will be done. And I send them, I just try to channel light and love to them. And I try to do that because I, I spent a lot of time in ministry and in hospitals with dying people. And I would see people pin their faith on the healing of their mother. from cancer. And then, you know, mom’s got stage four, uh, melanoma, it’s metastasized through her lymph node system, and there’s no way she’s going to survive. And yet they’re praying for this miracle. And once in a while it happens, but most of the time it doesn’t. And then they lose their faith or their belief because God didn’t answer my prayer. But, but that’s not the, you’re praying for yourself. You’re not praying for the best for the person or the will of the divine being done. I, so I learned, I learned by watching that my prayer life is my meditation life.

Guy:
Beautiful. Thank you. Wrapping things up, Peter. Um, I got one more question for you, but I want to get, where can people find out more about you? Are you doing, um, yeah, what are you up to? Let us, let us know and how can people find you?

Peter:
You can find me at peterpanagore. love, dot L O V E. I’m on YouTube. My dot love, I help people who’ve had mystical experiences, kundalini awakenings, spiritually transformative experiences, near death experiences. I help them integrate psychologically, emotionally, relationally, and spiritually. And I’ve done it myself.

I’ve spent 40 years as a counselor, but also, you know, All of this is my life. I can help because I’ve been through it myself. So I’m at PeterPanagore. love. I run a counseling service. I have a YouTube channel. I teach Kriya Yoga on Tuesdays. I teach meditation Mondays and Wednesdays on YouTube. I have a small community of people who are like me. Um, and, and you’re all, everybody’s welcome, and on Sundays, we have this thing called Mystic Tea Salon, and it’s, uh, our rules are humility, compassion, kindness, authenticity, and experience, and it’s an open forum for discussion of mysticism. And the last thing I’m doing is I sold my book tour to some, uh, Hollywood producers, film, I shouldn’t, they’re telling me, don’t say Hollywood producers, because, uh, But, uh, it’s being made into a motion picture and we’re far along in the process and it’s going great.

Guy:
Wow. in the theater near you. When, when is there a due date on that? Oh, not yet. Um, they don’t, they, they sit down and there’s no, eh, don’t talk about due dates. Um, it’s, it’ll be a couple of years before it’s, it hits the screens, but we’re, we’re, we’re now fast Amazing. So it hasn’t been cast yet though, or anything like that.

Peter:
Uh, no, but I know who they’re talking about.

Guy:
Oh. Bye. Wow.

Peter:
Hot young, hot, to play me, hot young A listers. I’m like, yeah.

Guy:
Fantastic. Fantastic. Um, last question for you and the links will be in the show notes for everyone, but with everything we’ve covered today, Peter, is there anything you’d like to leave the listeners to ponder on?

Peter:
Yeah, the moment that you die, you’re going to find out for yourself. And, and if you aim your life a little tiny bit toward light and love, you’ll have a pleasant and beautiful experience and an easy transition. I don’t know what happens if you don’t. I did. Um, I love is the key. Love is the treasure of life.

It’s the one thing that I carried across with me. All the love I was given, all the love that I gave away was my possession. I, you can’t meditate, don’t worry about it. If you’re not on a spiritual path, don’t worry about it. just love people. That’s it. Just love people.

Guy:
Hmm. Thank you, Peter. Thanks for coming back on me. We’ll have to get you back on in the future. There was so many things, topics that I was going to jump down with you, but that was perfect. Thank you so much, mate. I really appreciate it.

Peter:
Anytime Guy, it’s a pleasure talking to you. You ask me, I’ll be back anytime. Thank you very much for having me,

Guy:
Thanks, legend. Thank you.