So I see this big flash of light come out of
the phone, hits me in the face, and throws me
back like a rag doll.
And it really threw me backwards.
And that's when things really got interesting
because as I was being thrown backwards, all of a sudden
I had this very strange sensation of moving forwards.
My guest today is Dr.
Tony Cicoria, MD.
He just prefers Tony.
He's a practicing orthopedic surgeon who had a near
death experience back in 1994, and he's here to
tell us what caused his NDE and some of the pretty
amazing things that have happened to him since then.
Tony, welcome and thanks so much for coming on the show.
Thank you.
I appreciate being invited.
It's pretty crazy.
This opposite ends of the earth thing, isn't it?
Oh, it, it is absolutely incredible that, you go
through life thinking, is there going to be a tomorrow?
And here I am talking to somebody in tomorrow.
yep.
I guess you're a guarantee that there is a tomorrow.
Exactly.
Yep.
I'm Friday.
Your Thursday.
Tony, would you give us a little bit of background
on your life up to the day of your NDE and then
we can go from there?
Okay.
I grew up in upstate New York, Kingston, New York.
I went to the Citadel, which was a military college in
South Carolina in 1970.
And when I graduated, I went to get my PhD in physiology
and I had the great honor to work with Albert St.
Georgie, my senior year in college.
He was up at the Massachusetts one of the Oceanic labs,
and I'm drawing a blank.
At any rate, I thought for sure that I wanted
to be a scientist and I went to get my PhD.
And when I finished, the options were limited
for what I wanted to do.
I could be a lab rat in somebody's basement.
And I thought that this, it's not what I
thought it was gonna be.
At the time I was in love with the idea of the old
scientists and they would, go for walks in the park around
the lake and share great ideas and help each other.
And all of that disappeared over time.
And it became a publish or perish environment.
And I thought, you know what?
I'm gonna take it a step further.
And I decided to go to medical school.
So as soon as I finished, I continued at the same place
at the Medical University of South Carolina and
and decided to get my MD.
And as I was going through that, trying to decide what
type of physician I wanted to be, I decided I wanted
to be an orthopedic surgeon because I was always one
of those kids that liked to take things apart and put
'em back together again.
So it seemed like a natural aptitude for me.
And so I did that and in 1988 I started working and we were
in upstate New York a place called Oneonta, New York.
And my wife normally would have a big party every August
and in this particular August of 1994 was gonna be at a
place called Sleepy Hollow Lake in upstate New York,
which is just below Albany, and that's where we're
gonna have this big party.
About 25 people.
Lots of kids running around.
And my wife had rented a pavilion to have this
multiple birthday party at.
And I was elected the cook, and that's the
way the day started.
And then as I was out working the barbecue I thought I
hadn't checked on my mom cuz she was not there and I
thought I better go call her.
So I, I got somebody to cover the barbecue and I walked
around in the front of the building and there was a
payphone attached to it and I'm gonna give my mom a call.
And I picked up the phone and I dialed her number and
let it ring 4, 5, 6 times and she never picked up.
So I was, I thought, oh, I, I'll try again later.
And as I took the phone away from my face I heard a huge
crack and I saw this big flash of light come out of the phone
and hit me in the face, and I knew exactly what it was.
It was like a lightning strike.
What I hadn't realized because I was paying attention to the
grill, was that a storm cloud had brewed up over the lake
that we were next to, and I hadn't been paying attention.
So I see this big flash of light come out of
the phone, hits me in the face, and throws me
back like a rag doll.
And it really threw me backwards.
And that's when things really got interesting because as I
was being thrown backwards, all of a sudden I had this
very strange sensation of moving forwards And I remember
standing there thinking, how is this possible?
I know I got hit, I saw it, and I knew I'd been
thrown back like a rag doll.
And here I am standing and I'm looking around.
I look at the phone and the phone is just dangling.
And nothing's making any sense.
And at that point I hear my mother-in-law screaming and
I'm down at the bottom of the stairs and everybody else is
up on the first floor and I hear her screaming and all of
a sudden she's running down the stairs right at me and
I'm thinking, and it's not good when your mother-in-law's
screaming and running at you.
And as she got down in front of me, I could tell that
she couldn't see me cuz she was looking off to her left.
And as she got to the bottom of the stairs, it was
like I wasn't even there.
And she just took off to the left and I thought,
what the hell is going on?
And so I started to follow her and I took a few steps
following her and all of a sudden I'm confronted
with myself on the ground.
And I remember looking down and going, oh shit, I'm dead.
It wa it was a shock.
I guess all of my life I thought that, when you
died there would be some sort of notification.
Either who knows what it was, but I didn't expect to
have it not even be known.
I thought there'd be some bells or whistles
that would go off, but it was absolutely nothing.
So I'm standing there and I'm looking at myself on
the ground, and as this is happening, my mind is racing
like crazy and I'm trying to make sense of this and
all of a sudden I'm saying to myself, wait a minute.
I'm thinking just like I normally would.
And I'm obviously not in that body that's on the ground.
I'm standing out here.
I can hear everybody.
I can see everybody, but nobody can see or hear me.
And I'm trying to get their attention and
nothing seemed to work.
And then I saw this lady who actually was waiting
to use the phone behind me.
And she started to get down to do CPR.
Turns out she was a nurse from one of the local hospitals,
and how fortuitous is that?
Get struck by lightning and have somebody waiting
to save your ass from going to the other side.
So she got down and she starts doing what
she's supposed to do.
And at this point I'm thinking, nobody can see
me, nobody can hear me.
And I'm feeling stupid and I thought I'm gonna go check
on my family cuz they were upstairs and my wife and
my three kids are up there.
And I thought I'm gonna go up the stairs and
see what's going on.
So I walk over to the stairs and I start to go up and I
get to about the third stair.
And I'm looking down at the stairs cuz I always,
I'm afraid I'm gonna fall face forward on the stairs.
So I always watch what I'm doing.
And as I'm looking down, I noticed that my legs are
starting to dissolve and I thought, whoa, this is
getting really intense.
And I just kept going up the stairs.
By the time I got to the top of the stairs,
I had lost all form.
I was just a ball of energy.
And the stairs go off to the left.
And I said, what the hell?
I'm not gonna go up the stairs.
I just went through the wall.
And when I got to the other side of the wall, I came out
right over the top of where my wife was sitting and she's
painting children's faces.
And I made a mental note of where the kids were, where
who was standing where.
Who the kids were and what pattern they were standing in.
I don't know why I did that, but I did.
And later on I verified that was exactly the
way they were standing.
And so traveled through this room and when I got to
the other side of the room, I was going on a diagonal
and I went through the roof.
And suddenly I'm outside.
And that's when things really got crazy interesting
because it was like I had fallen into a river of pure
positive energy and there wasn't anything in this river
of energy except absolute love and absolute peace.
And it was just, it was absolutely shaking to
experience it because it was devoid of anything else.
And it was this bluish white light and it had a sparkly
appearance to it, and it made me think of when I was
a kid and I'd be swimming in a crystal clear stream
and I'd see the sun shining through the water as I
was underneath the water.
And it reminded me of that.
And as I was looking at this light energy, and I could
tell what it felt like.
And as I looked around, I started to see that
whatever this energy was, it actually made up everything.
And I could look at the trees and see the energy
flowing into the trees and everything was made up of
whatever this energy was.
And I thought to myself, I'm thinking, this
is the God energy.
This is what everything is made of.
And I thought, this is so powerful.
I can, I could measure this.
And so my science brain is kicking in going, we can,
we could look at this.
And I'm like, but and the more I looked at it,
I could actually see the energy pattern and it
had a sine wave pattern.
And I could see it flowing.
And it went through everything.
And at this point I could tell that I was moving someplace.
Had no idea where I was going.
But I could feel speed and direction.
So I was accelerating in, into something, but I had no idea
what, and at this point I've become absolutely euphoric
over the fact that this is the greatest thing that could
ever happen to somebody.
And I, I had a short period where I saw high points
and low points in my life.
Almost like a collage of pictures just, showed me
pictures of this and this and that and there wasn't
a lot of emotion around it.
It was just, these are things that happened in
your life that were of some significance, and there was
no explanation other than the fact that they just passed on.
And so I settled down and I'm floating in this river
of pure positive energy.
And I'm thinking, again, this is the greatest thing that
could ever happen to somebody.
And I was just excited about where it was going.
And then all of a sudden it was like somebody flipped
a switch and I was back in my body and I was pissed.
I was like, no, don't make me go back and you
can't do this to me.
And I quickly realized that's not up to me.
And I'm laying there on the ground and in the place
where it hit me in the face and came out my foot, it
felt like somebody had taken hot pokers and stuck them
in both of those places.
But I'm still unconscious and the lady who was next
to me had stopped CPR and she's just kneeling next to
me, but I still can't open my eyes or look at anybody.
And so it took several minutes before I had enough mental
function to be able to open my eyes and say anything.
And at that point I just embarrassed myself because
the first thing I said to this lady who's kneeling next
to me, that saved my life, I said, it's okay I'm a doctor.
And she just kinda laughed and she said you
weren't a minute ago.
And I thought, okay, none of this is making sense
and I'm just making a fool of myself, so I'm gonna
shut up, which I did.
And of course, the police and the ambulance came and
I said, no, I'm not going.
When you get struck by lightning, you're
either alive or dead.
There's not much in between.
And it's, at that point I said, just talk to my family.
And I said, take me home.
Let me see my cardiologist, my neurologist and let's,
let me just get out of this.
So that's what happened.
And so they took me home and I saw my doctors and
everybody said the same thing.
You're lucky to be here.
And I was like, okay but I was tormented by what did it mean?
When I started to think about it and, everything in life
is a series of probabilities.
And I started thinking about what's the possibility or
the probability of a bolt of lightning, several million
volts worth, striking a building, losing enough of
its current by the time it gets to you that it doesn't
turn you into a french fry, it just stops your heart.
And then I think, and what's the probability of having
a nurse standing behind you so that just in case
you got a little too much, somebody was gonna be there
to jumpstart your heart again.
And, when I started looking at all this stuff,
I'm thinking there's nothing random about this.
And as Einstein used to say, God does not throw dice.
And that's true.
And I'm a firm believer that everything
happens for a reason.
But I was given no reasons.
I had no idea.
And I was haunted by the fact that this thing had happened
and I had no idea why and what it meant or what I was
supposed to take from it.
And then shortly after that, it was about two
weeks after the event.
So after the lightning, it took me about a week
to get the circuits running again properly.
That first week I could look right at you.
And say, I know who you are.
I'll be damned if I can find your name.
It's locked in a box someplace up there
and I can't get to it.
And there were a lot of things like that.
I just I knew that I knew something, but I couldn't
get to where that file was.
And after a week that disappeared and it seemed like
everything was back to normal.
But about another week or two after that, I started
having this really incredible desire to hear classical piano
music, which was a really strange thing for me because
I was a kid of the sixties.
There was rock and roll and there wasn't
much of anything else.
My mother had made me play piano when I
was seven years old.
She made me take lessons for a year and I, out of
obligation, I did that.
Actually was probably under threat of life and limb.
But I did it and never had any interest and never went back.
But all of a sudden I, I can't do anything without
thinking about this absolute desire to hear this.
And it was so strong that I drove an hour to Albany,
which was the nearest big city that would have
classical piano music on CDs.
And I went into this music store, and as I walked in
there, it seemed like there was a CD that just jumped
off the shelf into my hands, and it was Vladimir Ashkenazi
playing his favorite Chopan.
Ashkenazi was one of the famous Russian
pianists, is one of the famous Russian pianists.
He's still alive.
And at this point I didn't know what to
do with all of it.
It was just, I was so taken by this the music
and I started listening to the CD and I listened
to it nonstop and I made everybody else listen to it.
I'm sure they were sick of hearing it.
But, I just couldn't stop.
It was just a compulsion that had made no sense to me.
But within a very short period of time of listening
to this music, I realized that it's not gonna be enough
to listen to this music.
I need to know how to play it, which was a big problem
since I didn't have a piano and I didn't know how to play.
But I was undeterred.
And the very next day, one of our babysitters came
to the house and said, I'm gonna be moving and I have
this old upright piano I need to store for a year.
Could I store it at your house?
And I'm thinking, okay, this is really getting weird now.
So all of a sudden I have a piano.
And she loads the piano in the house and I'm thinking,
all right, now I need to know how to learn how to play.
So I went and bought a couple books and how to try
to teach yourself to play.
And at the same time, I ordered all the sheet
music from the cd, which is, magical thinking.
I don't know what the hell I was thinking.
There are people who have been playing this stuff
for 10 years and still wouldn't attempt to do that.
But it didn't seem to matter.
I was determined to learn how to do this, and so I started
to try to teach myself, and within a few more weeks
of that, I go into bed as normal, but all of a sudden
I, I have this dream and in this dream, It was like
an out of body experience.
I'm actually, I'm walking out onto the stage and I'm walking
toward myself and I'm way out on the front edge of the
stage and I'm at a, I'm giving a concert at this concert
hall and I'm listening to this music that I'm playing.
And as I'm walking up behind myself, the thought
comes to me that this is not somebody else's music.
This is mine.
And I thought, okay.
So I, I'd start listening intently to it, and I walked
up behind myself and I'm listening to what I'm playing
and I'm watching everything and I'm looking at the concert
hall and the ending had this loud crashing ending and it
woke me up and I, so I got up.
And I sat on the edge of the bed and I looked around and
it was 3:15 in the morning and I walked out to the
piano and I thought let me see if I can plunk some of
this out that I just heard.
I had no idea, and I didn't know how to write music.
I didn't know how to read music.
And so I sat there and I could plunk out a few
notes of what I heard, but I didn't even know how to
write down what they were.
And so I said, the hell with this.
And I went to bed and I woke up always at 5 30, 6 o'clock,
cuz that was my time to get up and get ready for work.
And from that moment on, whenever I went near
that piano, the music from the dream would
start to play in my head.
So whenever I sat down, at the piano, it was
like a tape recording, it would just start.
And if I didn't pay attention to it, it
would become intrusive.
It would actually start playing when I was trying
to work or when I was trying to do something else.
And so I learned very quickly that it was kinda like a
two year old, you really had to pay attention to
it or there was gonna be some repercussions from it.
And so this process went on and I continued trying to
teach myself and I picked out a few of the pieces from
that CD that I thought, I'm gonna learn these first.
And I started trying to teach myself and one day I'm
banging away at the piano and my daughter's best friend
Jackie was over at the house and her mom was coming by to
pick her up and she came in the house and she heard me
on the piano and she came in and said, what are you doing?
And I said, I'm trying to learn this piece of music.
It was called The Fantasy Impromptu, a piece of Chopan.
And I said, I don't understand why the hands don't line
up in this piece of music.
I said why would somebody write a piece of music where
the hands don't line up?
And she said they're not supposed to.
And I said, why?
And she said, it's called a poly rhythm.
And I said, I'd never heard of that word before.
And I was like, why would anyone do that?
And she said, I'm not even gonna try to
explain this to you.
You need to get a teacher.
So at that point she gave me the name of Sandy McCain, who
was the chairman of music at Hartwick College in Onionto,
New York where we lived.
And I called up Sandy and told her this whole story
and asked her if she'd take on an old guy to try
to teach him some piano.
And she did.
And we started working two hours a week.
The only time we had in common was five o'clock.
So five o'clock was our piano time.
Five o'clock in the morning.
So I'm sure that her family was not real happy with me,
but that was the best we could do to meet the two schedules.
And so this went on for quite some time.
And then as I'm learning to play, I'm also working on
the music from this dream.
And as I learned how to do things, I would write down a
measure or two and I'd stuff it in a drawer someplace,
thinking, someday I'll get back to all of this.
And I kept working on learning how to play, and
I started going to a music camp, a piano camp for adults
in Bennington, Vermont, which was called a Sonata.
And it was, it's a group of people.
They would meet four or five, six times a year.
Different people and at different times, and it's all
people that are absolutely obsessed with piano and
then this is their week of indulging themselves.
And so I started going to that in 2002.
In 2006 when I went, the owner's sister Erica
Vander Lynn Seidner.
Erica was the number one salesperson for Steinway
in New York City, and she had just left Steinway and
went to Bosendorfer, and she was there at the piano camp
and she brought five pianos in for people to play on,
which was an absolute treat.
And we got talking about all of this stuff and the
music and the music from the dream and the things
that I was working on and afterwards, she said to
me, there's only one person that can tell this story,
and that's Oliver Sacks.
And at the time I didn't know who Oliver Sacks was
other than the fact that he wrote the book Awakenings,
when he figured out how to treat Parkinson's Disease.
He's a famous neurologist, and I didn't think
anything more of it.
And so I went about my normal business.
And it seemed like that was in May, that meeting was.
And in June, I get a phone call from Oliver Sacks and I'm
like, oh, this can't be real.
And Oliver says, I've heard about this lightning
story and I'd like to have you come down to New York
City to interview you.
I'd like you to be one of my patients.
I have a collection of people like you who have
had unusual things happen.
And I said, sure, that would be great.
So in August of that year, 2006, I went down to see
Oliver Sachs and I got to spend the whole day with him,
which is an absolute treasure.
This was a man who could think circles around anybody
I knew, including myself.
And he, we spent the entire day together which
I will never forget, and at the end of the day,
we're standing in the doorway and saying goodbye.
And he looked at me and he had this piercing way
of looking at people.
And he looked at me and he says, the music from the
dream went through an awful lot of trouble to get here.
The least you can do is write it.
And I was so taken with what he said.
I went right home.
And it was about three hours to get back home.
So I had plenty of time to think about it.
But when I got home, the next day, I went right out
and bought a music writing program called Sebelius,
which is the equivalent of music writing for dummies.
And if you have an electric piano, you can
hook this thing up so that you can play something
and the music actually appears on the screen.
And so that was the way I started because by that
point, I had gotten to where I could play some parts of the
music from the dream, but I had no idea how to write it.
And so I spent the next seven months, every minute
that I wasn't working, writing down this music.
My goal was to get it written for my next May piano camp.
And so that was my goal.
And so when piano camp came around in May I had finished
the music and played it for my piano friends at this piano
camp, and everybody liked it.
And I thought, okay, this is pretty cool.
While I was there, I got a call from Oliver and
he says, I wanted to ask your permission to, to
use your story in my book.
And I thought I don't have anything to
hide, sure, go ahead.
He said, good cuz you're chapter one and it's
coming out July 23rd.
I said, we got a little ahead of ourselves here and sure
enough, my story was published in the New Yorker magazine the
July 23rd edition, 2007, and.
At that point, all hell broke loose because, this
was, I hadn't been telling a lot of people about this
story and cuz I didn't want people to think I was
crazy and suddenly it's got taken out of the closet and
thrown out and everybody's for everybody to look at.
And about a week after it came out, I got a call from
a guy named Carlton Clay.
Carlton was the head of the music department
at State University of New York in Onionta.
And Carlton says, I read this article and he
says, I'd love for you to come and teach a class.
And I thought, look, that would be pretty interesting
cuz I like to teach and do unusual things.
And I said, sure.
And a week later he calls and says, I'm getting
inundated with phone calls about this thing.
He said, would you consider playing the
music for the class?
And I thought, I'll do that.
And then it seemed like it was another month or so after
that, Carlton calls again, and he says, you won't believe it.
I'm just getting hammered with people calling here and
everybody wants more and more.
And he said, would you consider doing a concert at
the performing arts center?
And I said no, I don't have the faintest idea how to
do something like that.
I said I'm not musically trained, I'm not prepared.
I have no idea where to start.
And somehow he conned me into doing it.
And I said, okay, I'll do it.
So the next phone call I make is I call Sandy,
my music teacher.
And I said Carlton conned me into doing this thing.
And so I said I would, and it's gonna be
in January of 2008.
And I said, can you get me ready for it?
And she said, it's gonna be a lot of work.
She said, you gotta be prepared to put three
or four hours a day into getting ready for this.
And I'm like, okay.
We start on this process and we would go up into the
performing arts center and she would make me walk out on
stage and make me walk off.
She would, make me talk to the crowd and then
make me play the music and, I can still hear her.
She'd be up in a top row of the seats.
And I'd be playing away and she'd go, I can't hear you.
Oh my God, this is gonna be no fun.
But, we worked along and then about a few weeks
before the concert, Carlton calls me again and he says,
things are changing again.
And I said, what are you doing?
And he says, the BBC one wants to come and so does
German television, and so does Granada Media.
So there's three huge sets that want to come
and film this thing.
And I was like, oh my God, I've come too far
now, what am I gonna do?
I said, okay.
And so along comes the concert day, which
actually turned out to be my birthday anyway.
And there's three television crews.
I remember going to the green room right beforehand.
And I remember sitting in there and I'm talking to
God and angels, anybody that wants to listen.
And I said, you guys put me through a lot to get me here.
I said, don't embarrass us both and leave me out
there without a lot of help.
And thankfully I managed to get through it and the music
from the dream and a couple of other pieces that I had
written along the way and managed to get through it.
And ever since then, it's taken on a life of its own.
So I've played that music all over the country.
And, it's interesting the reactions that I get to it.
People will come up afterwards and tell me about they see
visions or they feel certain things and I've even had
some people ask if they could come and lay on the floor
underneath the piano so they can feel the vibrations of it.
Because there's something in the music, there's
something in the frequencies of the music that stimulates
certain brain activity or certain behaviors.
And it's interesting.
I think there's more to the music than I
have any concept of.
It's so far over my head.
But I do believe that there are healing frequencies and
there are frequencies that stimulate brain activity in
people, and it's just based on the things that people say.
Tony, do you think that was possibly the end game in mind?
If you consider that we make a plan for life
before we come here.
Do you think that the fact that the music is healing
was the ultimate intention?
I think that there's some truth to that.
I have been searching for an understanding of how
all this fits together ever since it happened.
And I've literally read hundreds of books
trying to understand.
And I think what it really comes down to is that we
have no real concept of how the brain works and how it's
connected to other things and other places and, and
the frequencies that exist in the ether or the quantum
field, as some people call it.
And how all of it interacts and how it can help to
reprogram your brain.
And so is some of the aspect of this music about helping
people to reprogram some part of their brain that they
don't have access to or or could help in their evolution?
I don't know, but I've often wondered that.
Just going back to when your NDE first occurred did you
start talking to your family, did you tell your family about
what happened straight away?
I know you didn't talk to many people, but how long was
it before you said, oh, this is actually what occurred.
I told them pretty quickly.
But I was very selective about anyone else.
So my family was the ones that I told about what I
had seen and and how it all seemed to fit together for me.
And, some people thought I was just hallucinating.
Some people didn't know what to think.
But I knew I was absolutely certain of the things I saw in
the things that I experienced.
And as I had begun reading as much as I could get my
hands on about people who've had similar sorts of things,
there's a commonality that people have who've had
a near death experience.
They all see very similar things.
They experience similar things.
There was one that sticks out in my brain
is Pamela Reynolds.
It was a famous case and Pam had an aneurysm in her
brain, which is a balloon that's gonna burst and
when it does, you die.
End of story.
Unless it can be found and have surgery.
And so she was having headaches and she saw
her doctor, and he did the appropriate test
and found this aneurysm.
And he sent her out to the Barrow's Neurologic
Institute in Arizona.
Phoenix, Arizona.
And Dr.
Spetzler was the surgeon that she saw, and he was
gonna do a new procedure on her called standstill.
And what they would do is they would take you into
the operating room, they would hook you up to a
cardiac bypass machine, put you on bypass, and then
they would drain all the blood out of your brain.
So it was a bloodless field.
And they would do the surgery and then they would put the
blood back in and restart your heart and hopefully you
would wake back up again.
And this was a pioneering procedure that she had done.
And what was interesting was after, she lived and
after the surgery, she was taken to the I C U, and when
she was in the I C U, she started telling everybody
about all of the stuff that happened to her when she
was proven clinically brain dead and cardiac standstill.
So this woman's heart has stopped, her brain has
been cooled to 60 degrees and verified absolute flat
line, no electrical activity in her brain, and yet,
she was able to tell them exactly where all of the
equipment was set on the tables, who was in the room.
She was able to give conversations that the
doctors were having while she's under anesthesia.
And then at one point she left her body and she initially
went up and she was sitting over Spetzler's shoulder.
And she was watching what he was doing.
But then she said an opening occurred up
toward the ceiling.
And so she went into the tunnel and when she was in
the tunnel she met some of her family who walked with
her a short ways, and then they turned her around and
said, you have to go back.
And she said, hell no, I'm not going back.
This is pretty nice over here.
And they somehow managed to get her back.
And I think it was her uncle or grandfather, I can't
remember which, who, when she was standing at the edge of
the tunnel, pushed her out.
And that coincided with when they started her heart.
And she had a veridical memory of everything that happened.
The things that people were saying in the room.
Who was in the room.
Music that was playing in the room.
And, one of the things she really objected to was when
Spetzler left the room, he had the residents were
closing the wounds and they put on music from the
Eagles: the Hotel California.
And she was very upset with one particular line that said,
you can sign out anytime you like, but you can never leave.
And she was very angry about that because that
was what she experienced.
She didn't want to go back in her body.
She wanted to go wherever the tunnel took her.
But the fact that she was able to be aware of the
music and the things that were being said and the
instruments and what the instruments sounded like.
There was an instrument that they used in the
surgery called a Midas Rex.
It's a high speed drill that they used to cut through bone.
It has a god awful sound.
As it cuts through bone it really gets your attention.
But she made the sound to a T of what it sounded
like, what it looked like.
And it's not possible to do any of those things if
you're truly anesthetized.
And they had visual proof that she was, because
they're recording her brain, they're recording her heart.
She's flatlined both sl.
So you can't have your cake and eat it too.
You can't say she must have had light anesthesia, or she
had some way of knowing these things, but there's no way.
It's an interesting parallel of the things
that she experienced and what I experienced.
I think is it Dr.
Eben Alexander?
I'm sure you've probably read his book.
That's another good example, and he's a
neuroscientist, right?
And he was completely like prefrontal cortex
completely wiped out.
And he had all these memories.
You mentioned the quantum field.
It's almost like the information is stored
there in the quantum field, and the brain is
really just a reducing mechanism to, to access it.
There are a lot of studies that are
starting to suggest that.
That memory somehow exists in the quantum field and we
don't know how to access it.
But some people do access it accidentally most of the time.
One of the things that happened to me after
the lightning was I got contacted by Darryl
Treeford, who's a physician.
And Dr.
Treeford is a specialist in savant's and he has a whole
group of people with similar stories to mine, but they've
all had different injuries.
They've either gotten hit with something in the
head, they had surgery, any number of different things,
but afterwards, they all had developed something
they didn't have before.
And so there's enough of people like myself and
them that make you think, okay, there's something
normal about ability to get those qualities.
And I think the problem is we just don't know
how to access them.
We know we can do it accidentally and somebody
gets hit in the head and suddenly they can do
incredible calculations they had no idea how to do before.
Or like myself, you hear music and the music's
coming from someplace.
Where is it coming from and how does it make
its way into my brain?
And again, there's a lot of people that are starting
to believe that this memory exists in the quantum field
and nobody really understands what that is exactly.
And how we communicate with it is a whole other black box.
Did you acquire any other abilities, anything
that you would consider to be, supernormal,
paranormal after your NDE?
Apart from the music coming through.
Yeah, the only other thing that did come out of it was
that I can feel people's energy, their aura as
other people would call it.
And it feels like static electricity out of not having
a better word to describe it.
Everybody's is different, and if somebody has something
wrong with their shoulder, for example I can, if I
happen to bring my hand near their shoulder, I'll
feel this distortion of that electrical energy.
And so if I move down the arm, it'll disappear.
But as I get closer to where the problem is,
I can actually bring somebody to tears with it.
So there are some things that I don't have an a real
understanding of, but I have just noticed that they exist.
And I use them as tools to help if I'm trying to
figure out what somebody's problem is I can use that
as a way to narrow the focus of what I'm looking at.
I've had flashes of knowing things that I
have no way of knowing.
I'll have a feeling, somebody's gonna call and
the phone rings, or I walk over and I pick up the
phone and they're on it.
But those things there's no way to quantitate any of that.
And there are enough people that have things like
that happen anyway that you don't know whether
it's meaningful or not.
But these are things that I didn't really notice before.
And when you say you sense someone's aura, is that
just a feeling, you can't actually see anything?
I know people that can see it but I have only on
occasion been able to do that.
Most of the time I can feel it without any problems at all.
Seeing it, I think is harder.
At least it was for me.
One of my other guests he had a near death experience.
He said that he became quite empathic so he can feel what
people's emotions are like.
Have you had anything like that as well?
Not as much.
Certainly emotions are concentrated in people
in different ways.
So if somebody has an enormous amount of tension
and it tends to concentrate in their shoulders and upper
back that will cause a huge electrical disturbance if
I put my hands near it.
There's things like that you can pick up.
So is there anything fundamental about the
way you view life that's changed since your NDE?
Absolutely.
I'm absolutely certain that there is no
such thing as death.
We change forms but our spirit lives on forever.
Whoever we are, we always are.
And that I'm absolutely certain of.
We keep going through this reincarnation process.
And at least from what I can understand the rationale
behind it is we have to reach a certain level of evolution,
spiritual evolution, to be able to be able to rejoin the
source from where we came.
And we just keep going through this process till
we have enough points to be able to do that, to
graduate from this spiritual density to the next one.
Tony I'm starting to run outta time here, but I wanted
to ask, people are probably gonna have questions for you.
Is there some way for people to reach you?
Assuming that that's something that you're
Sure.
My email is T C I C O R I a@yahoo.com,
tcicoria@yahoo.com, and certainly if somebody's got
a question, feel free to ask.
All right I'll put that in the show notes.
And do you have any other like a final message
for people before we wrap up the interview?
I think that the only real message that I have is
there is life after death.
And I think it's really important to have an
approach to life that is, other than self, than
being more concerned about others than about the self.
I think it's a big part of how our spirits
are supposed to work.
I suppose if we're not so concerned about death,
then that's a natural sort of evolution isn't it?
That we become more interested in what
effect we have on others.
Yeah.
Tony, thank you so much for coming on the show.
I really appreciate you taking the time.
I know
you're welcome.
over there, and I'm sure that people will get a
lot out of this interview.
And I appreciate you coming on.
Anytime.
Thank you for inviting me.