#306 - Dr. Tony Cicoria is Hit By Lightning - Hear His Music From Heaven

0:00 Welcome back to Round Trip Death. Before we get started today, I want to talk about personal beliefs. I think there's always something new to learn from our guests. I also realize we all have different belief systems. This show is not about my beliefs or what a religious or philosophical expert would say is right or wrong. This is a judgment-free place where we listen to sincere people describing what happened to them. If something said doesn't fit your personal beliefs, it's okay. How you use this discussion is up to you. My only recommendation is to listen to that soft voice inside you.

0:43 It'll help you know what to do with this information. Now let's hear from today's guest. We have with us today Tony Sicoria. We're very happy to have you, Tony. How are you? Great, sir. Thank you so much for having me. Did I pronounce that okay? Perfectly. All righty. Good. Hey, I had fun talking with you the other day in our pre-interviews that we do. I think your story is very unique and that's one of the fun things about this show is that no two NDE stories are the same. People kind of assume they are. They're not. They're all different.

1:24 Yours is one fits into that different category and it's a whole lot of fun. Before we jump in, would you mind just telling us a little bit about yourself? All right. I grew up in upstate New York and I went to the Citadel, which was a military school in Charleston, South Carolina for college. This was during the war and I thought if I'm going to get drafted and go to war, I might as well go as somebody who knows what they're doing. Turns out the war ended a month before graduation, so I didn't get to go anyway. I assume we're talking the Vietnam War here.

2:05 Yes. Okay. Yeah. And then I went to graduate school because I had wanted to. I thought in my mind's eye that I was going to be one of these crazy mad scientists in the basement of some building doing crazy kinds of research. And I did do that and realized that that wasn't what I wanted. And so after I finished my doctorate, I went to medical school in Charleston, South Carolina, met the medical university there and then decided to go in towards pedics, did my training up in Virginia and met the university there.

2:48 And then went into practice up in upstate New York again, a couple of miles from where my family grew up and that was in Oneonta, New York. And I was there. We lived there from the time we moved up there in 1988 until we left in 2019. So I've been a practicing orthopedic surgeon since 1988 in that area. And I had been going down kind of an academic road. I was doing a lot of research and I was thinking about going into academic research at Syracuse University.

3:36 And things took a turn in my life and I never followed through with all of that. And that turn came about when I had what I would frequently refer to as a phone call from God. It got struck by lightning in 1994. Okay. Let's get a little bit of background on that now. So where were you? What were you doing? And what was your relationship with lightning before this? We were in August of 1994. Every August my wife and her family would have a big huge gathering.

4:21 There were five people that had birthdays in August so they would celebrate it at one time and this was that month. We were going to have it at a place called Sleepy Hollow Lake, which is just south of Albany, New York. They had rented a pavilion and we went there that morning and I was in charge of running the barbecue. So I was outside and in the morning it was a beautiful day. I wasn't paying attention to anything because I was running the grill. And about halfway through the morning I decided that I was going to go call my mom who was not there.

5:03 And as I had to walk around to the front of the building where there was a payphone attached to the building. And so I'm not paying attention to the fact that a big storm had blown up over the lake, which we were right next to. And I was completely oblivious to that. And as I dialed my mother, she didn't answer the phone so I was just getting ready to hang up the phone. And I got the phone to about here and I heard a loud crack. And at the same time this huge flash of light came out of the phone and hit me in the face.

5:47 And it just sent me flying backwards like I'd been kicked by a horse. And as I was going backwards, a really strange thing happened because all of a sudden I had the sensation of moving forward. And I remember thinking, this is crazy. I know that I got hit and I know that I got thrown back and now I don't understand why I have this weird sensation of moving forward. And that was only for a fraction of a second. And at that point I was just standing there absolutely dumbfounded. I'm looking around and they see the phone dangling from the phone carriage and it's just banging against the wall.

6:33 And I'm looking around and nothing's making any sense to me. And then all of a sudden I hear my mother-in-law screaming and she's at the top of the stairs and I'm at the bottom. And she starts running down the stairs right at me and I'm thinking, this is not good when your mother-in-law is screaming and running at you. And I was just kind of frozen like a deer in the headlights. As she got down right in front of me, it's like I wasn't even there. And she took off to her left. And so I just instinctively turned to follow her and I took a few steps and suddenly I was confronted with myself on the ground.

7:17 And I remember thinking, oh shit, I'm dead. And it was a shock. I mean, no pun intended. That's amazing how much can run through your head so quickly. It was blazingly fast. And I remember thinking, I walked over to the body and I'm realizing that I'm sitting, I'm here and my brain is racing. My mind was racing, not my brain. And my mind is racing like crazy and I'm trying to make sense of this. And I see this lady who was standing behind me waiting to use the phone.

8:02 She starts to get down to do CPR. Turns out she was a nurse who was just waiting there in the wings to use the phone. And this place is in the middle of nowhere. I can't imagine why she was there. And so she starts to get down and do CPR and I'm trying to call to them and I realize that they can't hear me, but I can hear and I see them. And I thought, well, there's no point in standing around here. So I decided to leave and I turned around and I was going to walk up the stairs and I was going to go back to where my family was and see what they were doing.

8:45 And so I started walking up the stairs and I'm looking down at the stairs like I normally would just so I don't trip and fall on my face. And as I'm watching the stairs, I see that my legs are starting to dissolve. And I'm thinking, wow, this is really getting kind of crazy. And by the time I got to the top of the stairs, I had lost all form. And I looked at myself and there was just a ball of energy without real form. And then the stairs actually go up to the left and I didn't go up the stairs, I just passed through the wall. And when I came out the other side, I passed immediately over my wife who was sitting on a chair and she's painting children's faces.

9:32 And I made a specific note to myself of where the kids were and who they were and what position everybody was in. And then I passed through that room on a diagonal. And when I got out of the building, then things really started to get interesting. It was almost like I had fallen into a river of pure positive energy. And it was crazy and it had this bluish white light. And the only thing that I could feel was if you can imagine absolute love and peace, there wasn't anything else to be felt.

10:13 And at that point, I was really dumbfounded. Did you feel like that river of energy was taking you somewhere? I did. I did feel like it was taking me somewhere. As I was standing there in this river, there were a number of things that were going on. One, I was looking at this river and it was actually a river of energy. And it was so specific because I could actually see the lines of the energy. I could see the almost a sinusoidal wave form that was flowing in it. And what was interesting about it was that everything that I looked at was made up of this energy.

11:00 And I made the conclusion to myself that this must be what God is. This is the energy of God. And at that point, I realized that there was a sensation of I was moving and I had both speed and direction. I was going someplace. I just had no idea where. But it was an incredible feeling. And as I was doing this, I had this... It was almost like a collage of high points and low points in my life that just kind of were there and were gone. And right about this point, I'm coming to the realization that this is the greatest thing that can ever happen to anyone.

11:46 As I'm in this stream and I'm just kind of almost euphoric about it, and suddenly it was like somebody flipped a switch and I was back in my body and I was so angry. I didn't wanna go back. And I was begging anybody that would listen to let me not have to go back and go through this. And it went from being absolutely incredibly blissful to being in pain. And so I'm laying on the floor and I felt like somebody stuck a poker in my face and one of my foot where it came out. Okay. Before we move in that direction more of what happened after you came back, can we dig any deeper into what you saw and felt?

12:34 For example, you said you saw energy. I don't know what energy looks like. Normally I wouldn't either. As I looked at this light, this bluish white light, it reminded me of as a child, they used to swim in these big creeks where the water was crystal clear. And if I was down low in the deep part and I looked up, I would see this light from the sun coming through the water and had this glistening whitish appearance to it. And it reminded me of that. The more I looked at it, more I could see that the energy that was streaming toward me had formed to it.

13:20 And as I stared at it more, I could see that I saw these lines within the light. And when I looked at some of the background things, like I was seeing trees and the water of the lake, I saw that this energy that wherever it was coming from was actually what made up everything. So that everything was made of this energy. And as we have learned from our theoretical physics partners, everything is made of energy.

14:02 But I could see it. And it really hit home to me. And I thought, geez, this is something I could measure. It was that palpable. It was very clear to me that it was something very important, very strong. So that was sort of your scientific side of your brain saying, maybe I can measure this. Did the scientific side of your brain think of anything else? It was very clear to me a number of things. One that whoever we are, we always are. And I learned that when I looked at the body and I realized that I'm still having the same thought patterns that I normally would have.

14:52 And so I realized that this shell that's on the ground is nothing more than a shell. The real me is my spiritual form that I was existing in at that point in time. And that was the real person, if you will. And so I made that realization. And then as I was out in the energy stream, then it became even more apparent to me that there's so much more to what we imagine reality to be than we have any idea. What do you mean by that?

15:34 We look at, we see, I look across the room and I see a bookshelf. And so is what I see reality or is it something that my brain has learned to look at the vibrational frequency of an object and it interprets that vibration as something solid? And in reality, it's probably, there's no real substance. The reality that we see is a mirage.

16:18 It's being interpreted by our brain. Yeah. Right? That energy. And you said that you lost form and became sort of a ball of energy. Did you see any other of these kind of beings? No. I was in retrospect, I was disappointed because at the time this happened, I didn't know anything about near-death experiences or anything like that that other people have had. And in reading a lot of these accounts, people meet relatives, they see other beings, they're told things. And I was disappointed that I didn't get any of that.

17:00 I almost felt like I'd been shortchanged. You didn't get your money's worth out of that, indeed. It was like, okay. But you really felt something. Explain a little bit more about what you felt. In terms of when I was out there and experiencing... Yeah, you mentioned you felt energy and bliss. Yeah. I mean, if you can imagine, there's a thing in science called absolute zero. It's a temperature at which there's no molecular motion. And it's a pure singular state, if you can imagine that.

17:40 And that's what I like in this love energy too. It was completely devoid of anything else. It was just a radiating energy of love and peace. And it was unlike anything I've ever experienced in my life. And it was truly earth-shaking. So again, I want to talk to the scientist for a second here. You've just mentioned energy and love in the same breath. What does that mean? Does that make love more tangible?

18:22 And what I experienced, I truly believe that love is an energy form. And that energy obviously re-eats from a source, but that energy is something that everyone can share. All right. Let's talk about being slammed back into your body. What happened there? Well, there was not a pleasant experience because I went from being absolutely ecstatic with happiness and to absolutely in pain. It really hurt.

19:03 And I remember lying there thinking, oh my God, this really hurts where I get hit and where it went out. But I was still unconscious. I still couldn't see, I couldn't talk. And it seemed like minutes went by before I was able to open my eyes as I knew that when I was back, the CPR had stopped and the lady was kneeling next to me. And I wanted to say something and I should have known that I wasn't thinking very clearly at that point.

19:45 And I looked at her and I said, it's okay, I'm a doctor. And she just laughed and said, well, you weren't a minute ago. And I felt like a jackass. I really did. And it was like, oh my God, I'm just gonna shut up and not say anything else because what's coming out is really stupid. And at that point, they called the police, they called an ambulance. And by the time everybody showed up, I was sitting up and I was talking and I'm like, well, there's no point in going to the hospital because I know what it's like to go to an emergency room. I'm not gonna sit there for six hours waiting to be seen. And there wasn't any real emergency.

20:25 I said, you get struck by lightning, you're either alive or dead, there's not much in between. So I wasn't thinking very clearly at that point and that's obvious. And I opted to just have my family take me home and see my family doctor who we called on the way and told him what happened. And he had me just go right over to his office. They checked me out and said, well, everything looks like it's okay. So I thought... And then at that point, I was really kind of dumbfounded because I'm like, this is too crazy to have just been a spurious event.

21:05 I know in my mind, the science brain is going, there's no way that you could figure out the probability of an event like this where the lightning hit the building and lost enough of its current. By the time it got to you, it just stopped your heart rather than frying you. And then on top of that, that part of my brain is also going, and to make sure that you didn't get completely knocked out of the ballpark, they had a nurse standing there waiting to resuscitate you. And so I'm sitting there thinking, how do you figure out the probability of two events like that happening to prevent me from not returning?

21:57 And at that point, I realized, okay, this is not a random event. Somebody orchestrated this, and for what? I have no idea. But it was pretty clear to me that this was an event that had some importance to it. But I didn't have any idea what it was at that point. Well, you've had 20 plus years to think about it now. Do you have some of those answers? I have some. And a lot of it came from, shortly after the lightning, within a couple of weeks, I started having this insatiable desire to hear classical piano music, which was a big departure for me because I grew up as a kid of the 60s, and there was rock and roll, and there wasn't much of anything else.

22:51 My mother had made me take piano lessons when I was seven years old for a year, and at the end of that year, I promptly quit and said, I don't want to do this anymore. I want to play baseball and go fishing and do all kinds of other stuff. So that was, and then never went back to that. So I never really learned a lot either. So for me to suddenly want to be involved in classical piano was a big departure. But it was such a powerful feeling that I actually went to a music store. I had to go to Albany, which was an hour away, to find a place that even sold classical piano music.

23:38 And I went into the store and when I walked in the door, it's like this CD of Vladimir Ashkenazi playing his favorite Chopin. It seemed like it jumped off the shelf and ran into my hands. I bought the CD and I started listening to it, and I listened to it nonstop. I was so taken with it that I couldn't stop listening, and I made everybody else listen, even at work. And very quickly I realized that it was not going to be enough for me to just listen to this music. I needed to learn how to play. But that was a problem too, since I didn't have a piano and I didn't know how to play.

24:18 But it seemed like it was the next day our babysitter called and said, I'm moving out of state and they have this old upright piano. I was wondering if I could store it at your house for a year. And I thought, well, it's fortuitous. So suddenly I had this feeling that I have to learn how to play a piano and suddenly a piano appears. And I bought some books on trying to teach myself how to do this. And that's where I started. And about three weeks into that, I have a dream. And in this dream, the dream was like an out of body experience. And I remembered I'm walking out onto a performance stage and I see myself out on the front of the stage and I'm performing in a concert hall.

25:12 And I remember thinking, this is really kind of crazy. And as I'm walking up and I'm looking at myself for listening to the music, and by the time I walked up behind myself, I realized that this is not somebody else's music. This is mine. So I listened to the music and the ending had a loud crashing ending and it woke me up and I look at the clock, it's about 3.15 in the morning. And I walked out to the piano and I tried to plunk out some of the things I heard, but I said, this is stupid. I don't know how to read and I don't know how to write, so I'm going back to bed. And I did.

25:52 But from that moment on, whenever I sat down at that piano, the music from the dream would start playing in my head. And if I didn't pay attention to it and didn't work on it every day, it would start to play in my head when I didn't want to. And it was a very insistent, almost like a small child, like pay attention to me. I'm like, okay. So I learned very quickly that every day I needed to do some work on that music and I started doing that as I was trying to learn. And I was trying to teach myself initially and I remember one day my daughter was playing with one of her best friends and her best friend's mom came by the house to pick her up and she heard me banging on the piano and I was trying to learn what's called a fantasy impromptu.

26:51 It's a piece by Frederic Chopin. It's an advanced piece and way above my head. But it was one of the things on the CT so I would determine I was going to learn how to play it. And she heard me and then she walked in and she said, what in the world are you doing? And I said, I said, I'm trying to learn this piece of music. I said, but I don't understand because the hands don't line up. And she looked at me and she said, they're not supposed to. It's what's called a polyrhythm. And I thought, and I said to her, what's a polyrhythm?

27:31 And she said, I'm not even going to try to explain this to you. You need to get a teacher. And so at that point she gave me the name of a couple of people and the one lady was Sandy McCain who was the chairman of the Department of Music at Hartwood College and I called her and I said, look, I'm an old dog trying to learn some new tricks and told her the story in which she'd take me on as a student. And she had me come and audition, if you will, to be a student. And she said, I'll take you on, she said, but there's only one thing I'm going to insist on.

28:15 And I said, what's that? You don't play anything else of this magnitude until I tell you that you can because you are learning so many bad things trying to do it yourself. And I said, okay. And that's the way we went. She started me at the very beginning and we started working two hours every week and that continued from that time, it was 1998 by that point and it continued up until when I left New York in 2019.

29:00 So you've gotten pretty good at the piano. I've gotten reasonably, done reasonably well. I mean, I'm certainly no horror which says for sure. Tell us more about this piece of music that was stuck in your head. Did you get it down on paper? For many years, it was just constantly being played in my head. And I would try to play bits and pieces of it. And as time went on, I would write down little snippets of it and I would stuff it in a drawer thinking someday I'll come back to this. In 2002, I started going to a music camp for adults, piano camp for adults called the Sonata which is in Bennington, Vermont.

29:48 And it's essentially a big group of people that are in love with the piano and they just play that exclusively. And it's a week of complete indulgence of the piano. They have lessons, they have pieces that they work on and they have a performance at the end of the week. And I had started doing that in 2002. And then in 2006, so I would go in once a year in May. And in 2006, when I went, the owner's sister who was Erica, Erica Vanderlyn Feidner, Erica was the number one salesperson at Steinway in New York City.

30:40 And she had just left Steinway and went to Bozendorf for pianos. And she brought five pianos in for people to play during the piano camp. And she and I had gotten talking about this whole thing with the music and the lightning. And she said, you know, there's only one person that can tell the story and that's Oliver Saxe. And I said, at the time I didn't know who Oliver was other than that he'd written the book Awakenings. And he was a famous person. But Oliver was one of the preeminent neurologists in the world, as well as a prolific author.

31:21 And he was the person that had discovered the treatment for Parkinson's. And that was in May. And then a couple of months later, I get a phone call from Oliver and he invites me down to his house in New York City. He says, I'd like you to come down so I can interview you and I want you to be a patient of mine for a study group I have. And I thought, sure, why not? So in August of 2006, I went down to Oliver's house and got to spend a whole day with him, which was incredible for me. And one of the things that came out of that is as we're standing in the doorway saying good night, he looked at me and he had this way of his piercing look.

32:08 It's almost like he looked right through you. He looked at me and he says, you know, the music from the dream went through an awful lot of trouble to get here. The least you can do is write it. And at that point, I was so taken with what he said that as soon as I got home, the first thing I did was I bought a program called Sibelius, which is writing music for dummies. And it allows you to play something into a recording piano and it turns it into music in notational form. So it was very useful for me. And I spent the next seven months taking all the music that I had heard and converting it into hard copy, if you will.

32:58 And so at the end of that seven months, I finished it and I took it to my piano camp and I played it for everybody and said, you know, this is the music from the dream that I'd been hearing nonstop ever since it happened. It was well received. And while I was there at the camp, I got a call from Oliver and he said, you know, I was wondering if you would consider letting me use me in the book that I'm getting ready to publish. And I said, sure. I didn't have anything to hide. And he said, good, because you're chapter one and it's coming out in the New Yorker magazine in July of this year.

33:43 I'm like, okay, we're a little ahead of ourselves here. Yeah. And what's the name of that book? The book is called Musicophilia that Oliver Sachs wrote. Musicophilia. It's actually Musicophilia, Tales of Music and the Brain is the full title. And so, you know, I said, sure. And then he said, oh, well, it's going to be coming out very shortly. And sure enough, it came out in July of 2007. And all of a sudden, you know, there was a lot of interest. The phone started ringing off the hook.

34:23 And one of the calls, the first calls I got was from a friend of mine at the State University of New York, Carl Clay, and Carlton was the head of the music department at the State University there. And he said, you know, I was wondering if, you know, I've seen this article in the New Yorker and I was wondering if you would teach a class. And I thought, well, that would be interesting. And so I agreed to that. And a week later, he calls and he says, you know, awful lot of interest in this. He said, would you consider playing for the class? And I said, sure.

35:03 And then a couple of weeks after that, he calls back again and he says, he said, you know, it's really grown more than I've ever expected it. And he said, would you consider doing a concert at the Performing Arts Center? And I said, I've never done that before. I don't have the faintest idea. And I wouldn't even know where to start. And he says, it'll be fine. He lied. So I'm thinking back on your dream now. Is that what's, what we're having a full circle here? Yeah, absolutely. And so I, you know, after several phone calls of calling me back and back, I agreed to do it.

35:48 And then it seemed like it was another two weeks later, he calls back and he says, I just want to let you know that in addition to the concert, there's going to be three television crews there. And I said, I said, you got to be kidding me. He said, no, the BBC One, Granada Media and German television are all going to be there. And I was panicked. And I called my piano teacher and told her what was going on. And I said, is there any way you can get me through this? And she said, but it's going to take a lot of work.

36:29 And so at that point, we spent the next two months, we would work three or four hours a day. She would take me up there, make me walk out on the stage, make me walk off the stage, make me go through the music. And she would go up in the top of the auditorium and she'd go, I can't hear you. So it was a huge learning experience. And I thought, I don't know how I'll ever get through this. But I remember going to the green room the morning of it. And I remember saying to God and whoever else would listen, I said, you put me in this mess.

37:15 I said, don't leave me out there and embarrass us both. And obviously I didn't make it as a demand. I said, please don't do that. And I managed to get through it without screwing it up. And at that point, it took on a life of its own. The music then became, there was a lot of people that wanted to hear it and it was recorded. And I would play all over the place at different performance places.

37:56 Okay. I think at this point, let's put some of this piece of music in now. Okay, so your life was changed in a big way as far as musically. Did your experience change your life in other ways too?

38:36 Yeah, it sure did. And a lot of things. After the lightning and the music became the powerful presence in my life, I was absolutely obsessed. I got up at 4.30 every morning. I played piano until 6.30 when I had to go to work. I would work my 12 hours. I would come home and I would have dinner if there was still anything left. And I would get the kids ready for bed. And that was part of my staying connected to them.

39:21 And then I was back at the piano from then until usually 12, 1 o'clock in the morning. And I would be working on the piano till I couldn't even see straight. And then I would go to bed and get up at 4.35 o'clock and store it all over again. It didn't do anything for my marriage, I can tell you that. So we wound up getting divorced as a result of all of that. And I certainly couldn't expect that. You can't expect somebody to be completely abandoned for a piano and like it. So we wound up getting divorced. But our focus had always been trying to create the most stable environment for the kids.

40:08 After we got divorced, my ex-wife was living in the garage over the house. So we had a standing garage next to the house and we had made an apartment for her over there so she could stay connected to the kids. And this went on for many years. After about eight years, we got remarried again. Because a lot of people said we never really got divorced in trick or less. And by that time, I had learned some moderation with the piano and the music and could function almost like a normal adult without being constantly obsessing about it.

41:04 So that was one of the big trade-offs. And then the other thing was when I was working in my practice, I was really headed down this academic road, if you will. I was doing research, I was publishing, I was the chairman of a big spine meeting that met yearly. And all of that stuff was going great up until the lightning. And after the lightning, I realized that that was absolutely meaningless. And so I abandoned that whole aspect of things. And people became much more of a focus in terms of my practice than at any other time.

41:57 It really became a much more personal endeavor. Yeah, that's really interesting. Most people that have had a profound experience like this undergo some kinds of major changes in their life. A lot of people that have had near-death experiences end up experiencing divorce afterwards. You've had quite a few years post this experience now. Can you tell us anything about that? Not just what happened to you, but what you've learned about other people in that way. I have learned that there's so much more that we don't understand.

42:43 Having had the experience of being out of my body and seeing that there is something more than what meets the eye. And I know that our spirit lives on forever. Our spirit is eternal. I was brought up Catholic, but I have not been able to reconcile the religious aspects of what I was taught with what I experienced in real time. And so I have become much more spiritual, but less religious, if that makes sense.

43:28 And I absolutely am certain of what happens. I know that we continue on. And I've read literally hundreds of books of people who have had near-death experiences and tried to compare notes and have read lots of books about where do we come from, where are we going from our soul natures. There's a lot that's ongoing. I'm actually in the process of trying to write a book about that.

44:12 And taking what I experienced in my near-death experience and what I have been reading about the origin of our souls and where we come from, where are we going, how does it all fit together? So that's kind of the book that I'm going to write is following those lines. So hopefully that'll come to fruition in next year. That's great. Before we sign off here, I love to leave people with some kind of a message of hope in a world that sometimes is a little tough right now.

44:55 Any last thoughts for everybody? Absolutely. Know that you are loved and that love is eternal and that you are eternal. When you die, you continue on. And what happens after that, I'm not entirely sure of other than the fact that we live on. Tony, thank you so much for being here today. Oh, absolutely. My pleasure. Thank you for having me here. Thanks for listening. We hope you will share this message with family and friends. To be notified when the next episode goes live, follow this show on your podcasting app or click over to roundtripdeath.com and sign up for our email newsletter.

45:44 As always, if you've had a near-death experience and want to share it, shoot an email to ericatroundtripdeath.com. Until then, I wish you everything good that you're looking for in this life and the next.