Getting Comfortable With Near-Death Experiences: My Near-Death Experience A Telephone Call From God

It was a beautiful August day at Sleepy Hollow Lake in Athens, New York in 1994. The occasion was my in-laws celebrating their annual group birthday gathering. About twenty relatives and their siblings were in attendance. While the children ran amok screaming and playing, I prepared the party barbeque. We had gathered on the second floor of a lakeside pavilion. The ground level included picnic tables and barbeque pits. A payphone was attached to the wall on the side of the building.

As the thought occurred to me to call my mother and check on her, I remember seeing a few light sprinkles of rain. In the midst of the revelry and chaos, and unbeknownst to me, the beautiful sunny day had surrendered to powerful dark storm clouds moving swiftly in over the lake. I ambled around the building to the pay phone and dialed my mother’s familiar number. I let the phone ring eight times, but there was no answer. With my left hand I pulled the phone hand piece away from my face to hang it up. When it was about a foot away from my face, I heard a deafening crack. Simultaneously I saw a brilliant flash of light exit the phone hand piece I was holding. A powerful bolt of lightning had struck the pavilion, traversed through the phone striking me in the face, as its massive electrical charge raced to ground.

My Near Death Experience & Out of Body Experience

The force of the lightning blast threw my body backwards like a rag doll. Despite the stunning physical trauma, I realized something strange and inexplicable was happening. As my body was blown backwards, I felt “me” move forward instead. Yet I seemed also to stand motionless and bewildered staring at the phone dangling in front of me. Nothing made sense.

At that moment, I heard my mother-in-law scream from the top of the stairs above me. She raced down the stairs towards me. I felt like a deer in the headlights. As she approached I could see she was looking beyond me to my right and headed that in that direction. She was oblivious to me standing there. I turned to see where she was going. Suddenly, I realized what was going on. A motionless body was lying on the ground some ten feet behind me. To appearances the person was dead. To inspection the person resembled me. To my astonishment another look confirmed it was me!

I watched as a woman who had been waiting to use the phone dropped to her knees and began CPR. I spoke to the people around my body but they could not see or hear me; I could see and hear everything they did and said. It suddenly occurred to me that I was thinking normal thoughts, in the same mental vernacular I had always possessed. At that moment I suddenly had one simple, ineloquent and rude thought, “Holy shit, I’m dead.”

This cosmic realization of consciousness meant that my self-awareness was no longer in the lifeless body on the ground. I, whatever I was now, was capable of thought and reason. Interestingly there was no strong emotion accompanying my apparent death. I was shocked, certainly, but otherwise I felt no reaction to what should have been the most emotional of life’s events.

Seeing no point in staying with my body, my thoughts then moved to walking away. I turned and started to climb the stairs to where I knew my family still was. As I started to climb I looked down at the stairs like I would normally do. I saw that as I reached the third stair, my legs began to dissolve. I remember being disconcerted that, by the time I reached the top of the stairs, I had lost all form entirely and instead was just a ball of energy and thought. My mind was racing frantically trying to record and make sense of what was happening.

At the top of the first flight, the stairs went up and left into the second flight. Instead of bothering with the stairs, I passed through the wall into the room where everyone was. I went diagonally through the room, over my wife who was painting children’s faces. She had one child in front of her, one behind that person and one to the left. I had a clear realization that my family would be fine. Dispassionately, I departed from the building.

Once outside the building, I was immersed in a bluish white light that had a shimmering appearance as if I were swimming underwater in a crystal clear stream. The sunlight was penetrating through it. The visual was accompanied by a feeling of absolute love and peace.

What does the term ‘absolute love and peace’ mean? For example, scientists use the term absolute zero to describe a temperature at which no molecular motion exists; a singular and pure state. That was what I felt; I had fallen into a pure positive flow of energy. I could see the flow of this energy. I could see it flow through the fabric of everything. I reasoned that this energy was quantifiable. It was something measurable and palpable. As I flowed in the current of this stream, which seemed to have both velocity and direction, I saw some of the high points and low points in my life pass by, but nothing in depth. I became ecstatic at the possibility of where I was going. I was aware of every moment of this experience, conscious of every millisecond, even though I could feel that time did not exist. I remember thinking, “This is the greatest thing that can ever happen to anyone.”

Suddenly, I was back in my body. It was so painful. My mouth burned and my left foot felt like someone had stuck a red-hot poker through my ankle. I was still unconscious, but I could feel the woman who was doing CPR stop and kneel beside me. It seemed like minutes before I could open my eyes. I wanted to say to her, “Thank you for helping me.” Nonsensically, all that came out was, “It’s okay, I’m a doctor.”

Shortly after I regained consciousness camp security arrived and requested that an ambulance be called, which, to their frustration, I promptly refused. Although I realized I probably made little sense, the truth about lightning strikes is that you are either dead or alive, and there is not much in between. In retrospect it is obvious I wasn’t thinking clearly, but at the time, I was still reeling from what I had just experienced. My family drove me the two and a half hours home to Oneonta, NY, wobbly and confused. Once there, I saw my local cardiologist and neurologist who did all the appropriate tests and examinations. They told me how lucky I was to be alive.

I was able to resume work two weeks after the initial lightning strike when my brain seemed to function normally again. In the weeks and months after the lightning strike, however, I changed in many ways. The story of my developing musical ability and composition as a result of this event has been touched on in several books and documentaries. ^{1, 2,3,4,5} (See Sidebar page 308.)

Can Science Explain NDE/OBE?

I had experienced what Raymond Moody, MD, defined as an out-of-body experience (OBE).⁶ I will refer to this phenomenon as a ND/OBE (near-death out-of-body) experience. For the purpose of this article, I am going to focus primarily on the experiential aspect of ND/OBEs and attempt to apply scientific reasoning to what may defy explanation with our current knowledge.

As a physician and scientist, I think it is extremely important to attempt a logical explanation of what happened and to examine what I experienced that fateful day. As an individual, however, I also think it is extremely important to appreciate the indescribable miracle that I experienced. I was presumed dead on the ground, yet I was later able to see and verify things that had been happening around me and that happened in another room where it was physically impossible for me to have seen. Both are imperative variables in arriving at a viable conclusion to this enigmatic event.

My friend and colleague the imminent neurologist and renowned author Oliver Sacks, MD, assures me that I was hallucinating … but was I? Dr. Sacks has described hallucinations associated with “ecstatic” seizures in temporal lobe epilepsy that certainly sound like some descriptions by people who have had actual NDEs.⁷ However, numerous reports have been presented and verified where experiencers of NDE/OBEs have been able to describe in incredible visual and auditory detail their NDE/OBEs. A case in point is that of Pam Reynolds, described in Michael Sabom, MD’s book, Light and Death⁸ and further studied by Holden⁹ and Woerlee.¹⁰ Reynolds was a patient who had a NDE/OBE during a neurosurgical procedure called “standstill” pioneered by Robert Spetzler, MD, at the Barrows Neurosurgical Institute. This procedure was used during a brain aneurysm resection where the patient had an induced cardiac arrest and the brain was monitored and was documented to be isoelectric and non-reactive. Just before the standstill procedure was begun, Reynolds was deeply anesthetized, with her eyes taped shut and a sheet over her head. Her brain activity was monitored in more than one way to confirm that her anesthesia was complete and yet she described “popping” out of her body - having a ND/OBE, whereupon she was able to describe sounds, “see” where people were standing, and describe the shape of surgical instruments used on her that she could not have seen physically. Dr. Gerald Woerlee¹⁰ claims she may have had moments of light anesthesia, which certainly can happen in surgery, but that would allow only auditory, not visual recognition. She was able to mimic the sound of a brutish instrument called a Midas Rex that was used to cut through her skull. More importantly she was able to accurately describe what it looked like in lay terms.

An extensive number of cardiac arrest cases have been recorded with similar experience to the Reynolds case. Pim van Lommel, MD, a cardiologist in the Netherlands, did a prospective analysis of 509 successful resuscitations in 344 Dutch patients who suffered a cardiac arrest.^{11, 12,13} Of those, 18% had a NDE/OBE. In other studies, the percentage varies for adult cardiac arrest victims who recall a NDE or OBE.¹⁴ Morse¹⁵ found 85% in children. An obvious question is why not all? Ring ¹⁶ found that blind people who had experienced ND/OBEs also reported veridical perception in which perceptions that were impossible from the vantage point of the physical body, and sometimes that totally contradicted their expectations at the time, were later verified to be accurate.

What Do the Skeptics Say?

Despite the strength of evidence in support of the reality of NDE/OBEs, many authorities still believe it is the work of a dying brain. Some of the controversy comes from studies that can simulate an experience that has some shared characteristics with actual NDEs. Those studies go back to Wilder Penfield’s physical stimulation of the brain in patients.^{17, 18} Olaf Blanke, et al.¹⁹ was able to recreate a partial OBE in patients when electrodes were stimulated in the temporal lobe/amygdala region of the brain. Nelson, et al.^{20, 21} ascribes the arousal/REM system as an integral part in the expression of NDEs and that hypoxia and cerebral ischemia are influential in the expression of the NDEs. Some new studies in rats by Jimo Borjigin et al.²² and Chawla et al.²³ in humans suggest that within 30 seconds after cardiac arrest there is a transient surge of synchronous high frequency gamma oscillations (a neuronal feature thought to underpin consciousness in humans) that precedes isoelectric EEG (flat line) or brain death. The authors make a giant leap to suggest this mechanism underlies NDEs. That hypothesis would negate cases of documented cardiac arrest and brain death where patients have returned to life after death and brought back information they would have no possible way of obtaining through mediation of the senses and the brain.^{24, 25}

Other Theories and Notions

The notion of consciousness surviving death is not new. Plato’s story of Er in The Republic²⁶ and Pythagoras,²⁷ who believed God created souls as spirit entities whose goal is to merge with the divine … able to be eternal, transmigrate, and reincarnate, are but a couple of examples. There are many books detailing the science of NDE and a vast compendium of credible cases supporting the survival of consciousness.^{28, 12} I think there is certainly something inherent in the temporal lobe/amygdala area that has a connection to what people experience as NDE, OBE, autoscopy (the experience in which an individual perceives the surrounding environment from a different perspective, from a position outside of his or her own body) or other unexplained phenomena.²⁹ There is experimental evidence to support that connection. But, there is obviously much missing. Real life changing NDE/OBEs, where people spiritually separate from their bodies and afterward can verify details they would not have any humanly way of gathering, are as yet unexplained and cannot be simply explained as a dying brain, anoxia, hallucinations, or sudden bursts of electrical activity.

What Do I Conclude?

In my case, being both a physician and scientist, I have approached what I experienced with some trepidation. What is clear to me is that my consciousness survived death and I was able to verify details of my near-death and out-of-body experience that I would have no conceivable way of knowing except through conscious travel of my spiritual self outside of my body. As Robin Kelly, MD, states, “Our brain may not be the seat of consciousness, but merely a vessel through which consciousness is realized.”³⁰

I can only hope that through further experimentation and study that meaningful data will be found to corroborate what many of us near death experiencers already know — that the gift of life is greater than the sum of its parts and, whatever consciousness is, survives death.

Biography

Tony Cicoria, MD, is an orthopedic surgeon, and chief of orthopedics at Chenango Memorial Hospital, Norwich, New York, and Clinical Assistant Professor of Orthopedics at SUNY Upstate Medical School, in Syracuse. Jordan Cicoria, Dr. Cicoria’s daughter, is a recent graduate of the University of Rochester, writer, and plans to attend graduate school.

Contact: tcicoria@gmail.com