March 15, 2024 • 53 mins
Enjoy The Story of Orthopedic Surgeon Dr. Anthony Cicoria.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM paranormal
podcast network. This is the place to be if you're
ready for the best podcasts of the paranormal, curious, and
sometimes unexplained.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Now listen to this.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Welcome to our podcast. Please be aware the thoughts and
opinions expressed by the host are their thoughts and opinions
only and do not reflect those of iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio, Coast
to Coast AM, employees of premier networks, or their sponsors
and associates. We would like to encourage you to do
(00:46):
your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself.
Speaker 4 (00:56):
Hi.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
I'm Sandra Champlain. For over twenty five years years, I've
been on a journey to prove the existence of life
after death. On each episode, we'll discuss the reasons we
now know that our loved ones have survived physical death,
and so will we. Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife.
(01:17):
I love stories of near death experiences, and I have
a sneaky suspicion.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
You do too.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
I want to read to you a few short stories
that are real. This happened to a five year old
blind girl, she says, I slowly breathed in the water
and became unconscious. A beautiful lady dressed in bright white
light pulled me out. The lady looked into my eyes
(01:44):
and asked me what I wanted. I was unable to
think of anything until it occurred to me to travel
around the lake. As I did, I saw a detail
that I would have never seen in my real life.
I could go any where, even to the tops of
the trees, simply by intending to go there. I was
(02:06):
legally blind. For the first time. I was able to
see leaves on trees, birds feathers, birds, eyes, details on
the telephone poles, and what was in people's backyards. I
was seeing for the very first time. Here's another story.
During my surgery, I felt myself lift for my body
(02:29):
and go above the operating table. The doctor told me
later they had kept my heart open and stopped for
a very long time, and they had a great amount
of difficulty getting my heart started again. That must have
been when I left my body, because I could see
doctors nervously trying to get my heart going. It was
(02:49):
so strange to be detached from my physical body. I
was curious about what they were doing, but not really concerned. Then,
as I drifted farther away, I saw my father at
the head of the table. He looked up at me,
which did give me a surprise because he had been
dead for almost a year. Another story, I approached the boundary.
(03:13):
No explanation was necessary for me to understand at the
age of ten, that once I crossed the boundary, I
could never come back. I was more than thrilled to cross.
I intended to cross, but my ancestors over another boundary
caught my attention. They were talking to me in telepathy,
(03:34):
which really caught my attention. I was born profoundly deaf
and now had all hearing that my family members did,
all of which new sign language when I was alive.
Now I could read or communicate with about twenty ancestors
of mine and others through telepathic methods. It overwhelmed me.
(03:56):
I could not believe how many people I could tell simultaneously.
One more, I almost died. Back in June of twenty twenty,
I was hit by a car while riding my motorcycle.
I blacked out, was hospitalized for a month and a half,
and my leg even got amputated. I don't know if
(04:19):
the accident itself did this to me, or the pain
and trauma did, or the place that I went to
when I blacked out. But I swear I've gotten so
much smarter and more in tune with everything. I am
hyper detail oriented, I have crazy motivational drive, and I
also feel like I can just understand things others can't.
(04:43):
I see the world so differently now. I can sense
people's energies and it helps me understand what people are
going through. There definitely is a change to me after
my near death experience. We love hearing about near death
experiences and can be inspired by these stories and reunions,
and they help us know that we go on after death.
(05:06):
There is a term called after effects of a near
death experience that people have, and often we can share
these effects by hearing stories. After effects include such things
like a reduced fear of death, increased belief in life
after death, interest in the meaning of life, acceptance of others,
(05:27):
and becoming more loving and empathic. The majority of people
make their lives about helping others through life. Some after
effects happen immediately, others may take years to fully manifest.
Doctor Pim van Lommel did a large study and divided
survivors of cardiac arrest into a group that had near
(05:48):
death experiences and a group that did not. The after
effects of both groups were assessed two in eight years
after their cardiac arrests. The group of survivors with near
death experiences were statistically much more likely to have a
reduced fear of death, increased belief in the afterlife, interest
(06:11):
in the meaning of life, acceptance of others, and were
much more loving, where there didn't seem to be much
change in the values of those who didn't. It is
remarkable that near death experiences often occurred during only minutes
or seconds of unconsciousness, yet commonly result in lifelong transformations
(06:35):
of beliefs and values. Ninety nine percent of near death
experiences said that their experience was real. But can a
near death experience unlock any extraordinary abilities in a person? Today,
on our show, I am so happy to share a
special story of a physician who was struck by lightning
(06:58):
only to receive a passion for music. I can't wait
for you to hear it. Also, two of my personal
favorite stories are of doctor Rajiev Parti and Anita Morjani.
Anita Morjani, author of the book dying to be me,
which I highly recommend. Had cancer that had spread throughout
(07:19):
her body and doctor said it was too late to
save her. All of Anita's organs had shut down and
she entered into a coma. She witnessed so much in
her near death experience, including being encouraged to return to
life by her deceased father and her best friend who
told her that she needed to return and live her
(07:41):
life fearlessly. When she came out of this coma, her
tumors shrank by about seventy percent within four days, and
within five weeks she was cancer free and was released
from the hospital. Now, she did have to spend a
few months in physiotherapy to regain her strength and to
use oliver muscles and limbs again. But today, in twenty
(08:05):
twenty four, Anita Morjani remains cancer free and makes her
life about helping other people and sharing the reality of
the afterlife. Doctor Rajiv Partis was chief of anesthesiology at
Hart Hospital in Bakersfield, California. He loved his wealth and
(08:27):
the prestige that his job gave him. He lived in
a mansion, had several luxury cars, and was able to
purchase anything he wanted. In August of two thousand and eight,
everything changed in his life when he was diagnosed with
prostate cancer due to an infection. He was admitted into
the hospital where he had his near death experience. Although
(08:51):
deep from anesthesia, he was aware that his consciousness had
somehow left his body. From a vantage point near the ceiling,
he could see the surgeon cut him open and all
of the operating room personnel cover their faces from the
odor that his infected abdomen seeped throughout the room. He
(09:12):
said his senses became so acute that he could hear,
see and smell things inside and outside of the operating room.
He even heard the anesthesiologist tell a dirty joke that
made the doctor blush when he later repeated what he
heard in the operating room. His spirit left the operating room, and,
(09:35):
although still in the United States, he drifted into India,
where he could hear his mother and sister talking about
what they were preparing for dinner that night. Fear ended
up finding its way into his experience. He had the
feeling of being pulled into darkness filled with screams and
(09:57):
sounds of fighting. Eventually, he saw a white light in
the distance and instinctively began praying. The white light turned
to a light of love, and he was shown his
life that he was not practicing forgiveness or compassion to
himself or others. He soon felt very sorry for the
(10:18):
lack of kindness and his behavior, wishing he could have
done certain things differently in his life. His book Dying
to Wake Up tells the story of him being an anesthesiologist,
making people fall asleep before surgery and now after the
near death experience, waking them up as to who they
(10:40):
are and what their life is for. There's much more
to his story, of course, but he shares what he
calls the near death Manifesto. One Consciousness can exist outside
the body. Two there is life after death. Three Our
experiences in life shape our current reality. Four We are
(11:03):
all connected to each other because we are all made
of the one and same energy that manifests as differentiated matter.
Five Divine beings exist and help and guide us. Six
there are different levels of consciousness, and seven there is
one all pervading, supreme love and intelligence that is the
(11:26):
source of the entire universe, and that love is the
supreme source of creation. In their latest book, Proof of
Life After Life, seven reasons to believe there is an
after life. Doctor Raymond Moody and Paul Perry share this.
There are many stories of near death experiences leading to
(11:47):
the life changing acquisition of new talents, the changing of professions,
or the overcoming of something like crippling anxiety. Why these
spontaneous improvements take place is not known. Some have speculated
that the brain changes due to neural plasticity, the reorganization
of the brain's neuronal connections that sometimes takes place after
(12:12):
a stroke or the brain trauma of an accident. Neural
plasticity proves to us that the brain is capable of
reorganizing or rerouting its neurons to compensate for traumatic damage.
Yet for neural reorganization to be the cause of these
spontaneous improvements is most likely impossible. After all, successfully rewiring
(12:35):
the brain after neurological damage can take substantial rehab, and
then effects of original damage most often still remain. There
is clearly, to me and a growing number of researchers
something more happening here. It's time for our break, and
when we come back, we are going to hear the
(12:58):
incredible story of Tony Sechoria and his after effects of
being struck by lightning. We'll be right back. You're listening
to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast
to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Keep it here on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast
AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Sander Champlain will be right back.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
We are happy to announce that our Coast to Coast
AM official YouTube channel has now reached over three hundred
thousand subscribers. You can listen to the first hour of
recent and past shows for free, so head on over
to the Coast to COASTAM dot com website and hit
the YouTube icon at the top of the page. This
(13:59):
is free show audio, so don't wait. Coast to COASTAM
dot com is where you want to be. Hi, it's
doctor Sky.
Speaker 5 (14:19):
Keep it right here on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain
and I'm really excited I get to share this next
story with you. Doctor Tony Sechoria is a well known
orthopedic surgeon, very busy man no particular interest in the afterlife.
When he was struck by lightn in nineteen ninety four.
(15:02):
The bolt was enough to kill him, but it didn't.
What it did do is leave him with a sudden
craving for classical music, in particular the piano. Doctor Tony
is regular, down to earth, and I know he'll enjoy
his story just as much as I do.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
My wife normally would have a big party every August.
In this particular August in nineteen ninety four was going
to be at a place called Sleepy Hollow Lake in
upstate New York, about twenty five people, lots of kids
running around, and my wife had rented a pavilion, and
(15:41):
I was elected the cook. And that's the way the
days started. As I was out working the barbecue, I
thought I hadn't checked on my mom because she was
not there. I thought I'd better go call her. So
I got somebody to cover the barbecue, and I walked
around in front of the building and there was a
pay phone attached to it, and I picked up the
(16:04):
phone and I dial a number and let it ring
four or five six times, and she never picked up.
So I thought, oh, 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 knew exactly what it was, a lightning strike.
(16:28):
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. I see the big flash of
lake come out of the phone, hits me in the
face and throws me back like a rag doll. It
really threw me backwards. And that's when things really got interesting,
(16:49):
because as I was being thrown backwards, all of a sudden,
I had this very strange sensation of moving forwards. I
remember standing there thinking, how is this possible. I know
I got hit. I saw it and knew I'd been
thrown back like a rag doll. And here I am standing,
and I'm looking around and look at the phone, and
(17:11):
the phone is just dangling. Nothing's making any sense. 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. All of a sudden,
she's running down the stairs right at me, and I'm thinking,
it's not good when your mother in law's screaming and
running at you. Is she got down in front of me.
(17:34):
I could tell that she couldn't see me because she
was looking off to her left. As she got to
the bottom of the stairs, he 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
(17:54):
confronted with myself on the ground. I remember looking down
and going, oh shit, I'm dead. It was a shock,
I guess all of my life, I thought that when
you died there would be some sort of notification, who
knows what it was, but I didn't expect to have
it not even be known. I thought there'd be some
(18:17):
of bells or whistles that would go off, but there
was absolutely nothing. So I'm standing there and I'm looking
at myself on the ground as this is happening. My
mind is racing like crazy, and I'm trying to make
sense to this, and all of a sudden, I'm saying
to myself, wait a minute, I'm thinking, just like a
normally would. I'm obviously not in that body that's on
(18:40):
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. She started
(19:00):
to get down and do CPR. Turns out she was
a nurse from one of the local hospitals. And help
fortuitous is that get struck by lightning to have somebody
waiting to save it 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. I'm feeling stupid,
(19:23):
and I thought I'm going to go check on my
family because they were upstairs. My wife and my three
kids are up there, and I thought, I'm going to
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 because I was
afraid I'm gonna fall face forward on the stairs. So
(19:44):
I always watch what I'm doing. As I'm looking down,
I noticed that my legs are starting to dissolve, and
I thought, Wow, 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. The
stairs go off to the left, and I said, what
(20:07):
the hell, I'm not going to go upstairs. 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, who was standing where, who the
kids were in, what pattern they were standing in. I
(20:29):
don't know why I did that, but I did. Later on,
I verified that was exactly the way they were standing.
When I got to the other side of the room
that was going on a diagonal, 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
(20:49):
into a river of pure positive energy. It wasn't anything
in this river of energy except absolute love and absolute peace.
It was his 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
(21:13):
through the water as I was underneath the water. It
reminded me of that. As I was looking at this
light energy, 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. I could
look at the trees and see the energy flowing into
(21:36):
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 is what everything is made of.
It's so powerful I could measure this, So my science
brain's kicking in and going, we could look at this.
But the more I looked at it, I could actually
(21:58):
see the energy pad 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. I had no idea where I was going.
I could feel speed in direction, so I was accelerating
into something, but I had no idea what. At this point,
(22:20):
I've become absolutely euphoric over the fact that this is
the greatest thing that could ever happen to somebody. 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 in this and this and that,
and there wasn't a lot of emotion around it. It
(22:41):
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. 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
(23:02):
was just excited about where it was going. And then
all of a sudden, it was like somebody flipped a switch.
I was back in my body and I was pissed.
I was like, no, don't make me go back. You
can't do this to me. I quickly realized that it's
not up to me. I'm laying there on the ground
(23:24):
and in a 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. She just kneeling
next to me. But I still can't open my eyes
look at anybody. So it took several minutes before I
(23:46):
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 and saved my life,
I said, it's it's okay, I'm a doctor, and she
just kind of laughed and she said, hell, you weren't
a minute ago. And I thought, okay, I'm just making
(24:08):
a fool of myself, so I'm going to 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, either alive or dead, there's
not much in between. At that point, I talked to
my family and I said, take me home, let me
see my cardiologists, to my neurologists, and let's let me
(24:28):
just get out of this. So they took me home
and I saw my doctors and everybody said the same thing.
Are you lucky to be here, 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. I started thinking about, what's
(24:48):
the probability of those bultiple 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
what's the probability of having a nurse standing behind you
(25:10):
so that just in case you got a little too much,
somebody was going to be there to jump start your
heart again. When I started looking at all this stuff,
I'm thinking, there's nothing random about this. As Einstein used
to say, God does not throw dice, and that's true.
I'm a firm believer that everything happens for a reason.
(25:30):
But I was given no reasons. I had no idea,
and I was haunted by the fact that this thing
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, After the lightning, it took me about
(25:50):
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 damn if I
can find your name. It's locked in a box some
place up there and I can't get to it. And
there were a lot of things like that. I knew
that I knew something, but I couldn't get to where
(26:12):
that finle was. After a week that disappeared, 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.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
This is a good time to take our break because
he has a lot more to say about what happens.
This is the after effect of a near death experience
of orthopedic surgeon Tony Sekoria. So we'll be right back.
You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio
and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Don't go anywhere.
(27:00):
There's more Shades of the Afterlife coming right up.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
The best afterlife information you can get. Well, You're all
Shades of the Afterlife with Sandra Champlain. Hi. This is
your followgist. Kevin Randall and you're listening to the iHeartRadio
and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champagne
and you're listening to the near death experience of doctor
Tony Sechoria. We last left him recovering from being struck
by a bolt of lightning. Let's see where the story continues.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
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. But all of a sudden,
I can't do anything without thinking about this absolute desire
(28:18):
to hear this. 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. I went
into this music store and as I walked in it, it
seemed like there was a CD that you jumped off
the shelf into my hands, and it was Vladimir Ashkenazi
playing his favorite chowpin. At this point, I didn't know
(28:42):
what to do with all of it. I was so
taken by this music, and I started listening to the
CD and I listened to it NonStop and made everybody
else listen to it. I'm sure they were sick of
hearing it. 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,
(29:02):
I realized that it's not going to 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.
The very next day, one of where babysitters came to
the house and said, I'm going to be moving and
I have this old, upright piano. I need the store
for a year. Could I store it at your house?
(29:23):
And I'm thinking, okay, this is really getting weird now.
So all of a sudden, I have a piano. She
loads the piano in the house, and I'm thinking, now
I need to learn how to play. So I went
and bought a couple of 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
(29:45):
was thinking. Their people have been playing this stuff for
ten years and still wouldn't attempt to do that, but
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 have this dream. And in this dream it was
(30:08):
like an out of body experience. I'm walking out onto
the stage and I'm walking toward myself. I'm way out
on the front edge of the stage. I'm giving a
concert at this concert hall. 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
(30:33):
I start listening intently to it. 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. It woke me up,
so I got up and I sat on the edge
of the bed and I looked around and it was
(30:54):
three point fifteen in the morning. I walked out to
the piano, and I thought, let me see if I
can plunk some of this app out that I just heard.
I had no idea I had to write music. I
didn't have to read music. 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. So I said the hell with this. I
(31:15):
went to bed. I woke up always it by thirty
six o'clock because that was my time to get up
and get ready for work. 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.
(31:36):
It would just start. 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. So I learned very quickly that
it was kind of like a two year old. He
really had to pay attention to it or there was
going to be some repercussions from it. So this process
(31:57):
went on, and I continued 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. 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.
(32:20):
It was called a fantasy. I PROMPTU a piece of
chowpin and I said, I don't understand why the hands
don't line up in this piece of music. Why would
somebody write a piece of music where the hands don't
line up? And she said, they're not supposed to. It's
called a poly rhythm. I had never heard of that
(32:40):
word before. Why would anyone do that? She said, I'm
not even going to 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 Haartwick College. In oneon to
New York, where we lived. I called up Sandy and
told her this whole story and asked her if she'd
(33:01):
take on an old guy to try to teach him
some piano. 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. And I'm sure that her family
was not real happy with me, but that was the
(33:21):
best we could do to meet the two schedules. So
this went on for quite some time. As I'm learning
to play, I'm also working on the music from this dream.
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. I kept working on learning how to play,
(33:44):
and I started going to a music camp, piano camp
for adults in Bennington, Vermont, which was called a Sonata,
and it's a group of people. They would meet four
or five six times a year, different people at different times,
and it's all people that are absolutely obsessed with piano
and this is their week of indulging themselves. So I
(34:08):
started going to that in two thousand and two. In
two thousand and six, when I went, the owner's sister,
Erica vanderlin Feider, was the number one salesperson for Steinway
in New York City and she had just left Steinway
and went to Bosendorf for her, and she was there
at the piano camp and she brought five pianos in
(34:29):
for people to play on, which was an absolute treat.
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. Afterwards, she said to me,
there's only one person that can tell his story, and
that's Oliver Sacks. At the time, I didn't know who
Oliver Sacks was other than the fact that he wrote
(34:51):
the book Awakenings when he figured out how to treat
Parkinson's disease. He is a famous neurologist, and I didn't
think anything more of it. I went about my normal business.
In June, I get a phone call from Oliver Sacks.
I'm like, this can't be real. Oliver says, I've heard
about this lightning story and I'd like to have you
(35:13):
come down in New York City to interview you. 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, two thousand and six, I went
down to see Oliver Sacks, and I got to spend
the whole day with him, which is an absolute treasure.
(35:35):
This was a man who could think circles around anybody
I knew, including myself. 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. He looked at me and
(35:55):
he says, the music from the dream went from an
awful lot of trouble to get here. The least you
can do is write it. 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
(36:16):
bought a music writing program called Sibelius, which is the
equivalent of music writing for dummies. 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. 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
(36:39):
I had no idea how to write it. 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. That was my goal.
So when piano camp came around in May, I had
finished the music and played it for my piano friends.
(37:03):
At this piano camp. 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 use your story in my book,
so I don't have anything to hide. Sure, go ahead,
he said, good, because you're chapter one and it's coming
(37:24):
out July twenty third. Sure enough, my story was published
in the New Yorker magazine. At that point, all hell
broke loose because I hadn't been telling a lot of
people about this story, and because I didn't want people
to think I was crazy. Suddenly it's got taken out
of the closet and thrown out for everybody to look at.
(37:46):
About the 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 Oneonta. He said, would you consider playing the
music for the class? And I thought, I'll do that.
It seemed like it was another month or so after that.
(38:07):
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. 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.
(38:28):
I have no idea where to start. And somehow he
conned me into doing it. I said, okay, I'll do it.
So the next phone call I make is I call Sandy,
my music teacher, and I said, can you get me
ready for it? And she said it's going to be
a lot of work. She said, you got to be
prepared to put four hours a day into getting ready
(38:49):
for this. And I'm like, okay, we start on this process.
We would go up and to 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. She'd be up in our top
row of the seats and I'd be playing away and
(39:09):
she'd go.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
I can't hear you.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
This is going to be no fun. But we worked along.
And then a few weeks before the concert, Carlton calls
me again and he says things are changing again, and
I said, what are you doing? He says, a BBC
one wants to come, and so does German Television and
so does Granata Media.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
I love this guy. We need to take a break
and then we'll be back. Plus I have a surprise
at the end. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife
on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM heir Normal
Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Stay there, Sandra will be right back.
Speaker 5 (40:08):
Hey, it's the Wizard of Weird Joshua P. Warren. Don't
forget to check out my show Strange Things each week
as I bring you the world of the truly, amazing
and bizarre right here on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
This is Afterlife Expert Daniel Braakley, and you're listening to
the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paronormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlaine.
Orthopedic surgeon. Tony Sechoria gets hit by a bolt of lightning,
has a near death experience, and now an uncontrollable urge
to learn and play piano. Next, he manages to write
down the music from a dream, and next they want
(41:15):
him to play in a concert. Here's what happens.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
A few weeks before the concert, Carlton calls me again
and he says things are changing again, and I said,
what are you doing? He says, BBC one wants to come,
and Sodas German Television, and so does Granada Media. So
there's three huge sets that want to come and film
this thing. I was like, oh my god, I've come
(41:40):
too far. Now what am I going to do? I said, okay,
loone comes the concert day, which actually turned out to
be my birthday. Anyway, there's three television crews. I remember
going to the green room right beforehand, and I remember
sitting here and I'm talking to God and the angels
anybody that wants to listen. I said, you guys put
(42:01):
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. Thankfully, I managed to get through
it the music from the dream and a couple of
other pieces that I had written along the way, and
ever since then, it's taken on a life of its own.
I've played that music all over the country. It's interesting
(42:25):
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 frequencies of the music that
(42:47):
stimulates certain brain activity or certain behaviors. I think there's
more to the music than I have any concept of.
It's so far over my head. 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
(43:10):
things that people say. 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.
I think what it really comes down to is we
have no real concept of how the brain works, and
(43:32):
how it's connected to other things in other places, and
the frequencies that exist in the ether, the quantum field
as some people call it, and how all of it interacts.
So is some of the aspects of this music about
helping people to reprogram some part of the brain that
(43:53):
they don't have access to or could help in their evolution.
I don't know, or like myself, you hear music and
the music's coming from some place. 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,
(44:13):
and nobody really understands what that is exactly, and how
we communicate with it is a whole other black box.
The other thing that did come out of it is
that I can feel people's energy, their aoram as other
people would call it. It feels like static electricity out
of not having a better word to describe it. If
(44:36):
somebody has something wrong with their shoulder, for example, 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. There are some things
(44:58):
that I don't have it a real understanding of, but
I 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
(45:22):
way of knowing, a feeling somebody's going to call and
the phone rings, or I walk over and I pick
up the phone and thereonic. 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
(45:43):
didn't really notice before. So 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. I think that the
(46:03):
only real message that I have is there is life
after death. I think it's really important to have an
approach to life that is other than self being more
concerned about others than about the self. I think it's
a big part of how our spirits are supposed to work.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
Thank you, doctor Tony Secoria. Now did I hear you?
Speaker 2 (46:31):
Think?
Speaker 3 (46:32):
I wish I could hear that piece of music you
can here is Lightning Sonata with doctor Secoria at the piano.
Pay attention to your emotions and see how it moves
your soul.
Speaker 6 (47:21):
Incling and stay.
Speaker 7 (47:33):
In and fifty.
Speaker 4 (48:42):
Th Coca in the.
Speaker 6 (50:27):
Name Cola Coca the look a look at.
Speaker 3 (52:42):
My friend. Anything is possible if you believe. Please remember
to come visit me at We Don't Die dot com.
I'm Sandra Champlain. Thank you for listening to Shades of
the Afterlife on the iHeart Radio and Coast to Coast
AM hair or podcast network.
Speaker 1 (53:09):
And if you like this episode of Shades of the Afterlife,
wait until you hear the next one. Thank you for
listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal
podcast Network.
Welcome to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM paranormal
podcast network. This is the place to be if you're
ready for the best podcasts of the paranormal, curious, and
sometimes unexplained.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Now listen to this.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
Welcome to our podcast. Please be aware the thoughts and
opinions expressed by the host are their thoughts and opinions
only and do not reflect those of iHeartMedia, iHeartRadio, Coast
to Coast AM, employees of premier networks, or their sponsors
and associates. We would like to encourage you to do
(00:46):
your own research and discover the subject matter for yourself.
Speaker 4 (00:56):
Hi.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
I'm Sandra Champlain. For over twenty five years years, I've
been on a journey to prove the existence of life
after death. On each episode, we'll discuss the reasons we
now know that our loved ones have survived physical death,
and so will we. Welcome to Shades of the Afterlife.
(01:17):
I love stories of near death experiences, and I have
a sneaky suspicion.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
You do too.
Speaker 3 (01:23):
I want to read to you a few short stories
that are real. This happened to a five year old
blind girl, she says, I slowly breathed in the water
and became unconscious. A beautiful lady dressed in bright white
light pulled me out. The lady looked into my eyes
(01:44):
and asked me what I wanted. I was unable to
think of anything until it occurred to me to travel
around the lake. As I did, I saw a detail
that I would have never seen in my real life.
I could go any where, even to the tops of
the trees, simply by intending to go there. I was
(02:06):
legally blind. For the first time. I was able to
see leaves on trees, birds feathers, birds, eyes, details on
the telephone poles, and what was in people's backyards. I
was seeing for the very first time. Here's another story.
During my surgery, I felt myself lift for my body
(02:29):
and go above the operating table. The doctor told me
later they had kept my heart open and stopped for
a very long time, and they had a great amount
of difficulty getting my heart started again. That must have
been when I left my body, because I could see
doctors nervously trying to get my heart going. It was
(02:49):
so strange to be detached from my physical body. I
was curious about what they were doing, but not really concerned. Then,
as I drifted farther away, I saw my father at
the head of the table. He looked up at me,
which did give me a surprise because he had been
dead for almost a year. Another story, I approached the boundary.
(03:13):
No explanation was necessary for me to understand at the
age of ten, that once I crossed the boundary, I
could never come back. I was more than thrilled to cross.
I intended to cross, but my ancestors over another boundary
caught my attention. They were talking to me in telepathy,
(03:34):
which really caught my attention. I was born profoundly deaf
and now had all hearing that my family members did,
all of which new sign language when I was alive.
Now I could read or communicate with about twenty ancestors
of mine and others through telepathic methods. It overwhelmed me.
(03:56):
I could not believe how many people I could tell simultaneously.
One more, I almost died. Back in June of twenty twenty,
I was hit by a car while riding my motorcycle.
I blacked out, was hospitalized for a month and a half,
and my leg even got amputated. I don't know if
(04:19):
the accident itself did this to me, or the pain
and trauma did, or the place that I went to
when I blacked out. But I swear I've gotten so
much smarter and more in tune with everything. I am
hyper detail oriented, I have crazy motivational drive, and I
also feel like I can just understand things others can't.
(04:43):
I see the world so differently now. I can sense
people's energies and it helps me understand what people are
going through. There definitely is a change to me after
my near death experience. We love hearing about near death
experiences and can be inspired by these stories and reunions,
and they help us know that we go on after death.
(05:06):
There is a term called after effects of a near
death experience that people have, and often we can share
these effects by hearing stories. After effects include such things
like a reduced fear of death, increased belief in life
after death, interest in the meaning of life, acceptance of others,
(05:27):
and becoming more loving and empathic. The majority of people
make their lives about helping others through life. Some after
effects happen immediately, others may take years to fully manifest.
Doctor Pim van Lommel did a large study and divided
survivors of cardiac arrest into a group that had near
(05:48):
death experiences and a group that did not. The after
effects of both groups were assessed two in eight years
after their cardiac arrests. The group of survivors with near
death experiences were statistically much more likely to have a
reduced fear of death, increased belief in the afterlife, interest
(06:11):
in the meaning of life, acceptance of others, and were
much more loving, where there didn't seem to be much
change in the values of those who didn't. It is
remarkable that near death experiences often occurred during only minutes
or seconds of unconsciousness, yet commonly result in lifelong transformations
(06:35):
of beliefs and values. Ninety nine percent of near death
experiences said that their experience was real. But can a
near death experience unlock any extraordinary abilities in a person? Today,
on our show, I am so happy to share a
special story of a physician who was struck by lightning
(06:58):
only to receive a passion for music. I can't wait
for you to hear it. Also, two of my personal
favorite stories are of doctor Rajiev Parti and Anita Morjani.
Anita Morjani, author of the book dying to be me,
which I highly recommend. Had cancer that had spread throughout
(07:19):
her body and doctor said it was too late to
save her. All of Anita's organs had shut down and
she entered into a coma. She witnessed so much in
her near death experience, including being encouraged to return to
life by her deceased father and her best friend who
told her that she needed to return and live her
(07:41):
life fearlessly. When she came out of this coma, her
tumors shrank by about seventy percent within four days, and
within five weeks she was cancer free and was released
from the hospital. Now, she did have to spend a
few months in physiotherapy to regain her strength and to
use oliver muscles and limbs again. But today, in twenty
(08:05):
twenty four, Anita Morjani remains cancer free and makes her
life about helping other people and sharing the reality of
the afterlife. Doctor Rajiv Partis was chief of anesthesiology at
Hart Hospital in Bakersfield, California. He loved his wealth and
(08:27):
the prestige that his job gave him. He lived in
a mansion, had several luxury cars, and was able to
purchase anything he wanted. In August of two thousand and eight,
everything changed in his life when he was diagnosed with
prostate cancer due to an infection. He was admitted into
the hospital where he had his near death experience. Although
(08:51):
deep from anesthesia, he was aware that his consciousness had
somehow left his body. From a vantage point near the ceiling,
he could see the surgeon cut him open and all
of the operating room personnel cover their faces from the
odor that his infected abdomen seeped throughout the room. He
(09:12):
said his senses became so acute that he could hear,
see and smell things inside and outside of the operating room.
He even heard the anesthesiologist tell a dirty joke that
made the doctor blush when he later repeated what he
heard in the operating room. His spirit left the operating room, and,
(09:35):
although still in the United States, he drifted into India,
where he could hear his mother and sister talking about
what they were preparing for dinner that night. Fear ended
up finding its way into his experience. He had the
feeling of being pulled into darkness filled with screams and
(09:57):
sounds of fighting. Eventually, he saw a white light in
the distance and instinctively began praying. The white light turned
to a light of love, and he was shown his
life that he was not practicing forgiveness or compassion to
himself or others. He soon felt very sorry for the
(10:18):
lack of kindness and his behavior, wishing he could have
done certain things differently in his life. His book Dying
to Wake Up tells the story of him being an anesthesiologist,
making people fall asleep before surgery and now after the
near death experience, waking them up as to who they
(10:40):
are and what their life is for. There's much more
to his story, of course, but he shares what he
calls the near death Manifesto. One Consciousness can exist outside
the body. Two there is life after death. Three Our
experiences in life shape our current reality. Four We are
(11:03):
all connected to each other because we are all made
of the one and same energy that manifests as differentiated matter.
Five Divine beings exist and help and guide us. Six
there are different levels of consciousness, and seven there is
one all pervading, supreme love and intelligence that is the
(11:26):
source of the entire universe, and that love is the
supreme source of creation. In their latest book, Proof of
Life After Life, seven reasons to believe there is an
after life. Doctor Raymond Moody and Paul Perry share this.
There are many stories of near death experiences leading to
(11:47):
the life changing acquisition of new talents, the changing of professions,
or the overcoming of something like crippling anxiety. Why these
spontaneous improvements take place is not known. Some have speculated
that the brain changes due to neural plasticity, the reorganization
of the brain's neuronal connections that sometimes takes place after
(12:12):
a stroke or the brain trauma of an accident. Neural
plasticity proves to us that the brain is capable of
reorganizing or rerouting its neurons to compensate for traumatic damage.
Yet for neural reorganization to be the cause of these
spontaneous improvements is most likely impossible. After all, successfully rewiring
(12:35):
the brain after neurological damage can take substantial rehab, and
then effects of original damage most often still remain. There
is clearly, to me and a growing number of researchers
something more happening here. It's time for our break, and
when we come back, we are going to hear the
(12:58):
incredible story of Tony Sechoria and his after effects of
being struck by lightning. We'll be right back. You're listening
to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio and Coast
to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
Keep it here on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast
AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Sander Champlain will be right back.
Speaker 3 (13:35):
We are happy to announce that our Coast to Coast
AM official YouTube channel has now reached over three hundred
thousand subscribers. You can listen to the first hour of
recent and past shows for free, so head on over
to the Coast to COASTAM dot com website and hit
the YouTube icon at the top of the page. This
(13:59):
is free show audio, so don't wait. Coast to COASTAM
dot com is where you want to be. Hi, it's
doctor Sky.
Speaker 5 (14:19):
Keep it right here on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlain
and I'm really excited I get to share this next
story with you. Doctor Tony Sechoria is a well known
orthopedic surgeon, very busy man no particular interest in the afterlife.
When he was struck by lightn in nineteen ninety four.
(15:02):
The bolt was enough to kill him, but it didn't.
What it did do is leave him with a sudden
craving for classical music, in particular the piano. Doctor Tony
is regular, down to earth, and I know he'll enjoy
his story just as much as I do.
Speaker 2 (15:21):
My wife normally would have a big party every August.
In this particular August in nineteen ninety four was going
to be at a place called Sleepy Hollow Lake in
upstate New York, about twenty five people, lots of kids
running around, and my wife had rented a pavilion, and
(15:41):
I was elected the cook. And that's the way the
days started. As I was out working the barbecue, I
thought I hadn't checked on my mom because she was
not there. I thought I'd better go call her. So
I got somebody to cover the barbecue, and I walked
around in front of the building and there was a
pay phone attached to it, and I picked up the
(16:04):
phone and I dial a number and let it ring
four or five six times, and she never picked up.
So I thought, oh, 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 knew exactly what it was, a lightning strike.
(16:28):
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. I see the big flash of
lake come out of the phone, hits me in the
face and throws me back like a rag doll. It
really threw me backwards. And that's when things really got interesting,
(16:49):
because as I was being thrown backwards, all of a sudden,
I had this very strange sensation of moving forwards. I
remember standing there thinking, how is this possible. I know
I got hit. I saw it and knew I'd been
thrown back like a rag doll. And here I am standing,
and I'm looking around and look at the phone, and
(17:11):
the phone is just dangling. Nothing's making any sense. 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. All of a sudden,
she's running down the stairs right at me, and I'm thinking,
it's not good when your mother in law's screaming and
running at you. Is she got down in front of me.
(17:34):
I could tell that she couldn't see me because she
was looking off to her left. As she got to
the bottom of the stairs, he 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
(17:54):
confronted with myself on the ground. I remember looking down
and going, oh shit, I'm dead. It was a shock,
I guess all of my life, I thought that when
you died there would be some sort of notification, who
knows what it was, but I didn't expect to have
it not even be known. I thought there'd be some
(18:17):
of bells or whistles that would go off, but there
was absolutely nothing. So I'm standing there and I'm looking
at myself on the ground as this is happening. My
mind is racing like crazy, and I'm trying to make
sense to this, and all of a sudden, I'm saying
to myself, wait a minute, I'm thinking, just like a
normally would. I'm obviously not in that body that's on
(18:40):
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. She started
(19:00):
to get down and do CPR. Turns out she was
a nurse from one of the local hospitals. And help
fortuitous is that get struck by lightning to have somebody
waiting to save it 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. I'm feeling stupid,
(19:23):
and I thought I'm going to go check on my
family because they were upstairs. My wife and my three
kids are up there, and I thought, I'm going to
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 because I was
afraid I'm gonna fall face forward on the stairs. So
(19:44):
I always watch what I'm doing. As I'm looking down,
I noticed that my legs are starting to dissolve, and
I thought, Wow, 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. The
stairs go off to the left, and I said, what
(20:07):
the hell, I'm not going to go upstairs. 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, who was standing where, who the
kids were in, what pattern they were standing in. I
(20:29):
don't know why I did that, but I did. Later on,
I verified that was exactly the way they were standing.
When I got to the other side of the room
that was going on a diagonal, 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
(20:49):
into a river of pure positive energy. It wasn't anything
in this river of energy except absolute love and absolute peace.
It was his 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
(21:13):
through the water as I was underneath the water. It
reminded me of that. As I was looking at this
light energy, 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. I could
look at the trees and see the energy flowing into
(21:36):
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 is what everything is made of.
It's so powerful I could measure this, So my science
brain's kicking in and going, we could look at this.
But the more I looked at it, I could actually
(21:58):
see the energy pad 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. I had no idea where I was going.
I could feel speed in direction, so I was accelerating
into something, but I had no idea what. At this point,
(22:20):
I've become absolutely euphoric over the fact that this is
the greatest thing that could ever happen to somebody. 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 in this and this and that,
and there wasn't a lot of emotion around it. It
(22:41):
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. 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
(23:02):
was just excited about where it was going. And then
all of a sudden, it was like somebody flipped a switch.
I was back in my body and I was pissed.
I was like, no, don't make me go back. You
can't do this to me. I quickly realized that it's
not up to me. I'm laying there on the ground
(23:24):
and in a 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. She just kneeling
next to me. But I still can't open my eyes
look at anybody. So it took several minutes before I
(23:46):
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 and saved my life,
I said, it's it's okay, I'm a doctor, and she
just kind of laughed and she said, hell, you weren't
a minute ago. And I thought, okay, I'm just making
(24:08):
a fool of myself, so I'm going to 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, either alive or dead, there's
not much in between. At that point, I talked to
my family and I said, take me home, let me
see my cardiologists, to my neurologists, and let's let me
(24:28):
just get out of this. So they took me home
and I saw my doctors and everybody said the same thing.
Are you lucky to be here, 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. I started thinking about, what's
(24:48):
the probability of those bultiple 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
what's the probability of having a nurse standing behind you
(25:10):
so that just in case you got a little too much,
somebody was going to be there to jump start your
heart again. When I started looking at all this stuff,
I'm thinking, there's nothing random about this. As Einstein used
to say, God does not throw dice, and that's true.
I'm a firm believer that everything happens for a reason.
(25:30):
But I was given no reasons. I had no idea,
and I was haunted by the fact that this thing
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, After the lightning, it took me about
(25:50):
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 damn if I
can find your name. It's locked in a box some
place up there and I can't get to it. And
there were a lot of things like that. I knew
that I knew something, but I couldn't get to where
(26:12):
that finle was. After a week that disappeared, 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.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
This is a good time to take our break because
he has a lot more to say about what happens.
This is the after effect of a near death experience
of orthopedic surgeon Tony Sekoria. So we'll be right back.
You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife on the iHeartRadio
and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network. Don't go anywhere.
(27:00):
There's more Shades of the Afterlife coming right up.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
The best afterlife information you can get. Well, You're all
Shades of the Afterlife with Sandra Champlain. Hi. This is
your followgist. Kevin Randall and you're listening to the iHeartRadio
and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champagne
and you're listening to the near death experience of doctor
Tony Sechoria. We last left him recovering from being struck
by a bolt of lightning. Let's see where the story continues.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
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. But all of a sudden,
I can't do anything without thinking about this absolute desire
(28:18):
to hear this. 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. I went
into this music store and as I walked in it, it
seemed like there was a CD that you jumped off
the shelf into my hands, and it was Vladimir Ashkenazi
playing his favorite chowpin. At this point, I didn't know
(28:42):
what to do with all of it. I was so
taken by this music, and I started listening to the
CD and I listened to it NonStop and made everybody
else listen to it. I'm sure they were sick of
hearing it. 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,
(29:02):
I realized that it's not going to 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.
The very next day, one of where babysitters came to
the house and said, I'm going to be moving and
I have this old, upright piano. I need the store
for a year. Could I store it at your house?
(29:23):
And I'm thinking, okay, this is really getting weird now.
So all of a sudden, I have a piano. She
loads the piano in the house, and I'm thinking, now
I need to learn how to play. So I went
and bought a couple of 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
(29:45):
was thinking. Their people have been playing this stuff for
ten years and still wouldn't attempt to do that, but
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 have this dream. And in this dream it was
(30:08):
like an out of body experience. I'm walking out onto
the stage and I'm walking toward myself. I'm way out
on the front edge of the stage. I'm giving a
concert at this concert hall. 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
(30:33):
I start listening intently to it. 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. It woke me up,
so I got up and I sat on the edge
of the bed and I looked around and it was
(30:54):
three point fifteen in the morning. I walked out to
the piano, and I thought, let me see if I
can plunk some of this app out that I just heard.
I had no idea I had to write music. I
didn't have to read music. 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. So I said the hell with this. I
(31:15):
went to bed. I woke up always it by thirty
six o'clock because that was my time to get up
and get ready for work. 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.
(31:36):
It would just start. 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. So I learned very quickly that
it was kind of like a two year old. He
really had to pay attention to it or there was
going to be some repercussions from it. So this process
(31:57):
went on, and I continued 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. 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.
(32:20):
It was called a fantasy. I PROMPTU a piece of
chowpin and I said, I don't understand why the hands
don't line up in this piece of music. Why would
somebody write a piece of music where the hands don't
line up? And she said, they're not supposed to. It's
called a poly rhythm. I had never heard of that
(32:40):
word before. Why would anyone do that? She said, I'm
not even going to 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 Haartwick College. In oneon to
New York, where we lived. I called up Sandy and
told her this whole story and asked her if she'd
(33:01):
take on an old guy to try to teach him
some piano. 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. And I'm sure that her family
was not real happy with me, but that was the
(33:21):
best we could do to meet the two schedules. So
this went on for quite some time. As I'm learning
to play, I'm also working on the music from this dream.
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. I kept working on learning how to play,
(33:44):
and I started going to a music camp, piano camp
for adults in Bennington, Vermont, which was called a Sonata,
and it's a group of people. They would meet four
or five six times a year, different people at different times,
and it's all people that are absolutely obsessed with piano
and this is their week of indulging themselves. So I
(34:08):
started going to that in two thousand and two. In
two thousand and six, when I went, the owner's sister,
Erica vanderlin Feider, was the number one salesperson for Steinway
in New York City and she had just left Steinway
and went to Bosendorf for her, and she was there
at the piano camp and she brought five pianos in
(34:29):
for people to play on, which was an absolute treat.
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. Afterwards, she said to me,
there's only one person that can tell his story, and
that's Oliver Sacks. At the time, I didn't know who
Oliver Sacks was other than the fact that he wrote
(34:51):
the book Awakenings when he figured out how to treat
Parkinson's disease. He is a famous neurologist, and I didn't
think anything more of it. I went about my normal business.
In June, I get a phone call from Oliver Sacks.
I'm like, this can't be real. Oliver says, I've heard
about this lightning story and I'd like to have you
(35:13):
come down in New York City to interview you. 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, two thousand and six, I went
down to see Oliver Sacks, and I got to spend
the whole day with him, which is an absolute treasure.
(35:35):
This was a man who could think circles around anybody
I knew, including myself. 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. He looked at me and
(35:55):
he says, the music from the dream went from an
awful lot of trouble to get here. The least you
can do is write it. 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
(36:16):
bought a music writing program called Sibelius, which is the
equivalent of music writing for dummies. 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. 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
(36:39):
I had no idea how to write it. 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. That was my goal.
So when piano camp came around in May, I had
finished the music and played it for my piano friends.
(37:03):
At this piano camp. 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 use your story in my book,
so I don't have anything to hide. Sure, go ahead,
he said, good, because you're chapter one and it's coming
(37:24):
out July twenty third. Sure enough, my story was published
in the New Yorker magazine. At that point, all hell
broke loose because I hadn't been telling a lot of
people about this story, and because I didn't want people
to think I was crazy. Suddenly it's got taken out
of the closet and thrown out for everybody to look at.
(37:46):
About the 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 Oneonta. He said, would you consider playing the
music for the class? And I thought, I'll do that.
It seemed like it was another month or so after that.
(38:07):
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. 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.
(38:28):
I have no idea where to start. And somehow he
conned me into doing it. I said, okay, I'll do it.
So the next phone call I make is I call Sandy,
my music teacher, and I said, can you get me
ready for it? And she said it's going to be
a lot of work. She said, you got to be
prepared to put four hours a day into getting ready
(38:49):
for this. And I'm like, okay, we start on this process.
We would go up and to 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. She'd be up in our top
row of the seats and I'd be playing away and
(39:09):
she'd go.
Speaker 3 (39:09):
I can't hear you.
Speaker 2 (39:11):
This is going to be no fun. But we worked along.
And then a few weeks before the concert, Carlton calls
me again and he says things are changing again, and
I said, what are you doing? He says, a BBC
one wants to come, and so does German Television and
so does Granata Media.
Speaker 3 (39:34):
I love this guy. We need to take a break
and then we'll be back. Plus I have a surprise
at the end. You're listening to Shades of the Afterlife
on the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM heir Normal
Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
Stay there, Sandra will be right back.
Speaker 5 (40:08):
Hey, it's the Wizard of Weird Joshua P. Warren. Don't
forget to check out my show Strange Things each week
as I bring you the world of the truly, amazing
and bizarre right here on the iHeartRadio and Coast to
Coast AM Paranormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
This is Afterlife Expert Daniel Braakley, and you're listening to
the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paronormal Podcast Network.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
Welcome back to Shades of the Afterlife. I'm Sandra Champlaine.
Orthopedic surgeon. Tony Sechoria gets hit by a bolt of lightning,
has a near death experience, and now an uncontrollable urge
to learn and play piano. Next, he manages to write
down the music from a dream, and next they want
(41:15):
him to play in a concert. Here's what happens.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
A few weeks before the concert, Carlton calls me again
and he says things are changing again, and I said,
what are you doing? He says, BBC one wants to come,
and Sodas German Television, and so does Granada Media. So
there's three huge sets that want to come and film
this thing. I was like, oh my god, I've come
(41:40):
too far. Now what am I going to do? I said, okay,
loone comes the concert day, which actually turned out to
be my birthday. Anyway, there's three television crews. I remember
going to the green room right beforehand, and I remember
sitting here and I'm talking to God and the angels
anybody that wants to listen. I said, you guys put
(42:01):
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. Thankfully, I managed to get through
it the music from the dream and a couple of
other pieces that I had written along the way, and
ever since then, it's taken on a life of its own.
I've played that music all over the country. It's interesting
(42:25):
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 frequencies of the music that
(42:47):
stimulates certain brain activity or certain behaviors. I think there's
more to the music than I have any concept of.
It's so far over my head. 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
(43:10):
things that people say. 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.
I think what it really comes down to is we
have no real concept of how the brain works, and
(43:32):
how it's connected to other things in other places, and
the frequencies that exist in the ether, the quantum field
as some people call it, and how all of it interacts.
So is some of the aspects of this music about
helping people to reprogram some part of the brain that
(43:53):
they don't have access to or could help in their evolution.
I don't know, or like myself, you hear music and
the music's coming from some place. 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,
(44:13):
and nobody really understands what that is exactly, and how
we communicate with it is a whole other black box.
The other thing that did come out of it is
that I can feel people's energy, their aoram as other
people would call it. It feels like static electricity out
of not having a better word to describe it. If
(44:36):
somebody has something wrong with their shoulder, for example, 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. There are some things
(44:58):
that I don't have it a real understanding of, but
I 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
(45:22):
way of knowing, a feeling somebody's going to call and
the phone rings, or I walk over and I pick
up the phone and thereonic. 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
(45:43):
didn't really notice before. So 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. I think that the
(46:03):
only real message that I have is there is life
after death. I think it's really important to have an
approach to life that is other than self being more
concerned about others than about the self. I think it's
a big part of how our spirits are supposed to work.
Speaker 3 (46:26):
Thank you, doctor Tony Secoria. Now did I hear you?
Speaker 2 (46:31):
Think?
Speaker 3 (46:32):
I wish I could hear that piece of music you
can here is Lightning Sonata with doctor Secoria at the piano.
Pay attention to your emotions and see how it moves
your soul.
Speaker 6 (47:21):
Incling and stay.
Speaker 7 (47:33):
In and fifty.
Speaker 4 (48:42):
Th Coca in the.
Speaker 6 (50:27):
Name Cola Coca the look a look at.
Speaker 3 (52:42):
My friend. Anything is possible if you believe. Please remember
to come visit me at We Don't Die dot com.
I'm Sandra Champlain. Thank you for listening to Shades of
the Afterlife on the iHeart Radio and Coast to Coast
AM hair or podcast network.
Speaker 1 (53:09):
And if you like this episode of Shades of the Afterlife,
wait until you hear the next one. Thank you for
listening to the iHeartRadio and Coast to Coast AM Paranormal
podcast Network.
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