Episode 178: Lightning Strikes! The After Effect of a Near-Death Experience

the trees, simply by intending to go there. I was 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 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 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.

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, 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. 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 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. 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. 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,

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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.

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.

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 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. 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, 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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, 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?

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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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.

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 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. 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. 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. 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 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 she'd go.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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.