Seeing the Light!
I wanted to share this true story with you today as it highlights some of the work we’ve been doing at the Spiritual Research Institute for Love Light Life. As you will see, you are not your body (despite what you think :).
Love Light Life!
A Bolt from the Blue
Tony Cicoria was forty-two, very fit and robust, a former college football player who had become a well-regarded orthopedic surgeon in a small city in upstate New York. He was a lakeside pavilion for a family gathering one fall afternoon. It was pleasant and breezy, but he noticed a few storm clouds in the distance; it looked like rain.
He went to a pay phone outside the pavilion to make a quick call to his moth (this was in 1994, before the age of cell phones). He still remembers every single second of what happened next: “I was talking to my mother on the phone. There was a little bit of rain, thunder in the distance. My mother hung up. The phone was a foot away from where I was standing when I got struck. I remember a flash of light coming out of the phone. It hit me in the face. Next thing I remember, I was flying backwards.”
Then – he seemed to hesitate before telling me this – “I was flying forwards. Bewildered, I looked around. I saw my own body on the ground. I said to myself, ‘Oh shit, I’m dead.’ I saw people converging on the body. I saw a woman – she had been standing waiting to use the phone right behind me – position herself over my body, give it CPR…. I floated up the stairs – my consciousness came with me. I saw my kids, had the realization that they would be okay. Then I was surrounded by a bluish-white light… an enormous feeling of well-being and peace. The highest and lowest points of my life raced by me. No emotion associated with these… pure thought, pure ecstasy. I had the perception of accelerating, being drawn up… there was speed and direction. Then, as I was saying to myself, ‘This is the most glorious feeling I have ever had’ – SLAM! I was back.
Dr. Cicoria knew he was back in his own body because he had pain – pain from the burns on his face and his left foot, where the electrical charge had entered and exited his body – and, he realized, ‘only bodies have pain.’ He wanted to go back, he wanted to tell the woman to stop giving him CPR, to let him go, but it was too late – he was firmly back among the living. After a minute or two, when he could speak, he said, “It’s okay – I’m a doctor!” The woman (she turned out to be an intensive-care unit nurse) replied, “A few minutes ago, you weren’t.”
Story retold to Dr. Oliver Sacks’ and published in his book, “Musicophilia.”
