Dr. Tony Cicoria: The Surgeon Who Heard God's Music After Lightning

The Scientist Who Took Things Apart

Before the lightning found him, Tony Cicoria: "you can go to any school you want to but if you don't go to the Citadel don't come home."

At the Citadel, he played football and studied biology. In his final year, he worked with Albert Szent-Györgyi, the Nobel Prize winner who defined how muscle worked. That experience gave him a vision: he'd be one of the lab rats working in the basement of some big institution, learning great things. He spent five years earning a doctorate in physiology with a minor in biophysics.

But when he graduated, there were no jobs. The Vietnam War had ended, and the market was flooded with PhDs who'd gone to graduate school to avoid the draft. So he pivoted again and went to medical school. He settled on orthopedics because he was one of those kids who loved taking things apart, putting them back together, rebuilding things. He figured his Italian heritage had buried some carpentry genes in there somewhere.

By 1994, he was on track for academic orthopedics. He wanted to publish papers. He was chairman of a big spine meeting every year. He was going down that road, and it seemed like the right one.

The Storm That Changed Everything

In August 1994, his wife organized a communal birthday party at Sleepy Hollow Lake for five family members with August birthdays. She rented a pavilion that could hold 25-plus people. Tony was given the job of running the barbecue, so he was outside getting the food ready while most everyone else was upstairs.

The day started beautifully. Sun shining, pleasant temperature, everything good. At some point, he decided to call his mother to check on her. His father had already passed, and his mom was by herself. He got somebody to cover the barbecue and walked around the front of the building where there was a pay phone attached to the wall.

What he hadn't realized was that a storm cloud had blown up over the lake. He put in the code in the phone and let it ring five, six, seven times. She didn't pick up. He thought, all right, she's busy, I'll try again later. As he started to take the phone away from his face to hang it up, he heard a huge crack.

A big flash of light came out of the phone and hit him right in the face, throwing him back like a ragdoll. But as it threw him back, he had the strangest sensation of moving forward. He remembers standing there going, this doesn't make any sense. He knew he'd seen the lightning. He knew he'd been hit. He knew he'd been thrown backwards. But now he was standing there, and nothing was making sense. He looked at the phone. The phone was dangling.

Running Into Himself

His mother-in-law started screaming at the top of the stairs. He was at the bottom. She ran down the stairs headed right at him, and he thought, this can't be good when your mother-in-law is running at you screaming. But as she got down in front of him, she was looking off to her left, as if he wasn't even there.

He turned to go where she was going. He took about three steps and ran into himself on the ground.

"I'm like oh I'm dead and it was such a shock," he says. "I fully expected that when you died something would happen to tell you you know Bells whistles who knows what but it wasn't it was just a very natural progression of I was in this state this second and the next second I was someplace else and went from being in a physical form to being in a spiritual form."

A woman who'd been waiting to use the phone got down to start CPR. She turned out to be a nurse. Tony stood there trying to call out to anybody who would listen. He could see all of them, hear all of them, but nobody could see or hear him.

And then it occurred to him: he was standing there thinking exactly the way he normally would. Complete control of his mind. Thinking in the vernacular and the way he normally would think. Massive racing thoughts going through his head trying to make sense of this whole thing. But he realized at that moment something profound.

"Whoever I am I always am," he says. "And there's no such thing as death and you know my spirit or whoever I was is eternal and that was probably the first big thing that realization that came to me as as this whole thing unfolded was that my spirit is here forever."

The Empty Shell

"We're essentially two people," Tony explains. "We're in this body which is nothing more than a costume over the top of of Who We Are always and in our spirit form."

When he went up to the body and looked at it, he seemed very dispassionate about it. It was like, that's me but it's not. I'm me. I'm still who I always was. And that's nothing but an empty shell.

"That was pretty Earth shaking," he says. But it was not a frightening experience. It was just very matter-of-factly: this is the way things really are.

He thought, well, there's no point in standing here because nobody can see me or hear me. He turned around and started to walk toward the stairs to go up and check on his family. He got to about the third step, looking down at the ground, and started to see his legs dissolve. He thought, well okay, this is getting really weird.

As he got to the top of the stairs, he had lost all form. He was just a ball of energy.

Through the Wall

The stairs went up another few steps to the left when you got to the top of the first level. He didn't bother with that. He had no form. He just went through the wall.

When he came out on the other side of the wall, he came out right over the top of his wife who was sitting painting children's faces. He remembers taking a picture in his head of who was there, what kids were there, how the furniture was arranged, and what order the kids were standing in.

That became an important issue later on when they were comparing notes. He was able to say all these things that verified the fact that yeah, he did see it, and he was there.

Tony has shared more details about this verification in another interview about his mystical music, where he describes how these specific observations convinced his family that his experience was real.

The River of God Energy

He continued going through that room and went through the roof. And that's when things really got interesting.

"It was like I had suddenly fallen into a river of pure positive energy," he says. "There was a bluish white light that this energy emanated from."

"If you can imagine an energy that's completely composed of love and peace," he continues, "there were no other emotions no other senses that I had except that and it was it was just Earth shaking to feel that much love and peace coming from this source."

"And it came to me that this must be the god energy," he says. "This is what makes everything and I thought well you know this is the greatest thing they could ever happen to somebody to to have this realization and to have this feeling and that's the only time I've ever experienced anything like that."

At that point, he realized he was going someplace. He started to see a collage of high points and low points in his life. There wasn't a lot of explanation or thought, just pictures of different things in his life: high points, low points, trauma, whatever it was.

He was just kind of settling into flowing in the Stream. He didn't know where it was going or where it was taking him, but it was exciting. It was an ecstasy. Such a wonderful feeling.

The Switch Flipped

And then all of a sudden it's like somebody flipped the switch.

Suddenly he was in pain. He was back in his body, calling out loud in his head to whoever would listen: "please don't make me do this I don't want to go back."

He had three kids and a wife and he loved his life, "but there was no comparison to what I was experiencing outside my body."

"I was like please don't make me do this," he says. "I I was really angry I wanted I wanted to stay where I was because it went from absolute Bliss to Absolute pain I mean where this thing hit me in the face and where it came out my foot with like two hot pokers."

But he realized it's not his choice.

The lady doing CPR had stopped and was kneeling next to him. It took several minutes before he was conscious enough to open his eyes. When he opened them, everything was really out of focus. He wanted to say something to thank her. Unfortunately what came out was "I'm a doctorate", as if that would reassure her. He realized at that point, okay, you're not thinking very clearly. Just shut up and wait this out.

Everybody started running over. They called an ambulance and the police. He thought, I don't want to go sit in the emergency room for four to six hours to have somebody tell me I'm alive. So he opted to have them take him home. He called his cardiologist friends and neurologist friends, went to their offices. Everybody said the same thing: well you're lucky you're alive.

The Silence

After his near-death experience, he was afraid to say anything to anybody. This was the early 90s. Somebody could call the state and say this guy's kind of loose around the edges you might want to pull his license because he's saying things that don't make a lot of sense.

He kept his mouth shut for the most part. He talked to friends and family about it, but he wasn't gonna embarrass himself and have people call him a lunatic either.

Before the lightning, he was on a road for academic Orthopedics. He wanted to publish papers. He was chairman of a big spine meeting every year. He was going down that road. And none of those things seemed to be important anymore.

He was really in a kind of lost, beginning to wonder why he went through this because it wasn't making a whole lot of sense.

The Music That Wouldn't Stop

Then all of a sudden he started to have this insatiable desire to hear classical piano music, which was a big departure. He was a kid of the 60s. There was rock and roll. There really wasn't much of anything else. But now all of a sudden he was having this desire to hear the classical piano stuff, and it was such a strong feeling that he actually drove to Albany because it was the closest place that would have classical piano CDs.

He remembers when he went in there that this CD of Vladimir Ashkenazi playing his favorite Chopin just jumped off the shelf into his hands. He thought, okay, this obviously is something I'm supposed to have.

He bought the CD and started listening to it and was absolutely captivated. He could not stop listening. He listened to it all day long.

And then very shortly after that, he realized it was not going to be enough to be able to listen to this music. He needed to learn how to play it.

That was a big problem since he didn't have a piano and didn't know how to play. The very next day, one of their babysitters came by and said she was moving and had this old upright piano she wanted to keep, but could she store it at their house for a year?

He thought, okay this is kind of weird. He'd had this thought yesterday that he needed a piano, and suddenly a piano was here.

The Dream

He started to try to teach himself how to play. A couple of weeks into it, he had a dream.

In the dream, he was walking out onto a stage. On the stage he saw himself, and he was playing in a concert hall, playing music on a piano. As he was walking toward himself, he really came to the realization that this is not somebody else's music, this is mine.

The music had a loud ending and it woke him up out of a sound sleep. He remembers sitting up on the edge of the bed and looking at the time: 3:15 in the morning. He thought, well let me go out to this piano. He started trying to plunk out different notes of things that he heard, but he had no idea how to write music and no idea how to play it either. So he said the hell with this and went back to bed.

But from that moment on, whenever he went to the piano, the music from the dream would start to play. And it would play all the time.

And if he ignored it, it would start to play when he didn't want it to. He was trying to concentrate on surgery, trying to do something else. It was that powerful inside of him.

It was like, okay, this is much more than I understand that it is.

The next day he went out and had to find a program to teach how to write music. It was a program called Sibelius, essentially writing music for dummies. He was able to take that program and start to write the music from the dream.

Tony has discussed his compositional process in greater depth in an interview focused on the mystical music he brought back, where he describes how the melodies continued to flow through him.

Possessed

He spent the next seven months, every single free minute he had, and he really went off the deep end with the music. He literally got up at 4:30 and would practice till 6:30 when he had to go to work. Then he would do his 12 or 14 hours. When he came home, it was time to put kids to bed, and then as soon as they were in bed he was back at the piano. He was there until 12, 1 o'clock.

"I was absolutely possessed by the music and the piano and nothing else was important," he says.

One thing he's found with the music is that it takes him about as close to that feeling, that Euphoria of being on the other side, as he can get. "It's almost like there's a a connection that I I can access," he says. "It's a frequency that I'm able to tune into."

And in reading about other composers, the great composers all said the same thing. Mozart was most prolific about it and said the music would come to him in finished form and all he did was write it down.

Lots of people have speculated that our brain is nothing more than a receiver. There's no way in the world it could house all the information that we have access to. There's some off-site place that we are able to communicate with.

What He Knows Now

"Life exists after death," Tony says. "We're in this form for a certain period of time and then we leave this form and we become something else so there's it's just a Continuum of existence you keep going through this this process you reincarnate as something else or someone else your spirit continues and you go through an evolution of of learning and phases of of healing and understanding of of what you experienced in this present life and what you're going to work on in the next one."

"I mean that's what we're here for," he says. "We're here to learn and to experience and to evolve spiritually into a higher being than what we are now."

The way he looks at it, everybody can go back to the source but you have to earn your way back. You do that by going through Proving Grounds if you will. You experientially develop.

There's two polarities, positive and negative. Moving along a positive polarity is service to others as opposed to the negative which is service to self. If you can think along the line of service to others in your daily life, then that gives you a more of an advantage to to grow spiritually and ultimately find your way home, rejoin with the source from once everything came.

"This was the greatest thing that I've ever experienced in my life," Tony says. "I was given an opportunity to to see what happens after death. Death is not to be feared, it's just a changing form. You still exist as whoever you are and always will be."

Before the lightning experience, he was very grounded in science in terms of what is reality. And now he completely understands that there's much more to our existence than we have any idea of.

"If everybody could experience that before they die," he says, "they would have a whole different perspective on life and and what we're doing here and it would change everything."

Tony has also shared his story and its implications in another detailed interview about his afterlife mission, where he discusses what he believes we're all meant to learn.

What This Tells Us

Tony Cicoria's account contains several elements that appear across thousands of near-death experiences: the immediate separation of consciousness from the physical body, the retention of complete mental faculties and identity, the ability to observe the physical world from a disembodied perspective, and the encounter with a transcendent light described as pure love.

But what makes Tony's story particularly significant is what happened after he came back. The music didn't come from his own mind or training. It came through him, fully formed, insistent, undeniable. This matches what many of history's greatest composers have described: not creation, but reception. Mozart said the music came to him complete. Brahms spoke of tuning into the "Infinite" to receive his compositions. Tony experienced this firsthand, not as metaphor, but as literal reality.

His description of the brain as a receiver rather than a generator aligns with a growing body of evidence from NDE research. If the brain produced consciousness, then severe brain trauma or cardiac arrest should eliminate all experience. Instead, people like Tony report their most vivid, clear, and memorable experiences precisely when their brains are compromised or flatlined. They're not hallucinating. They're accessing something the physical brain normally filters or limits.

The detail about losing his physical form and becoming a ball of energy is one of the most commonly reported features of deep NDEs. Experiencers describe a progression: first observing from a location near the body, then losing attachment to form entirely, then merging with or traveling through the light. Tony's account follows this pattern exactly. He didn't read about this beforehand. He lived it, and only later discovered that thousands of others have described the same progression.

What strikes me most about Tony's account is his reaction to returning. He wasn't grateful to be alive. He was angry. He begged not to come back. This isn't the response of someone hallucinating or dreaming. This is the response of someone who has directly experienced a state of being so far beyond our normal existence that physical life, even with a loving family and meaningful work, feels like a painful limitation by comparison. And yet he came back with a gift: music that connects him to that frequency, that state, that source. Music that allows others to feel, even briefly, what he felt in that river of light.

Tony's experience suggests that death isn't an ending but a returning. We don't go somewhere foreign. We go home. And the love waiting there, the peace, the sense of rightness and belonging, is so overwhelming that our greatest fear shouldn't be dying. It should be forgetting, while we're here, what we really are and where we're really from. Tony remembers. And through his music, he's trying to help the rest of us remember too.