I walked around the front of the building where there was a pay phone attached what I hadn't realized was that a storm cloud had blown up over the lake and so we're right next to the lake so I walk over and I'm gonna call my mom and I put in the code and the phone and I'm trying to get her on the pay phone and I heard a huge crack and this big flash of light came out of the phone and it hit me right in the face and just threw me back like a rag
doll 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 [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] I grew up in Kingston New York I was there for my first 18 years I had gotten into some trouble my last year in high school stupid things that teenagers do my high school
football coach had gone to the Citadel which was a military school in South Carolina he put a bug in my father's ear that I needed to go to the Citadel because I needed some mild Corrections and so my I remember my father saying well you can go to any school you want to but if you don't go to the Citadel don't come home I thought okay it makes it pretty simple choice so I went to the Citadel and I played football there and got my education in biology when I was there my last year I
had the honor of working with Albert St Georgie who was a Nobel Prize winner who defined the way muscle worked at that time it made me realize that that's what I wanted to do and I kind of had this vision of being one of the Lab Rats that worked in the basement of some big institution and learned all kinds of great things so I decided to go to graduate school and I spent the next five years getting my doctorate in physiology with a minor in biophysics when I finished my graduate degree there were no jobs
and what had happened was there were a lot of people that had gone to graduate school to get out of the war the Vietnam War because of the War ending when I graduated there was a glut of phds who just came onto the market and as a result of that there were no real good jobs and so I thought you know what I need to make another decision and I thought I'm going to go to medical school but at the end of it I was trying to decide what kind of a physician I wanted to
be and I settled on Orthopedics because I was one of those kids that loved taking things apart putting them back together and rebuilding things and I think because of my Italian Heritage I had some carpentry jeans that were buried in there someplace and so that's what I settled on in 1994 my wife had five people with birthdays in the month of August so every year we would have a communal birthday party and they had picked a place called Sleepy Hollow Lake at the lake there were Pavilions that you could rent and she rented one that
would hold 25 plus people and that was going to be our our August get together I was given the job of running the barbecue so I was outside getting the food ready and most everybody else was upstairs in the Pavilion and at the beginning of the day it was beautiful outside someone was shining it was a pleasant temperature and everything seemed good at some point I had decided I should call my mom to check on her because she was not going to be there by this time my dad had already passed so my mom was
there by herself and I wanted to check on her and so I I got somebody to cover the barbecue and I walked around the front of the building where there was a pay phone attached what I hadn't realized was that a storm cloud had blown up over the lake and so we're right next to the lake so I walk over and I'm gonna call my mom and I put in the code in the phone and I'm trying to get her on the pay phone and I let it ring five six seven times and she didn't
pick up so I thought all right she's busy I'll try again later and as I started to take the phone away from my face to hang it up I heard a huge crack and this big flash of light came out of the phone and it hit me right in the face and just threw me back like a ragdoll and as it threw me back I had the strangest sensation of moving forward and and I remember standing there going this doesn't make any sense I know I saw the lightning I knew I'd been hit and I
knew I'd been thrown backwards but now I'm standing here and and nothing's making sense and I look at the phone and the phone's dangling and I'm just standing there just absolutely bewildered and at that point I hear my mother-in-law screaming and she's at the top of the stairs I'm at the bottom of the stairs and she starts running down the stairs headed right at me and I thought this can't be good when your mother-in-law is running at you screaming that something's bad as she got down in front of me she was looking off to her
left and and I thought this is really strange and it's like I wasn't even there and I'm and I'm like what the hell and I turned to go where she's going and I took about three steps and I run into myself on the ground and I'm like oh I'm dead and it was such a shock I fully expected that when you died there would be some sort of a anything something would happen to tell you you know Bells whistles who knows what but there would be some sort of a signal that hey buddy you're dead
um 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 there was a lady who was waiting to use the phone she gets down to start doing CPR turns out she's a nurse and I'm standing there and I'm trying to call out to anybody who listened and I don't see you know I can see all of them I can hear all of them but nobody can see
or hear me and then it occurred to me that I'm standing here and I'm thinking exactly the way I normally would I'm complete control of my mind and I'm thinking in the vernacular and the way that I normally would think and I'm having these massive racing thoughts are going through my head trying to make sense of this whole thing but I realized at that moment that whoever I am I always am 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 [Music] so we're essentially two people you know 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 and you know when I went up to the to the body and I and I looked at it and um I mean it seemed to be very dispassionate about it it was like that's me but it's not you know I'm I'm me I'm still who
I always was and that's nothing but an empty shell and and that was that was pretty Earth shaking it was not a frightening experience it was you know it was just very matter-of-factly this is the way things really are and then I thought well there's no point in standing here because nobody can see me or hear me and I turned around I start to walk toward the stairs and I'm going to go up the stairs and check on my family and I started up the stairs and I got to about the third step and I'm
looking down at the ground and I start to see my legs dissolve and I thought well okay this is getting really weird um and as I got to the top of the stairs I had lost all form I was just a ball of energy [Music] the stairs when you get to the top of the first level it goes up another few steps to the left and I didn't bother with that I had no form I just went through the wall and when I came out on the other side of the wall I came out right
over the top of my wife who was sitting painting children's faces and I remember taking a picture in my head of of who was there what kids were there how the furniture was arranged and what order the kids were standing in and that became an important issue later on when we were comparing notes and I was able to say all these things that verified the fact that yeah I did see it and I was there I continued going through that room and when I get out of the 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 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 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 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 um and in my whole life at that point I realized that I was going someplace I started to see a collage of high points and low points in my life it was just there wasn't a lot of explanation or or thought it was just there's pictures of of different different things in my life high points low points trauma whatever it was and at that point I was
just kind of settling into flowing in the Stream I didn't know where it was going or where it was taking me but it was exciting and it was almost it was an ecstasy it was such a wonderful feeling and then all of a sudden it's like somebody flipped the switch suddenly I was in pain and I was back in my body calling out loud in my head to whoever would listen that you know please don't make me do this I don't want to go back and I had three kids and a wife and and I
loved my life but there was no comparison to what I was experiencing outside my body I was like please don't make me do this 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 I realized that you know it's not my choice and so the the lady who was doing CPR had stopped and she was kneeling next to me and it
took several minutes before I I was conscious to be able to open my eyes and when I opened my eyes everything was really out of focus and I wanted to say something to thank her and unfortunately what came out was I'm a doctorate you know it's okay that like you know what a stupid thing to say and so I realized at that point that okay you're not thinking very clearly you know just shut up and and just wait this out you know of course everybody starts running over and they call it an ambulance and they
call the police and I 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 I opted to just have him take me home and I called my cardiologist friends and my neurologist friends and I said you know this happened and they said we'll come right over and went to their offices and and everybody said the same thing it's like well you're lucky you're live [Music] after my near-death experience I was afraid to say anything to anybody this was you know in the
early 90s and at that time um you know 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 I kept my mouth shut for the most part I talked to friends and family about it but you know it was I wasn't gonna embarrass myself and and have people call me a lunatic either before the lightning I was on a road for academic Orthopedics I wanted to publish papers and I was a chairman of
a big spine meeting every every year and you know I was I was going down that road and none of those things seemed to be important anymore I was really in a you know kind of lost I was beginning to wonder why did I go through this because it wasn't making a whole lot of sense to me [Music] then all of a sudden I started to have this insatiable desire to hear classical piano music which was that was a big departure for me I 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 I'm I'm having this desire to hear the classical piano stuff and it was so such a strong feeling that I actually I drove to Albany because it was the closest place that would have classical piano CDs I remember when I went in there that this CD of Vladimir Ashkenazi playing his favorite Chopin just jumped off the shelf into my hands and I thought okay this obviously is something I'm supposed to have and so I I bought the CD and I started listening to it
and it was absolutely captivated I could not stop listening and I listened to it all day long and then very shortly after that I realized it it was not going to be enough to be able to listen to this music I needed to learn how to play it and that was a big problem since I didn't have a piano and I didn't know how to play so you know I was like okay well now what do I do well the very next day our one of our babysitters um came by and said I'm I'm moving
you know and I had this old upright piano that I want to I want to keep but could I store it at your house for a year and I thought okay this is kind of weird um you know I have this thought yesterday that I need a piano and suddenly a piano is here [Music] so I started to try to teach myself how to play in a couple of weeks into it I have a dream and then a stream I'm walking out onto a stage and on the stage I see myself and I'm playing in
a concert hall and I'm playing music on a piano and as I'm walking toward myself I really come to the realization that this is not somebody else's music this is mine the music had a loud ending and it woke me up out of a sound sleep and I remember sitting up on the edge of the bed and I looked at the time it was 3 15 in the morning and I thought well let me go out to this piano and I started trying to plunk out different notes of things that I heard but I had
no idea how to write music and I had no idea how to play it either so I said the hell with this and went back to bed but from that moment on whenever I went to the piano the music from the dream would start to play and it would play all the time and and if I ignored it it would start to play when I didn't want it to I was trying to concentrate on surgery I was trying to do something else it was that that powerful inside of me that you know it was like
okay this is much more than I understand that it is and the next day I went out and I had to find a program to teach how to write music and it was a program called Sebelius which is essentially writing music for dummies and I was able to take that that program and would start to write the music from the dream and I spent the next seven months every single free minute I had and I really went off the deep end with the music I I literally got up at 4 30 and I would practice
till 6 30 when I had to go to work and then I would I would do my 12 or 14 hours and when I came home it was time to put kids to bed and then as soon as they were in bed I was back at the piano and I was and I was there until 12 1 o'clock I was absolutely possessed by the music and the piano and nothing else was important one thing that I have found with the music is that it takes me about as close to that feeling that Euphoria of being
on the other side as I can get it's almost like there's a a connection that I I can access it's a frequency that I'm able to tune into and you know in reading about other composers you know the great composers all said the same thing Mozart was most prolific about it and you said you know if the music would come to me in finished form and all I did was write it down and you know 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 life exists after death where 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 we're here to learn and to experience and to evolve spiritually into a higher being than what we are now the way I look at it is everybody can go back to the source but you have to earn your way back and you do that by going through Proving Grounds if you will you experientially develop there's two polarities there's positive and negative and moving along a positive polarity is service to others as opposed to the negative which is service to self and
if 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 foreign this was the greatest thing that I've ever experienced in my life 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 I was very grounded in science
in terms of you know what is reality and now I completely understand that there's much more to our existence than we have any idea of [Music] if everybody could experience that before they die they would have a whole different perspective on life and and what we're doing here and it would change everything [Music] foreign [Music] foreign
