What Keeps Us from Being All We Are Capable Of Being

by Lewis Brown Griggs 

In this Lifetime I was blessed to be born (08/16/48) and raised as a fourteenth generation member of my maternal 1620 Mayflower family of Ann & Edward Fuller, my mother’s father Lewis H. Brown having been the chairman of a major corporation in New York and the architect of the Marshall Plan after being sent by President Truman and General Lucius Clay to study and report back on how to rebuild Germany after WWII (A Report on Germany, April 1947), and also a twelfth generation member of my paternal 1635 Hopewell family of Alyce & George Griggs, my father’s great-grandfather Colonel Chauncey W. Griggs having been the founder of two major food and lumber corporations in Minnesota and Washington. 

Educated and graduated from St. Paul Academy in 1966 and Amherst College in 1970, I gained professional experience in the federal government (GSA ’70-’72), an educational start-up firm (Spellbinder ’72-’74), and two public television stations (WGBH & KQED ’74-’78) until God in the first of two Near Death Experiences. 

On 11 March 1977 in Berkeley CA when my car was totaled in an accident my Spirit immediately left my Body as if in a white tornado and traveled quickly through a tunnel and out the other end into pure White Light. On the way I remember wishing there was a way to convey to those left behind that while it is totally natural and healthy to feel human sadness over the loss of a loved one it would be ideal if those left behind could also simultaneously know and trust that the Soul & Spirit of the loved one are immediately, upon leaving the Body, in transition to 100% pure Light and Love and Peace and Truth and Bliss. 

Unlike many who are given the choice to stay in the Light or return either to the same Body or to a new infant’s Body, I was immediately told in my Conversation with God, “Lewis, you have been Called here to have this Conversation and to be sent back because you are not doing your Work.” In response to my saying “OK, take me, I surrender, I will do your Work”, I was told “No, Lewis, it is not my work you must do; it is your Work”; and in response to my asking “Well, what is my Work?”, I was asked “What keeps you Lewis from Being all you are capable of Being?” So not being given the answer and not knowing the answer myself, and yet feeling that I needed to search deeply within myself to discover a profound Truth, I responded that having grown up with nothing but love and opportunity and freedom and privilege I was told not only that “We are all One under God” but also that here on Earth we are not all as blessed as I was, and I was told “Noblesse Oblige” and that since I was lucky to be ‘better off’ than others I must ‘give back’, and that as a result I seemed to have developed a class consciousness and discomfort preventing me from knowing how to bridge the gap between my Spirit and that of anyone of any class or culture or ethnicity different than mine. In response, as in the movie Amadeus when Mozart hit the perfect note and said “There it is!”, I heard God’s words saying “There it is, Lewis. There is your Work!”, and I was sent back down through the same white tunnel with no further conversation about how my Life was going to be changed for me to Do my Life’s Work. 

However, in the Light where knowledge of all is accessible I had experienced the Truths that We really are all One from the same individual Source of all Energy from which we all come, and on my return back into the body of my life on Earth I experienced that when our Spirit enters each human body composed of the only precise DNA that has ever existed we then become uniquely different each and every One of us. So the profound Truth that we are all One and simultaneously are uniquely different became the essential message of all my Work in cultural human diversity over the next twenty years (www.Griggs.com). I had also learned in the Light to notice when doors open easily and on their own rather than controlled by me, and then when back in the Body I was able to be open to learning how to recognize and value individual human diversity as Gifts provided to one another to help us achieve whatever Common goal we have in any partnership or team or organization, and how to utilize whatever Gifts we have been provided to help process appropriately whatever requires human assistance to complete its manifestation. 

Other Revelations from God included the humble recognition that any strength (like my confident pride) could become a weakness, and that any weakness (like my ignorant ethnocentrism) could be an asset as an opportunity for learning and could therefore become a strength, like how to authentically teach others from my experience how to learn to value differences as gifts with which to maximize personal and interpersonal and organizational effectiveness. From this I learned what a relief it is to always perceive learning opportunities as a natural part of Being constantly on my own Growing Edge rather than feeling after various accomplishments my arrogant pride of Being on the Leading Edge. And I learned as well what a relief it is to recognize my own 100% responsibility for whatever portion of any relationship dysfunction I felt might be mine, rather than assuming that whatever seemed to belong to the other person(s) was the full reason for the dysfunction. 

But God is never finished Revealing whatever we need to continue Being more fully all we are capable of Being, and with as much ease as we are conscious to receive and/or as much challenge as we require. 

Twenty years after my Conversation with God in which I was Called to my Life’s Work, on 15 June 1997 my fifteen-year-old daughter and ten year old son joined me to celebrate Father’s Day in a white-water raft trip down the Middle Fork of the Flathead River in Glacier Park MT. While rafting in water that was higher and wider and faster than usual after heavy rains and prior snow melt, a one hundred foot tall Cottonwood tree fell off the river bank and landed on my head, fracturing my skull and shoulder and leaving me in a coma for eight days, from which I came out with such severe left-frontal-lobe traumatic brain injury that I wasn’t able to read or write or walk or talk and knew not the names of my parents or siblings or children or where or even who I was. 

The learning Revealed from God in this event and in the fifteen ongoing years of continuous and now 85-95% recovery (depending on the moment) is no less amazing and Life changing than was the Conversation in the Light. I experienced the Mind & Body & Spirit on their own (without any help from my human ego or personality or positive thinking) give all Energy to surviving rather than dying, and once that was accomplished after eight days in the coma I experienced the Mind & Body & Spirit on their own again over three years of hospital assistance give all Energy to the recovery one cell at a time of 70% of all normal multi-tasking abilities until I was released to manage all further recovery without hospital assistance. 

In the beginning of the recovery process the metaphorical experience of feeling trapped in the center of a tornado unable to regain any basic skills forced me to discover the essential core Soul identity that I AM which I had never fully experienced so consciously in all the years of having such effective and well-rewarded skills of external expression. It is as if it required both the Conversation with God in the Light to discover that we are all One and then also the Being trapped by the traumatic brain injury to discover that without anything else functional it was another Revelation to just Be as I AM, and that for me to begin to experience fuller integration of Mind & Body & Spirit required both of these opposite and complementary events. 
Additional learning Revealed in the ongoing recovery and reintegration process included deep Gratitude for every small aspect of recovery since it was and still is always an improvement over whatever was the condition before, and before there was enough consciousness and perspective to have any understanding for what was not yet recovered there was only huge Gratitude for whatever was an additional capacity that wasn’t accessible the day or week before. Another learning Revealed by the complete inability to focus on more than one thing at a time was and still is the new ability to avoid the multi-tasking when not necessary and experience the new luxury of Being able to stay totally Present and focused just on the one task Being executed or the one person Being in more Spiritual essential connection with. 

So beyond all the additional Revelations gained by other more typically normal life experiences including Love of family and friends and ‘falling in Love’ and marriage and child rearing and divorce and financial successes and failures, etc., my two Near Death Experiences have been the most powerful sources of God’s Revelations in this lifetime. May I Be so lucky to be open to more Revelations from God without such severe crises being required for me to be so receptive!