Here is the full transcript of Lewis Brown Griggs’ talk titled “The Gift of Near Death” at TEDxAmericanRiviera 2012 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Death and Spiritual Growth
Hello, I get to not only talk with you, but have you think and feel about perhaps the most unthinkable and the most unexpected experience certainly I’ve ever had and maybe some of you have had also, and that is death. Think about that. And not only the moments before death, which probably feel like pain and severe crisis, but we’re going to go to the experience after death and returning back after death and even recovery from what caused the death.
And can you imagine that the most unthinkable and the most painful and negative experience in our perception might actually be the most positive learning possible in one’s life and after life, and might even help us grow more fully than even all the other learnings and crises and have more gratitude for what was learned? Imagine that. I have had that experience. In fact, twice. I guess I didn’t learn enough the first time.
So first imagine this moment of death in your own body, in your own spirit, in your own mind. And those of you who have been there can do this easily with me. Those of you who have not, literally imagine it. Is there pain? We’re talking about as you leave now. Is there pain? Is there release? Is there grief? Is there joy?
Pure Bliss at the Moment of Death
I want to assure you, and all of us who have been out and back want to assure you that the precise moment is nothing but pure bliss, pure release, pure joy, pure love, pure light. And if you can stand it here, none of all of the words together is enough to describe it. Okay?
And on March 11th, ’77, I had that experience of totaling my automobile and I have perfect memory of all that I’m now going to describe to you. Imagine what you can hear to be able to be in your memory and as clear as I’m looking at you today. In a totaled automobile, upon the moment of impact, my spirit left immediately and went flying up the little white tornado, the best metaphor I have, and immediately left behind the automobile and my body.
Wanting Others to Know the Joy
And immediately with human emotions still, because I was still closer to humanity than what I’m going to describe in a moment, the first feeling was such joy and such relief and such release that I wanted to share it with all that I had just left, who I love and who love me.
So the first learning, the first strength that comes from a weakness, the weakness being ignorance, the weakness being I haven’t been there, the weakness being an experience I haven’t had yet. And as I go through all of these examples, I want us to notice not only the unthinkable. But as we think about them, imagine that our greatest weaknesses, our greatest ignorance, our greatest holes in our whole self are the opportunities for growth and learning, which become our most authentic strengths and the most authentic expressions of our internal self and our own spiritual growth. So death can be the most amazing of all? The answer is yes.
Let Go of the Spirit
So I want to remind all of us who are about to lose somebody or who have just lost somebody that the feeling I had as I went was wanting you all to know immediately that in addition to the healthy natural loss of the human form that you love, that we love, healthy and natural, have that sadness and with no conflict, let go of the spirit, which has already left and is gone now in 100% light, love, peace, truth, freedom, like never experienced before. And trust that and simultaneously have the sadness and release and let go the spirit you love. Okay? One deep learning and they just keep happening.
So even as I share the ones I learned in death, you can remember and notice the ones in your own life from whatever crisis has been the source of your greatest learning. And without being glad the crisis happened, you can be glad for the learning that only came from that crisis and thereby be better able to notice every little difference, every conflict, every challenge as an opportunity for more learning and more growth with such gratitude that if we do that well enough, we don’t need to get hit as hard as someone who has to have two near-death experiences before he fully gets it.
So I’m now going through the tunnel that we hear about at such speed that when I get out to the other end, there is, as if there are words to describe it, this is even more amazing than what I already described, there is pure light. Pure light, love, truth, grace, peace, all consciousness, all knowingness and having left the body way behind and even the mind, the spirit starts to experience complete oneness with all that ever was, ever will be and all that is and complete understanding of all of it.
Imagine such consciousness and hold that. It is accessible to every one of us. At moments, we are in human bodies. We slip in and out and we all have access to it and we need not have to die first.
The Voice in the Light
And in that light, some of us are given a choice to come back and some are not. Some are spoken to and some are not. The stories and the details are all different and the essential core learning and truth is similar. But in my case, I was spoken to by a voice I heard really well and by the way, every time everyone is spoken to in the light by a voice is exactly the voice they need to hear and exactly the language and exactly the tone that we need to hear.
And I heard this voice say, “Lewis, you are called here to have this conversation and to be sent back because you are not doing your work.” In response to which, I said, “I surrender, take me, I’m yours, I will do your work.” I must have been imagining I was being called to be a missionary of sorts and I was told immediately, “No, Lewis, it’s not my work you need to do.
It’s your work. It’s your work. It’s your work.” We each are doing our own work and I got it very clearly.
“It’s your work you need to do, Lewis.” Great. Tell me, what is my work? Here I was in a place where since all truth is known, I expected the source of all truth to be able to make it easier for me. Didn’t happen. “No, Lewis. What is it that keeps you from being all you are capable of being?” Ask yourselves, each of you, that very thinkable question even though it’s this unthinkable moment of death and this unexpected moment where suddenly the car is totaled, that whole life is left behind and you are with the source of all truth being asked, “What is it that keeps you from being all you are capable of being?”
Answering the Voice’s Question
I didn’t know. So all I could do is dig so deeply to come up with what might be a piece of it, which was, and we are all on our own paths, doing our own work, coming in different doors toward all the same truth we reach. So my path and my door, I figured out has to have something to do with the fact that I was raised with love, privilege, education, endless opportunity by parents of two founding families of states and corporations with leadership skills and values and I thought, “What’s missing?”
Until I went deeper and got that in addition to the words that “we are all one under God,” I was also given the words that, “Well, no bless oblige, you have more than others, so give back.” And I went deeper and realized that with those gifts, I had created a feeling of betterment and that I had to help others who didn’t have as much and yet I started to discover loneliness, that even though I was told “we are all one under God,” my experience was, “Well, we may all be one under God, but somehow I and my tribe are better than you and your tribe.”
And the gap that created in me between my spirit and yours was so deep that I didn’t know how to bridge it. So I was told, just like Amadeus was, just like Mozart was in the movie “Amadeus,” when that perfect note was hit, “There it is.” I was told, “There it is, Lewis, there’s your work.” And I was sent back down without any knowledge about how my life would change. And what happened was doors started to open.
Another learning from another weakness of thinking that I could control what doors I wanted to open became that doors opened on their own and others closed on their own. And if I could just notice that, if each of us could just notice that and then move through the doors that open and then use whatever skills were given in this body and this life experiences to help co-create with the universe whatever is intended in that open door.
The Experience of Oneness
And so in one sentence, for 30 years I became, over the past 30 years, one of the original founders and leaders of what’s called cultural diversity training, which was of course not for anyone else. It was for me to get it and to learn how to bridge the gap and see all of our differences as gifts to one another. Because in addition to discovering we’re all one, I discovered as I came back that we’re each in the only DNA that’s ever existed in the history of life on earth.
And our differences are gifts to one another toward whatever common goal we have in this relationship or this team in this organization. It’s that simple. And it’s a gift every time. So then with this consciousness we start to notice relationships change and openness happens in all kinds of forms. So I learned a couple of years ago that my father was beginning to pass. And I got to share with him where I had been and what I knew he was going to be experiencing.
Conversations with Father
And so I told him all about it and asked him, because he was getting close to being ready to go, if he was now ready. And he said, “No, son. I love waking up every day and seeing the eyes of your mother.” Great, dad. You keep enjoying that. And a few months later I asked him again when there was more deterioration, “Dad, remember this and this and this, this wonderful experience you’re going to have. Are you ready yet?”
“It’s a difficult decision now, son. Part of me is ready. And I still like waking up.” And then a few months later, two days before he passed, I could tell there wasn’t much time left. And I asked him, “Dad, are you ready?” “Yes, son.” So I remembered what I had learned the first time, which was to let go. Help the spirit go and be in such peace. So there has never been grief since the day he passed.
There’s love, there’s missing, there’s loss, and there’s celebration. Because I know where the spirit is, okay? So I hadn’t learned enough yet, I guess, because on Father’s Day 97, I was on a Whitewater River trip with my 15-year-old daughter and my 10-year-old son when the unexpected and unthinkable happened again.
The Near-Death Experience
A 100-foot tall cottonwood tree fell off the edge of the river and landed on my head in the raft as we were going by. “Hello? What have I done now, God?” And my son also was hit. And we are all okay now, so you can hear this in another way. And there were numerous gifts if we had more time. But he had a fractured skull, was drowned, knocked out, and floating toward the falls. And another woman in the raft saved him, brought him back.
And recently he got an 800 in math and went to engineering school and now he’s got a job in an engineering company. And yet he never forgets that we are here. We are alive. And everything else is small. In my case, the skull was so fractured that I was dead, perceived of by all others, tied up once they realized I wasn’t quite dead because I was very brain damaged, left frontal lobe destroyed so severely I couldn’t read, write, walk, or talk or make any sense. So I have no memory of this in the coma.
However, I have a cellular memory of what it feels like for the mind and the body and the spirit to choose to live instead of die and give every ounce of energy to that. It’s an amazing experience and I, personality and ego, had nothing to do with it. I have had to learn this many times. And then when I came out of a coma in eight days, instead of having died, I was sent immediately in the traumatic brain injury recovery process and told, as my family was told, appropriately that we had never know whether this is going to plateau at 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 or 50%.
Gratitude in Recovery
It’s been 15 years and I am now, depending on the moment, those of you who know me will know, sometimes I’m 85% and sometimes 95% back. And I’m at least conscious enough to know there are some things still missing and I have other gifts I never would have had. And yet the process of the recovery developed such gratitude that no matter what your crisis, I want to repeat what I said so that you repeat it in your own memory to yourself, “the learning and the gratitude is a gift at least as great as the cost and the loss.” And we have to repeat for many of us, that doesn’t mean we’re glad it happened.
And yet the learning and the gifts are at least as great as the cost. Please hold that, value that as an enormous gift and hope none of us needs to get hit so hard again in order to keep that sensitivity and that gratitude for every moment worth of learning.
So from not being able to read, write, walk or talk or knowing the names of my children, my siblings, my parents, my wife, I began the process of regaining every bit of multitasking that we take for granted from zero. And now I have memory of every moment, every moment, starting with being in the center perhaps of the very same tornado that first took me 15 years before that, 20 years before that.
Because at the center of the tornado, I now learned the essential core self is in that spot, the apex where everything is 100% still. It isn’t out in the personality and the ego and all the skills and all the gifts and all the interpersonal interactions and all the to-dos.
The Soul’s Essence
It isn’t there. I didn’t know that. Even after the white light, so picture this in closing, pure white light, now I know and I share with you, we are all one. And we are uniquely different, every one of us. And at the inner inside center of all of this uniqueness and oneness, there is still the individual soul, separate even from the personality and all the oneness, and the soul never dies. It lives. It lives in bliss constantly. The soul cannot be killed, cannot be damaged, can’t be raped, can’t be abused.
The soul is 100% light and truth and love and peace in every one of us every minute. How can such a weakness become such a strength? And how can any of us at any moment forget that and need to be reminded? And from now on, however, we can all be reminded with the smallest sense of the energy within us and around us that is either enhanced or depleted by one another. And we each take responsibility for having it become all it’s capable of being as we are. Amen. Namaste. Those are my words.