Читать книгу Guided By Angels: There Are No Goodbyes, My Tour of the Spirit World - Paddy McMahon - Страница 10

In the early years after I found I could communicate with spirit guides, my main contact was with Shebaka. I wrote my first books about what he communicated to me. But by the time I started work on this book, Margaret Anna was the main spirit with whom I had regular ‘conversations’, although I still got interjections from others from time to time.

Margaret Anna seemed as keen as I was to explore the details of life after our death on earth, and to tell me all about her personal experience of settling in to a new life in spirit. She wanted me to pass on this information to others here on earth so that they know what to expect.

‘I want to shout a big YES to life, to the death of death, if I might put it like that, so that anybody and everybody can say, “I know my body is going to die, but I know, too, that there’s nothing to fear in that – it’s a celebration of continuing transformation in life.” I want to go into details about how I express myself in my present state and what life in spirit generally is like.’

She answered question after question, explaining the intricacies of the process of death, as I tried to make sense of it all. Her answers jumped around like a patchwork that I had to make sense of. Sometimes she moved on from a topic and came back to it later, when she knew I was ready to hear about it. I never knew where our communications would lead, but I was heartened by everything I found out.

I discovered, for example, that it’s usual to have a looking-back process or ‘review’ of the physical life that is over. That’s when we assess how well we succeeded in whatever we set out to achieve in our lives. Of course, we may find ourselves disappointed by our efforts. It’s not intended to be a guilt-inducing exercise but, rather, an objective look at our progress on earth. Margaret Anna emphasised the fact that there is no pressure; we judge ourselves when we feel ready to do so. In fact, no one forces us to do anything at all, which would be interfering with our free will.

Although a review can be a positive experience, I did wonder if people might be anxious about looking back on past performance. Certainly it’s a far cry from presenting ourselves for judgment, as is often traditionally taught, but nonetheless it can be a daunting prospect. Margaret Anna’s experience was bound to be helpful, so I asked her whether she felt that she had achieved what she set out to achieve when she looked back at her earthly life.

She answered that, on the whole, she did. In her later years on earth she didn’t experience much of a sense of achievement. She had written a lot and talked a lot; she had raised a considerable amount of money to help people in need. She had consistently served in as loving a way as she could. But she had also been a source of dissent, and many of her projects had collapsed. She was often disillusioned and she see-sawed between religions. At the end, very much alone apart from a few stalwart friends, she couldn’t see herself as anything other than a failure, well-intentioned though she was. But, she told me:

‘In spirit there was – there always is – a very different perspective. It’s a futile and altogether pointless exercise trying to judge a life’s expression within its time span. When I looked at that earth life from the much broader vantage point of spirit I saw that, through my writings, my talks, my contacts with people, the ideas I put into motion, my passion for equal opportunities for everybody, I had opened doors to the raising of consciousness outside of the limits of a particular time scale. In other words, I had made a contribution – the effects of which would live on after I passed on. Once I had taken that on board in spirit I was able to forgive myself for all the human failings I had manifested and let myself enjoy the freedom I now had.’

Love after death

One of the major tragedies in our lives is when we lose our loved ones. I have come across this sort of situation many times and it can be heartbreakingly sad. Margaret Anna mentioned how much in love she had been with her fiancé Charles Holmes, her devastation when he died, and how different her future life would have been had he lived. But the good news is that they have resumed their relationship. She says, ‘We love each other in a more complete way than would have been possible on earth.’

So, while the pain of physical separation is very hard to bear there is great comfort in the thought that we will not only see our loved ones again, but also resume our relationships with them in a more profound way. Anything that is possible on earth is possible in spirit.

Communicating with guides

As I mentioned earlier, as a child I found great comfort in the idea of guardian angels, who were always helping me in a loving way. There was no fear associated with them. They helped me in ways too numerous to mention, and my belief that they were there, by my side, protecting me and my family from whatever I believed might endanger us, made my childhood infinitely calmer.

As I grew up into adulthood, I continued to believe in guardian angels – long after I had discounted most of the other elements of the belief systems of my youth. It was not something I actively thought about; rather, they were constantly there, on the periphery of my thoughts, and very real in many senses. In fact, I didn’t dwell on the angels much until I was dramatically reminded of their existence later in life. The most significant outcome of what I might call my reawakening was my acceptance not just of the reality of guardian angels, but the fact that it was possible to have conscious communication with them. Perhaps it was my earlier, unconscious acceptance of their existence that made me believe entirely that the voices I was hearing were those of spirits; it was, however, a mind-blowing experience to discover that I could interact with them – and they with me. For many months I experienced a mixture of exhilaration and confusion, until it all settled down. Once I was able to keep the voices at bay until I needed assistance, the relationship became peaceful and utterly comforting.

More than anything I want people to understand my own experience of working with guides, so that they can benefit in the same way. I had a significant process of adaptation in adjusting to the spontaneous way of spirit, which contrasted with the structured physical way we normally operate.

I wondered if guardian angels and spirit guides are the same, or are they distinct entities? Throughout the ages, angels have been pictured wearing wings, which, as a child, I found to be a comforting, sheltering image. I presumed the wings were meant to represent the traditional role ascribed to angels as messengers of God, the means by which they flew around delivering the messages. I like the quotation from G.K. Chesterton which says: ‘Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.’ I now know that they do; this is something we all need to do. We can only truly soar when we are light enough to do so.

My understanding, in accordance with the information I have been given by my spirit guides, is that we are all soul – part of God, or ‘unconditional love’. In that sense there can be no distinction between angels and guides. Although I prefer the description ‘guardian angels’ myself, I got into the habit of using the word ‘guides’, partly because it was shorter but mainly because it had no obvious religious connotation. Anyway, I couldn’t imagine Margaret Anna flying around with wings attached to her! The word ‘guide’ is fitting, too, as their role in our lives is to guide us through both our darkest and our brightest days.

Way back in the 1960s, I was one of the first training officers in the Irish Civil Service. Essentially, my job was to teach effective communication, including writing, talking, negotiation, and explaining the workings of the different institutions of government. I needed to use whatever technical aids were available to me, such as blackboards, flip charts and overhead projectors. I also used to prepare ‘how-to’ handouts on a variety of subjects for distribution. That all added up to a structured form of working, with clearly defined objectives.

When my life was transformed and I began to develop my communication with guides, I had to adapt to a totally different style. In the early stages I was inclined to try to pin things down in the ‘how-to’ formula with which I was familiar; however, I soon found that this was like going down a blind alley. My usual organisational skills were useless; for example, I discovered that there was no point in trying to prepare for individual meetings or talks by making notes. I needed to use a different form of preparation that involved relaxing as much as I could, and then asking for help from my guides. Each individual meeting had to be totally spontaneous, and I had to be absolutely relaxed and open-minded for them to work.

When I spoke to the public, my talks lasted about ninety minutes. I might have some ideas in my head – or a story or stories that I could tell, if I found they were relevant – but I never used notes. At all stages I needed to be in tune with my guides and with the audience. I’d have made that impossible if I had a prepared agenda. Accordingly, my talks were always spontaneous within the realm of communication with guides and how the members of the audience could be helped to do that for themselves.

Systems and detailed planning and organisation are needed in day-to-day life on earth. However, trying to extend that approach to direct communication with guides will inevitably leave us open to frustration and disappointment. One of the most important and wonderful features of life is that we all have our own individual styles. It is through those ‘styles’ that our guides try to communicate with us. For instance, in my own case communication mainly happens through feelings or impressions, rather than pictures or words.

An undiscovered land

A participant at one of my courses shared this little story with the group:

‘An explorer found a beautiful, undiscovered land. When she returned to her home, she told her friends about this country, describing the valleys, hills, rivers, trees, animals and plants. She told them: “You must go there for yourselves. My words cannot do justice to that land.”

Her friends were excited to hear about the land, and were keen to investigate for themselves. They asked her to draw them a map to guide their journey and to show them exactly where the land was. She refused, saying: “No, you must set out and find the way for yourselves. There are many different routes and I only know one of them.”

However, they insisted and, after a time, she relented and drew a map for them. Her friends were intrigued by the map and spent days planning for the journey, discussing which route they would take, and what the land would look like. But they delayed, deciding that they had first better prepare thoroughly for the trip. Perhaps, too, they needed to know more about maps, how to read them, how to understand what picture the map showed. Years passed, the map was studied, then copied and passed on to others. Schools were set up in map-reading.

The explorer was sad and went away. No one visited the land.’

In my opinion, this little story highlights how we allow an over-organised approach to life to overwhelm and even obliterate our spirit of adventure. Our conditioned analytical processes get us nowhere in our efforts to achieve the intrepid open-mindedness needed in effective communication with guides.

I like the following quotation from George Bernard Shaw: ‘Man who listens to reason is lost. Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.’

Handing over

At a relatively early stage in my communication with guides I was offered a simple way of giving and receiving help. This was the gist of it:

Imagine yourself in a circle with your guides, who are channelling into the circle all the unconditional love of the universe. Suppose you’re concerned about relatives or friends or people who are either living or have passed on, or material matters, or whatever. Imagine them all in the middle of the circle with all that love flowing around them. You feel yourself in alignment with that love. Imagine it also flowing all around your immediate environment, your country, all the continents, spreading peace and harmony around the world. Stay with the feeling as long as feels comfortable for you.

When I do that exercise, which can be done anywhere, at any time, I can feel loving energy flowing around the circle, and it usually rocks me gently backwards or forwards or round and round. In doing the exercise I release all need for worry, and I’m cooperating in sending unconditional help to whomever and wherever it’s needed in the simplest and most effective way.

I’m told by Shebaka that if only one person in a thousand was to do that exercise or something similar on a regular (i.e., daily) basis, the effect would be so powerful that within a relatively short time span – say, about fifty years or less – there would be no wars, no crime, the freedom of the individual would be respected, and planet earth would be a wonderfully harmonious place. Why? Because of the flow of unconditional love around the universe and the consequential raising of global consciousness.

Since I was given that exercise, I have been doing it with the people I have met in individual sessions, in courses and in talks. To me, it’s the best form of communication I can recommend. One of its most appealing aspects is that it involves no effort at all. I’m all for making things easy. An important feature of it for me is that I can feel the presence of my guides and let my analytical side take a rest.

One of the most common pleas that I heard from people during individual consultations and working with groups is that they needed to change their current situation and didn’t know how. The first, and most important, answer is that there is nothing – no situation – that cannot be changed. The phrase ‘thinking outside the box’ has come into common usage and it is actually a remarkably apt way to describe what we need to do in our lives on a daily basis in order to open our minds and effect change. We need to let go of our linear ways of thinking and allow solutions to manifest – solutions at which we would never have arrived through our conditioned analytical processes.

My approach tended to be to ask people to suspend temporarily all thoughts of their present difficulties and then to make a list of what they enjoyed most. I suggested that they ask themselves how much those items featured in their day-to-day lives. In making their lists, I asked them to bear in mind that what they enjoy (or might enjoy, if they felt they had the opportunity to do so) doing today, they might not enjoy tomorrow.

The reason why I suggested making the lists is that by doing so they were focusing their energies, and looking at how they were living their lives. If, for example, they saw themselves as being trapped in a continuing round of duties, responsibilities, financial pressures, relationship problems, non-stimulating work, job worries and so on, they were locked into a negative pattern of energy that is self-perpetuating. My guides have always stressed that, no matter how much we may seem to be victims of circumstances, we still have the power to change our lives. That power is within us; we can exercise it positively or negatively. One thing is certain – there will not be positive direction in our lives unless we decide to make it so.

I next suggested that once they had made the decision to express themselves – focusing on how they could live in a manner that would provide them with creative fulfilment that would satisfy all the things they had outlined in their lists – they hand over the lists to their guides, symbolically, through their thoughts.

The handing-over process involves setting the wheels in motion to achieve support from the infinite, universal energy (unconditional love) in three ways. First of all, when we focus on what we want and need, and then take steps to hand this ‘list’ over to the guides, we are exercising our own free will. We are making decisions and choices. Secondly, we are providing positive direction to our energy, by outlining how we would like to express ourselves. We do this in the understanding that we are acting on our present perception of what we want, and allowing ourselves the flexibility to respond to our changing perceptions in the knowledge and trust that our guides are keeping a constant overview of our (soul) purpose. Finally, when we hand over, we are acknowledging that we need help. This is a liberating admission in itself, and literally opens us to receiving it.

It’s important to remember that when we look back at our own physical journey on earth in our review of it, we are unlikely to be concerned by how many possessions we acquired, how much recognition we achieved or, indeed, our status. I am told that ultimately our only concern will be the extent to which we were able to release and enjoy our creative potential; in other words, our divinity.

When I ran my courses I could see very clearly how well the handing-over process worked. There are a few examples that stand out in particular.

Michelle was working in a business that she liked. She wrote on her list that she’d like to own the business. At the time, she knew that her financial situation was such that there seemed to be no hope of realising her dream unless the cost of the business would be no more than a certain amount that she wrote on her list. In a nutshell, she trusted in the handing-over process.

The course was spread over eleven weeks. One evening towards the end of it, she couldn’t contain her excitement when she arrived. The owner of the business had approached her with an offer that he’d sell it to her for the exact amount that she had written on her list. She had handed over, and her dreams had been answered.

Another woman who achieved her dreams in the process of handing over was Carol, who longed for a baby. She put this on her list, and handed it over. On the last night of the course, at the end of the eleventh week, we had great cause for celebration. Carol was pregnant. Her husband was also on the course, and it may well be that his own aspirations combined with hers to make it an even more powerful process.

Another incident that springs to mind started with a long-distance call I had from a woman called Louise. She told me that she and her husband were due to pay a substantial debt by a certain date, and they had exhausted every means of finding the money. They had also looked for an extension of the deadline, but without success. It shouldn’t have made any difference, but I felt more pressurised by the fact that she was ringing from another continent. I could only do my usual thing of handing the situation over to my guides. I asked her to do the same thing with her guides, and I assured her that a solution would emerge.

About three weeks later she telephoned me again to say that there had been no development, and there was now only a week to go before the money was due. There was still no hope of postponing the date of payment, so what were they going to do? Somewhat less confidently I told her that the message I was getting was that there was no need to worry.

Less than two weeks later I heard from her again. On the date that the debt was due to be paid, her husband received a completely unexpected refund of income tax, which was just enough to clear the debt. Once again, faith in the guides was justified.

Another woman told me about the way of working with her guides that she had developed. Whenever she felt that she needed help with a problem or a decision – or, indeed, anything – she wrote a note of thanks to her guides for the expected help and put it in a box. Then she followed her feelings, always with positive results.

This woman’s story reminded me that I have so often forgotten to say thanks throughout my life. I don’t mean just to guides, or to God/unconditional love, but for the wonder of life and all the beauty it offers daily in all sorts of ways. I thoughtlessly take so much for granted. Feeling and expressing gratitude create an expansive vibration that spreads all around us.

Occasionally in my talks I used the story of the fifth Labour of Hercules to reinforce my belief in the power of handing over apparently intractable problems to guides.

Hercules was tasked by King Augeas to clean out his stables, commonly known as the Augean stables, in a single day. I don’t know how many stables there were, but I imagine that there were a lot of them – enough, anyway, to make it obvious that it would be impossible for him to clean out the accumulation of manure and filth in them in the allotted time, and with the tools available to him. Then he had an inspiration, which he followed. He went up to the top of a hill overlooking the stables and he found that there was a river running nearby. He went back down to the stables and knocked holes in the walls. Then he went up the hill again and managed to divert water from the river down the hill. The water gathered force as it flowed down the hill and in through the holes of the walls of the stables, sweeping clear all in front of it.

The story doesn’t say what happened to the holes in the walls. Presumably he filled them up again! What it does tell us is that as notoriously strong as Hercules was, he could not do the job by himself. To me, the river in the story symbolises the universal flow of help that’s available to us, which we can access ourselves or, ideally, through our guides, whenever we feel the need to do so.

Placing trust

These stories provide simple yet profound examples of how the spiritual and the material merge – how the material can be used as an aid to spiritual growth, and how, if we allow ourselves to trust enough, a lot of the hassle can be taken out of living and participating in the physical world. It’s easy enough to trust, say, 50 or 80 per cent, but 100 per cent is a hard nut to crack. Yet, that’s what is required. The universe doesn’t know half measures. This may seem like an intimidating prospect, but we’re assured that our guides always help us, no matter how doubting we may be. In our lack of trust, though, we deny ourselves the wonder of seeing things happen in often miraculous ways.

In our physical world, nothing exists in material form unless we do things. It’s understandable then that we tend to see our image of ourselves by what we do – in other words going to the being from the doing. (That may be more true of men than of women.) In reality, what’s important is how we are, in our being, when we do whatever it is that we do. The doing flows from the being. How we are is the important thing.

Working with guides has been a central feature in my life for many years, and I have found the handing-over process tremendously effective in making my life simpler and more rewarding. I don’t want to pretend that I don’t experience hassle, or get stressed about things, but that doesn’t happen much. When it does, I remind myself to follow my usual practice.

I have been trying to explain as best I can the difference between the human and spirit ways of approaching things, and it is often difficult to get it across – particularly in the context of working with guides. Our conditioning as human beings leads us to expect that there are techniques that can be packaged and applied to every conceivable situation. In my experience I have never come across any methodology that will guarantee effective direct communication with guides in a way that can apply to everybody without exception. That’s why I haven’t tried to bring together into one chapter the whole area of communication with guides. Instead, I have let it run like a stream through the book, providing suggestions and examples from which people may find a way or ways that suit them.