Читать книгу Guided By Angels: There Are No Goodbyes, My Tour of the Spirit World - Paddy McMahon - Страница 7

As a child, an adolescent, and even into early adulthood, fear of death was more or less my constant companion. Not my own death – but that of my father.

I was born in 1933 in a rural location in County Clare, Ireland, the third of seven children. There was a sort of magical, mystical aura to the place where I grew up; the existence of ghosts and fairies was taken for granted, and the pathways that led to their fairy forts were out of bounds for walking on or even crossing. I don’t remember being told about all of that; it was simply part of the folklore of the place. When I was a child I firmly believed that crossing a path or walking through a fairy fort would bring bad luck. In fact, until the age of 10 or 11 my life was dictated to an extent by the promise of good or bad luck, depending upon my actions. Even as a young adult I didn’t consider my beliefs ‘supernatural’. It was just the way things were. From an early age I was accustomed to the idea that there were two worlds – physical and non-physical. As a result it has never been a huge leap for me to believe that there may be something other than what we see around us.

Storytelling was a feature of the rural location in which I was raised. An old man – I thought he was old, but he was probably much younger than I am now – who lived about a quarter of a mile from my first childhood home had a seemingly endless repertoire of stories, and I spent many a rapt evening listening to him. The fact that a lot of them were ghost stories made them even more enthralling for me – except that in order to get home I had to travel along a dark boreen (a little road) with bushes on each side of it. I was perpetually convinced that a ghost was going to jump out from behind every bush. But that didn’t stop me from going back repeatedly for more stories.

The religious ethos of my childhood was extremely orthodox Catholic. Heaven beckoned to those who were pure and truly good; Purgatory was the destination for those of us who were a mixture of good and bad. Hell, however, was for those who had committed even one mortal sin, and it was there that they would burn in hellfire for all eternity. My father had given up practising religion when I was about 6 years old, and I was terrified that he was going to end up in Hell. I firmly believed that the one and only way to escape eternal punishment in Hell was by making a confession to a priest, who was God’s representative, and expressing true contrition for all sins, thus earning God’s forgiveness. Without religion, my father could not be released from his sins and he would not be spared. The thought of this – and his likely fate – haunted me.

In contrast to my father, my mother was extremely religious. So was I. I used to worry a lot about what happened to people when they died – no doubt influenced by my concern for my father.

One element of my religious conditioning was completely untainted by fear. Guardian angels were a constant reality for me as a child, and when things were at their darkest I felt that they were always there to help me. I didn’t have any picture of guardian angels in my mind. I just thought of them as loving beings flying around helping people. I didn’t think about whether they had once been real-life people. I didn’t give them much thought at all. But their loving presence and my belief in their ability to guide me through my life – and protect me and those around me – was an important part of my childhood. Each night, before I fell asleep, I used to ask them to mind me – and everybody else in my family. My usual ‘prayer’ was: ‘Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.’ It became almost a ritual for me to repeat this prayer each night.

In 1952 I got a job as an executive officer in the Irish Civil Service in Dublin, and that Christmas I headed home to County Clare to be with my family. After the festivities were over, my father accompanied me to the bus that would take me back to Dublin. It was then that I had my first memorable psychic experience. Although, to me, he had no obvious appearance of illness, as I said goodbye to him I knew with an inner certainty that I would not see him alive again. What’s more, I knew that he knew, too. I resolved that I would write him a long letter, saying all the things that I had always wanted to say but had never been able to. I wanted to tell him how much I loved him. But I had not yet put pen to paper when I got a call, in February 1953, to tell me that he had died after a brief illness.

I sat by my father’s bed, by his body, all night long. I didn’t do this for any traditional religious reasons; I simply wanted to. I felt deep regret that I had not written that letter to him. As I sat there, I recalled how affectionate he had been towards my siblings and me as children, and I experienced an almost unbearable feeling of sadness. Other people came and went during the night, only staying briefly. They commented upon how peaceful he looked. I wondered where he was and what was happening to him. I knew there had been no obvious deathbed repentance and it was hard to contemplate that even as I sat beside his still body his soul might be undergoing the unimaginable punishment of hellfire. I wished I could have talked to him more freely, particularly about my ever-present concern for his eternal salvation.

My father’s passing had a cataclysmic impact on me, and began the process that would eventually lead to an entire change in my consciousness. I couldn’t imagine what eternity would be like. I hoped, rather than believed, that I would see him again, but I didn’t have any idea how that might happen. I felt bereft and confused, but still hopeful that we would meet again. Physical experience doesn’t prepare us for a concept of endlessness; however, even within my limited grasp of the concept I reasoned that there was hope for him. As the span of a human lifetime could be no more than a mini-second in eternity, its deeds couldn’t justly be judged in eternal terms – no matter how sinful those deeds might be considered. I moved away from the orthodox belief structures with which I had grown up, and resolved that I’d try never to allow my thinking to be controlled by fear or dogmas or institutions built on foundations of fear.

I returned to Dublin, troubled and distressed by the passing of my father. But life has a habit of carrying on, no matter how deeply traumatised we become, and so it was with mine. I continued working in the Civil Service, got involved in amateur acting and directing, and began dabbling in writing. I got married, became a father of two children, a boy and a girl, and settled into domesticity and the furtherance of my career. I cast to the back of my mind the psychic experience that had preceded my father’s death. My only other memorable psychic experience was a dream that a horse called Never Say Die would win the English Derby. It did. I’m afraid I didn’t trust the dream enough to place a bet of more than a few shillings, and I’ve never had a dream like that since (deservedly so because of my lack of trust!). Later, I thought of the dream as a sort of a cosmic joke, foreshadowing subsequent developments for me.

My mother died in 1974 when I was 40. She was a wonderful woman who was a genius at managing to keep the whole household ticking over reasonably smoothly during an era when money was very scarce. In mourning her, I deeply regretted that her life hadn’t been easier. My grief for her, however, was much more straightforward. I did not fear what might happen to her after she died, as I had with my father. His death had been the catalyst for change, and at that stage I had shed all the fear-based orthodox belief structures of my youth. I was open to new ideas – at the most instinctive level.

One day in 1978, when I was in my early 40s, I visited the public library in Dun Laoghaire, in County Dublin, near to where I lived at that time. I went there fairly regularly but on this particular day I was drawn to a section of the library that I had never previously explored. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but my usual reading material was mainly fiction, occasionally biographies. A book entitled A World Beyond, by Ruth Montgomery, an American journalist, seemed to jump out at me. Looking back, I don’t think there was anything special about the title or the cover that appealed to me. In any event, I borrowed the book and was fascinated by the scenario of life after death that it presented. Ruth Montgomery had received communication from Arthur Ford, a well-known American medium until his death in 1971, and in A World Beyond she detailed everything that she had learned from him. I was transfixed.

Not long afterwards I happened to see a television programme in which somebody was talking about spirit guides continually connecting with humans. The comforting feelings about guardian angels that I had held as a child, but had latterly submerged, resurfaced. In tandem with the message contained in Ruth Montgomery’s book, I could sense that something was at work.

I find it hard to describe what happened next, but suddenly there were voices in my head, talking continually, but with a consciousness that definitely wasn’t mine. They weren’t talking about the meaning of life or any deep philosophical stuff; it was as if we were having a chat about mundane things, as humans do with each other. What on earth was going on? The voices were there when I woke up in the morning, as I went about my work, as I talked to my wife, Phyllis, and my children, Brian and Aisling, and when I went to bed at night.

Voices in my head? I wondered about my sanity. At times the doubts and fears of my early conditioning came to the surface. Could I be imagining it all? Was it the devil and all his cohorts of evil spirits playing tricks on me?

I wasn’t frightened, though, because the voices weren’t being malicious. What they were saying wasn’t even important or memorable. They were notable only for the fact that I knew for sure they weren’t me. They were spirit guides – or guardian angels – and they were communicating with me. They weren’t visible to me, except occasionally as light shapes, but I could hear them as clearly as I could any humans, even though there was no sound.

In some ways it was like a ‘before and after’ situation. All I can say is that before this moment I was living and working conservatively on a day-to-day basis. After, I was outwardly doing the same things, but my inner world was blown apart.

Why was this happening? Would I be better off if I could go back to being the way I was before?

And yet I didn’t want to go back – even though I found it very difficult to cope with ordinary, everyday life. I wanted to get away by myself to savour it all, and yet I felt I had to continue with my daily round of family and work responsibilities as if nothing had changed. Strangely, no one seemed to notice anything unusual about me. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, including my family, about it. Maybe my acting experience was helpful in that context.

After a few months I realised that I couldn’t go on existing in what seemed like a multiplicity of worlds. The voices were too distracting. Since I was on planet earth, I’d either have to leave it or be grounded in the experience of it. Then it came to me that the answer was simple – I could just ask my guides to control what was coming to me, to let it happen only by arrangement. I asked by sending a thought to them and, miraculously, what had been a constant stream of communication stopped immediately. Perversely, I was disappointed, but at least I was able to function more easily within the physical reality of my environment.

That early babble of voices was, I later learned, a sort of concentrated training course to enable me to integrate my communication with my guides with my day-to-day activities. What they were doing was showing me that it was the most ordinary thing in the world to be communicating with each other, and they achieved that objective. One of my guides explained to me that the communication would always be only a thought away, but at my convenience and readiness to receive it.

What was it like? I communicated with my thoughts, not aloud. The best way I can describe it is as a sort of telepathy – I communicated with my guides with my mind and they communicated with me in the same way. I suppose it is much like the silent prayers that some people may send out before bed at night. They don’t speak aloud, but are communicating nonetheless.

As far as I was aware, the climate in Ireland in the 1970s and early 1980s did not encourage what might be categorised as paranormal experiences. For that reason, or perhaps because I was excessively sensitive about being considered ‘different’, ‘odd’ or in need of psychiatric care, I lived a double life for quite a long time. I had a secret, internal life that I shared with ethereal beings and I managed to combine it with a conventional, external life in which I apparently conformed with the rules of society in the regulation of which I played an official part. All that didn’t cause me any stress; in fact, I enjoyed it.

People have often asked me how I became aware of the gift that enabled me to connect with the next world. I never thought of it as a gift as such. In fact, I believed and I still very much believe that it is something that is open to anyone who does not dismiss the possibility. I have attempted to describe the sort of internal revolution that seemed to occur all at once – rather like getting a hole in the head and all sorts of things flowing in. In fact, this may be the most perfect analogy; if people knew about what I was experiencing they may have thought I had gone soft in the head. All I can say is that one minute the phenomenon wasn’t there, and the next it was.

Word gets around

One evening I was visiting a house where a small group of acquaintances had gathered. The subject of conversation turned to auras. At the time, the idea that all people have auras around them – which show as lights following the outline of their bodies – certainly wasn’t familiar to the majority of people with whom I had contact. It was a bit of a risqué belief, and probably pretty controversial. Since then, of course, the existence of auras is, I think, widely accepted – and it has even been demonstrated with a special form of photography known as Kirlian photography, after the Russian technician Demyon D. Kirlian, who developed it in 1939. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Kirlian photography hit the US, and most certainly later than that when it was unveiled in Ireland. But it was new and quirky, and somebody in our group got the idea that we should try looking at each others’ auras.

Auras can probably be best described as energy fields that surround our bodies – sort of radiate out from them. We all have them, but the question was, that evening, could we see them? We felt that we’d have the best chance of succeeding if each person in turn sat against a white background. The rest of us would concentrate on looking (in as relaxed a way as we could) at and around that person. Some of my acquaintances quickly saw a light around the person – either white, or in colour. I didn’t see anything at all, but I suddenly started getting all sorts of impressions about the person sitting down: about her relationship with her partner, her feelings about her career, the place where she lived. I passed them on and she said that they were not only very relevant, but helpful for what was happening in her life at that time. The impressions didn’t come to me visually or as if somebody was soundlessly putting words into my mouth; they simply dropped into my mind and I articulated them as clearly as I could in my own words.

After that, the other guests asked me to do the same thing for them, with similar results. At this remove, all I can remember is that the general reaction was one of surprise and interest – which, I suppose, would have been true for me as well. It was all very odd.

As I didn’t want to be put into any sort of ‘guru’ slot, I asked the group to keep quiet about what had happened. Since the spirit guides first made themselves known to me, I’ve made every attempt to avoid putting myself into the limelight, and I continue to do so to this day. These are private conversations, and while I am always more than happy to use the information they provide to help others, it would be all too easy to become a sort of modern-day medium, and have my life taken over. I invariably aimed to forget whatever transpired in my individual sessions with people in case I might, unconsciously, reveal something that they trusted would be confidential.

Slowly but surely the wall that I had tried to build around my secret life began to crumble. Sometimes, much to my embarrassment, and after a little too much to drink, I was a bit too eager to impart the information provided by the spirit guides. As a result, word began to spread and a rapidly increasing number of people began to ask if they could come to see me. I was still very careful not to let any of that impinge on my work life, and kept things quiet when I was with my colleagues. My personal and social life was, however, beginning to follow a new track. The contact with people who were searching for meaning and direction in their lives was like an affirmation for me. I had to accept that guidance was coming to me from some benevolent source or sources outside of myself that I understood to be my guides.

My ability to provide people with guidance continued to perplex me. I had never regarded myself as being abnormally perceptive and, yet, when I asked for guidance I was able to tell people many things about themselves, their past experiences, their families, their relationships, their careers, their challenges and their gifts – facts that I couldn’t possibly have known in any other way. Many of these people were strangers to me, and the information I received about them was startlingly vivid and accurate. I was still, at that point, unsure where it was all coming from. I considered all the obvious explanations, such as telepathy, and subconscious or unconscious suggestion, but they made no sense in my situation. If I were using paranormal skills I would have been able to do so all of the time – not just on isolated occasions when people came to me for guidance. I considered it vitally important that I was completely unable to intrude on anyone’s privacy unless I was asked to do so by the person concerned.

The trouble was that word was getting around too fast. I was in a senior management position in the Civil Service, and part of my job included implementing a major reorganisation programme to do with property registration. I loved my job. It was enjoyable and fulfilling, but it made a lot of demands on my time. On the domestic front, the telephone was ringing constantly – day and night – with consequential inconvenience for the whole household, as people who had heard of my ability to make contact with spirit guides sought advice. All of this happened entirely through word of mouth. I struggled with my double life until I was given the opportunity to take early retirement from the Civil Service in 1988. This was a turning point for me. I was torn between continuing to do a job I enjoyed and accepting that something much bigger was going on. It was time to do something different with my life.

My family were supportive of my decision to retire from my job. My wife had long been interested in the area of communication with guides. I think they were glad that I was now able to deal with the telephone calls myself because they were less inconvenienced by its demands! And, of course, I was in a position to respond more frequently to requests from people to come to see me. After a session with me, individuals would tell their friends about the results and I’d get more calls until the whole thing snowballed.

Since that time, and across many years, I have had the privilege of meeting thousands of people. I have written eleven books under the pen-name Patrick Francis in collaboration with three spirit beings with whom I have established a strong communication. The first was an ex-nun called Margaret Anna Cusack. The second was Shebaka, an Egyptian pharaoh after whom the Shabaka stone in the British Museum is named. This stone was given to the museum by the First Lord of the Admiralty, George John, 2nd Earl Spencer (an ancestor of Princess Diana) in 1805, and registered with the museum on 13 July of that year. I spelled Shebaka’s name with an ‘e’ rather than an ‘a’ because I knew nothing about him initially, so it was a huge surprise when I found out about the stone. The third guide is Jiddhu Krishnamurti, the famous Indian philosopher and teacher. I set up my own self-publishing company but I did not actively seek publicity, nor did I advertise. I believed that people who would be interested in – or benefit from – the material in my books would be drawn to them. That arrangement suited me and it worked well.

One of the most rewarding and compellingly enlightening elements of my new work involved individual sessions with people. During these sessions all sorts of issues surfaced, including wide-ranging fears, relationship difficulties, career problems, a search for meaning in life, depression, financial issues, guilt, past lives, the desire for contact with ‘dead’ loved ones, communication with spirit guides, health problems, curiosity about what happens after the death of the body, and more. Most of these issues fell outside my own range of experience, which helped me to be non-judgemental in my approach. People came to see me about anything and everything, and the sessions that ensued moved into areas that were not confined to the particular issue that troubled my visitors. The floodgates were opened during our sessions, and both my visitors and I were often dumbstruck by what evolved.

I remained reluctant to intrude on people’s privacy unless they were completely open to the idea of hearing what the guides had to say. I knew nothing about the vast majority of my visitors, and put complete trust in my spirit guides to supply insights that would be in their best interests.

My life had changed, and through that I was beginning to help to change the lives of others. My story doesn’t stop here, though; in fact, this is and was just the beginning. I continued to devote a good proportion of my life to providing the guidance that the spirit guides offered. Later on in the book I will be going into more detail about guides and making suggestions about how people can connect with their own guides, if they so wish. First, though, since the book is primarily about what happens to people when they die, I must introduce the soul who inspired this book and who, as Margaret Anna Cusack, lived on earth from 1829 to 1899.