Читать книгу Guided By Angels: There Are No Goodbyes, My Tour of the Spirit World - Paddy McMahon - Страница 9

My journey through life has confirmed my acceptance of the continuity of life after death. I grew up believing that we were confined to a specific fate according to our behaviour on earth, but what I learned next made much more sense to me. There was no fear in this new understanding; it soon became clear that life after death not only existed, but was a vibrant, positive experience. I’d always been open to (and found great comfort in) the idea that I had guardian angels helping me through life. They continue to do so, and through them I am able to help others as well.

Margaret Anna is just one of those guardian angels who has changed my life forever. The fact that she was a real person, who actually existed in the ‘real world’ before her death in 1899, undoubtedly provided proof of the continuity of life. She is now sharing her wisdom with humans on earth, and I have no doubts about her existence. But life in spirit is something very different from life on earth, and Margaret Anna has been hugely influential in defining and explaining that world. I can’t hop in and out of the spirit world in order to carry back shoals of information. Fortunately, there are evolved and generous souls like Margaret Anna who want to lift the burden of fear from us by telling us what to expect when the time comes for us to move on. Through Margaret Anna and to a lesser extent my other guides I have learned a great deal about the ‘next life’.

By the time I came to write this book I had been used to the idea of Margaret Anna as one of my spirit guides for many years and I certainly wasn’t slow in asking for her help when I found myself, as I often did, in challenging situations. I didn’t bother waiting for answers. I just asked and trusted that the answers would come in their own good time, which they invariably did.

Collaborating with Margaret Anna on a book was a different, perhaps more immediate, type of experience. My communication with her wasn’t like having an ordinary conversation with another human being. She didn’t come and sit beside me and I didn’t see her or visualise her. (Later on I saw photographs of her in her older age, but at first I had no idea what she looked like.) The only way I can describe the communication is that I felt her presence – a warm, comforting, humorous sort of feeling – so I knew when the communication was happening and when it wasn’t. She wasn’t using words but, rather, conveying impressions to me that I expressed in my own words. It was a seamless type of experience that, I suppose, could be regarded as similar to telepathy, although that’s an inadequate description. Even though it would have been easier for me if I could have just written down words coming directly from her, it was more fulfilling for me to use my own words – and, of course, that helped me to raise my level of consciousness.

I was also reassured by the fact that she wouldn’t let me get away with any misinterpretations. How did I know this? I just did, in the same way that I knew when she was communicating with me and when she wasn’t. In our first session Margaret Anna conveyed that she’d like to talk about her own experience since she passed on. I could hardly wait to hear more about that. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that what happens after the death of the body is a ‘burning’ question; certainly it is for the people I have met over many years. I suggest that even the ‘when you’re dead, you’re dead’ brigade have some niggles of curiosity about it from time to time.

I personally didn’t have any doubts about the continuity of life. I never kept any records of my individual sessions with people, as it was vitally important for them that they could trust in the confidentiality of whatever transpired at our meetings, but occasionally something memorable emerged, which stayed in my mind. I didn’t have any particular agenda when people came to me; obviously, spontaneity was an essential ingredient in the whole process.

I preferred to concentrate on communication with guides, and to address career or relationship issues – or generally philosophical matters. But my meetings were always different, and the tone and the content were guided by the needs of my visitors, and the communication with the guides. In the early stages I actively hoped that messages from ‘dead’ relatives didn’t come through, mainly because I didn’t want to risk misleading anyone. I wanted to be absolutely sure that whatever connection I made in such a sensitive area was 100 per cent genuine. I suppose also that I didn’t fully trust my ability as a communicator. But some readings undoubtedly had a mediumistic element – where the communication was coming from a relative or friend of the person seeking the reading. The readings took place in an intimate setting (a small room) devoid of any distractions, the main feature being two comfortable chairs – one for myself and the other for the sitter. The duration of the readings was approximately two hours. What happened within those two hours was largely beyond my control.

Working with my guides was altogether different from trying to connect with somebody who might be totally new to that type of communication. But, as time went on, and almost in spite of myself, I got messages and information for many people from relatives or friends who had passed on. The nature of the information was such that there could be no doubt about the authenticity of the experiences. Sometimes what I was receiving from my contacts in spirit made no sense to me, but when I plucked up the courage to convey it to the people concerned it was invariably significant for them.

Two sessions in particular spring to mind. I have altered the names of the sitters to protect their identity. I don’t like the word ‘medium’ but, as I can’t think of a better alternative to convey the sense of a bridge between the physical and the spirit worlds, it will have to do.

Becoming a medium

One day, many years ago, I had an appointment with a woman called Josephine. While I was waiting for her at my home, a man’s name kept repeating over and over in my head. This was unusual for me, as I never asked for or received any advance information before a meeting. When Josephine arrived, I mentioned the name to her and she reacted instantly. The name I had heard was that of her husband, who had died many years previously. Immediately I felt him coming through to me, telling me that he had died while he was tying his shoelaces. I know ‘coming through’ is a strange sort of expression to use, but I think it’s a more accurate way of saying that I felt him ‘telling’ me, as we weren’t actually ‘talking’ as such.

I hesitated about saying this to Josephine, because it sounded so strange, but the voice was insistent, and so I said it.

‘Oh, yes,’ she said very matter-of-factly. ‘He was out in the yard bending down to tie his shoelaces when a tractor backed into him and killed him.’

After that there was no stopping him; he gave her all sorts of information and advice about various personal and business matters. At this stage I have no recollection of what they were; in any case, they would only have been of interest to her. I remember, though, how delighted I was by the session with her. She was obviously very pleased about the contact with her late husband.

A few months later I met a woman named Anne. Once again I was visited by a communicator, who absolutely insisted that I pass on a message. The message or, more accurately, the instruction, was: ‘Tell her to play a piece of string.’

This seemed completely nonsensical to me. I was thinking of ‘string’ being a slender rope of some kind. However, when I eventually took a chance and told her, Anne lit up immediately. The spirit was a friend of Anne’s, and she had been wondering what music to play at a memorial service for him. She knew exactly what he meant – music played by string instruments. She didn’t seem to be surprised – but I was.

These and other experiences have provided me with plenty of incontrovertible evidence of continuing life. My communication with Margaret Anna has, therefore, always made sense to me, and I’ve never doubted that the details she has provided about the spirit world are accurate and believable. In many of the experiences I had provided information that sounded superficial to me, but was deeply moving or important to the people receiving the messages. However, the very fact that it was possible for both sides of the physical and spirit dimensions to make contact was comforting, particularly because it was obviously genuine. I was eager for more information – and a wider discussion of life in general in the spirit dimension – and that’s where Margaret Anna came in.

Living after death

Like many others, I was often wrenched by agonising self-questioning. In most of my communications, when people came to see me, I had proof that the communication was accurate because it was confirmed. In Margaret Anna’s case I was working in the dark. Was I fooling myself into thinking that the soul who was Margaret Anna Cusack was actually communicating with me? And by questioning this communication, was I showing a lack of trust? Margaret Anna had been such a celebrity in her earthly life, I wondered if I had just somehow extrapolated information about her and created artificial communications. I was worried, too, that the information I was transcribing might in some way create a misleading impression about her.

Margaret Anna gave short shrift to my qualms. She suggested that we forget about all that and get on with the project that would become this book. She began by describing to me her own death: ‘My friends put on my coffin: “Margaret Anna Cusack fell asleep June 5th, 1899, aged 70 years.” The thought was nice. I said goodbye to my poor old body, which had been tired out for a long time. It had struggled with ill-health for many years and had lasted a lot longer than I could reasonably have expected.’

Margaret Anna looked on as her friends lovingly dealt with her body. After the burial ceremonies were over, she suddenly became aware of what she could only describe as a radiant being smiling at her and then giving her a big hug. Without any perception of movement she found herself as a guest of honour at a big welcoming party. It was a wonderfully joyful reunion with many friends.

I asked her whatever questions occurred to me and she answered them directly, without any evasion. Did she expect to be judged after her arrival? She did, she said, but there wasn’t any sign of anything like that.

How did she recognise her friends? She said she just knew them. They were like effulgent beings of light, yet easily distinguishable one from another.

Were there gender distinctions in spirit? She answered: ‘There were and there weren’t. I know that’s a strange kind of answer. The best way I can try to explain it is that there was a transcendence of gender, like, say, when you communicate on a soul level with somebody. Yet there were some whom I had known as female and some as male, and I seemed to communicate with them in that way and they with me.’

Was there any sexual frisson? ‘I wasn’t always a nun! Yes, there was sexual frisson, as you put it, in the sense of a wonderful joyful intimacy, which is what sexuality involves, as I understand it.’

In asking her questions, I was aware that I was thinking in a linear way, from a time and space point of view. In her new situation it seemed as if everything was happening simultaneously. She explained that she was no longer aware of time. She was still getting used to feeling completely free. On earth she was always busy – things to be done, ideas to be explored, books to be written, bishops to be cajoled. Now here she was with no agenda, but full of the joy of just being, and surrounded by kindred spirits in every sense of the word.

In order to help me understand, she explained that the reunion went on for maybe a few hours or maybe a few days in my time. She hadn’t yet completely shaken off the feelings of illness and tiredness that were her constant companions on earth. At some stage one of her old/new friends suggested that she might like to take a little rest. She agreed, and instantly she seemed to be lying on a wonderfully comfortable bed in a beautifully appointed room with soft music enveloping her. She relaxed into the harmony of it all. She said that it was misleading to talk of things happening in sequence, because everything seemed to be happening all at once.

In any event, the relaxation process refreshed her and, once again, she found herself with a group of the friends she had met earlier. They had a lot of catching up to do. I asked her whether she was beginning to be curious about what she was going to be doing. I said that I couldn’t imagine her being happy sitting around relaxing and doing nothing, no matter how enjoyable the company.

She replied that she didn’t have to do anything – but that she wasn’t doing ‘nothing’. Impressions were coming to her all the time. Even as she thought about something – for example, how her Sisters from the Order were getting on – she found she was able to get a picture or a vision of that immediately. It was all completely effortless. She asked me to imagine this scenario: I want to visit my friends in America. I have to go through a lengthy process of booking tickets, paying fares, hours of travel interspersed with delays at airports. But in the world she was now in, there was none of that. The only drawback was that she couldn’t converse with her sisters in the Order or touch them. She could talk to them, but they didn’t hear her. Initially, that was a big disappointment, particularly as she had had to suffer the pain of separation from them while she was bodily on earth. After a while she adjusted to the way things were and began to enjoy helping out in unobtrusive ways.

Who is God?

Early on in our communication I asked Margaret Anna whether it was possible to prove for those of us on earth that there is life after death. ‘It’s often said that there is no proof of life after death, because no one ever comes back to tell their relatives, friends or even interested researchers about their new life; however, this is not the case. Many souls have been communicating through the centuries with those humans who have been open to receiving them so I can’t take any credit in projecting, as it were, a voice from the grave.’

Margaret Anna was very easy to work with, and her sense of humour was always evident in all of our communications. She regularly teased me, for example, by saying she knew that I had thought she looked very grim in the photographs I had seen of her, and we developed a light-hearted sort of banter that belied the extraordinary level and content of the information she passed on to me. It was strange for me getting used to the idea that she could read my thoughts like that, but as our conversations continued I got used to it.

My main goal in our early communications was to ask exactly what happens when our body ‘dies’ and we pass over.

Margaret Anna said that she experienced a lot of confusion in the aftermath of her passing. She had changed religions, had been a social reformer, had been regarded as a nuisance by her ecclesiastical superiors, and she had been vilified and condemned as an apostate. As she says, ‘It seemed as if I had created conflict where I had wanted harmony, and hate where I wanted love.’

She had become so accustomed to rejection, she was very concerned about what God would be like. What if He turned out to be like the figures of authority that she had known in the past?

I assumed that, as Margaret Anna Cusack, and then perhaps more particularly as Sister/Mother Francis Clare, she would have built up a relationship with God as a Supreme Being in some form. I asked her where God fitted into her new situation. She replied, ‘For a start, there was still no sign of any call to judgment and I began to realise that there wouldn’t be. There wasn’t any indication of God wanting to see me for any other reason either, which was both a relief and a disappointment.’

In my interaction with spirit beings I needed to be completely relaxed and quiet in my mind. I had an arrangement with Margaret Anna that whenever I felt tired or unclear we discontinued our sessions.

When I indicated to her that I was ready to continue, she said: ‘I was releasing the mental restrictions that were built up in my physical lifetime – having, of course, already released the material ones. Impressions came flooding back to me of what I had previously known, including the notion of God, not as a separate being, but as the life force in all of us. There was to be no judgment other than that which I chose to make on myself.’

While I was writing down these words, I recalled an occasion when I was travelling on a bus one evening. I was in a sort of meditative mood and I hoped that nobody would sit beside me and start talking to me. There seemed to be a good chance I’d be left in peace as there was a number of empty seats on the bus. Even so, a woman got on the bus and made a beeline for the seat beside me. I can’t describe her very well, as I was trying not to look at her, but I could see out of the corner of my eye that she was a large lady, conservatively dressed. She sat down firmly and decisively, with a very strong physical presence. I kept my eyes closed, pretending to be dozing, but that didn’t work.

She said in a loud voice: ‘They’re real places, you know.’

I mumbled something, not wanting to encourage her by asking the obvious question. That didn’t stop her. She repeated her statement, so I felt I had to ask what places she was talking about.

‘Heaven, Hell and Purgatory,’ she answered.

I didn’t make any comment, but she went on to tell me that a woman in Austria had seen them in a vision and was able to describe the suffering in Purgatory and Hell in gruesome detail.

Eventually I could keep quiet no longer. I said, ‘There aren’t any such places. They’re all states of mind.’

That led to a verbal deluge about how wrong I was. Then, with a triumphant flourish, she stood up and said, ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

She left the bus – and me to my fate!

So what was the truth? The Heaven, Hell and Purgatory scenario most certainly wasn’t like anything Margaret Anna had described. And what about God? Where did he fit in?

A loving union

The God of my youth was a patriarchal figure with a long white beard and a rather frightening expression – or so I thought. It wasn’t difficult to imagine Him (always a capital ‘H’) doling out severe punishment for even minor transgressions. It’s understandable that I thought that way – we are all conditioned to impose a sort of structure on concepts, so that we can relate them to our own experience. So, in order to understand something, we tend to put onto it a form that’s familiar to us. This does, however, have the unfortunate effect of imposing limits on our thinking.

The same can be applied to the notion of God, to whom we give a ‘form’ that we can understand. It followed that God had to be a ‘person’, albeit one who could see, hear and know everything going on in the world – and be everywhere, all at the same time. His ability to achieve all of this had to be taken on trust; it would only be possible to accept His existence and His role if we believed.

As far as I’m aware, most, if not all, religious teaching focuses on the idea of separateness; in other words, there’s a Supreme Being (God) who created all souls and is separate from them. Because God is separate, He has the ultimate prerogative of sitting in judgment on us. Interestingly, however, every one of my spirit guides stresses that the idea of separateness is what delays the evolution of life on earth in terms of awareness. They are adamant that whatever we call the animating force of life – God, the Universe or unconditional love – is not separate from us but that we are all part of it.

In order to understand that concept, we need to dispense with any notions of form or structure. I like to use the description ‘unconditional love’ because it makes it impossible for me to fall into a trap of trying to fit that into any kind of structure. While I can’t fully understand how it all works, I find it easy to accept its infinite, unlimited nature, as I don’t see how it can be enclosed within any boundaries, not even beginnings and endings.

Margaret Anna and all those souls who act as our guides are helping us to free ourselves from the feeling of separateness, and to align ourselves with unconditional love. In that way we’re no longer in a ‘Him’ and ‘us’ situation but, rather, in a loving union with the source of all life. A simple (but ultimately inadequate) analogy is that of a drop of water being in the ocean but the ocean also being in the drop of water. In other words, there’s no separation between the drop of water and the ocean. Extending the analogy to ourselves we can understand and, ideally, accept that we, however limited and insignificant we may perceive ourselves to be, are part of that unconditional, infinite, loving energy and can allow ourselves to be supported by its unlimited power.

Another analogy was suggested to me by Jiddhu Krishnamurti (whose stated mission in his earthly life was to set people absolutely, unconditionally, free from all forms of conditioning). Suppose we say that there’s an everlasting light in each person. There’s an equivalent potential brightness in each light. In some people it shines dimly, in others it’s glowing a little brighter, in still others the glow is stronger; in each one the glow is at a different level of brightness. What switches the light to an increasing level of brightness is the quality of the inner life of each person – security, self-esteem, an ability to respond spontaneously to the flow of light, and, above all, freedom from rigidity of thinking, going within, and allowing the light to spread throughout the whole being. As each light glows ever more brightly, it connects with all the other lights and illuminates the whole universe.

The universal connection might perhaps be illustrated by representing each person as a perpetually lighting candle with its own distinctive colour. The light from each candle spreads into a huge glow throughout the universe. Yet each candle retains its individuality, while being part of the whole confluence of light.

So it is that each soul is a part of God and God is in each soul.

Margaret Anna had explained to me that each of us is a soul in spirit before we are born into our physical lives, and I asked her why she didn’t carry the concept of God that she had known at that time into her life as a nun.

She explained that her aim in that life was to be an agent of change, a reformer, and that it was necessary for her to go into an environment and to be part of it before she could seek to transform it. She had to have a passion for what she was doing. She couldn’t be an outsider. Where there was injustice, she needed to be a victim of it. Where there was sadness, grief and loneliness, she needed to experience them. She needed to be human in every sense of what that meant at that stage of human evolution. She also needed to be female, because human evolution would remain stagnant unless it could be rescued by a balancing of male and female consciousness within individuals and then globally.

In the context of the nineteenth century, her priority was to try to create a climate of improved conditions for people, particularly those who had unequal rights and opportunities, such as women and the poor who, of course, included both sexes.

She said to me, ‘I felt that my role was to be a launching pad from which others could orbit. I sought to be a pragmatist rather than a philosopher – or perhaps, to be a pragmatic philosopher! Perceptions of God could wait. In any case, they would be as individual as souls and would continue to be. We could explore the higher reaches of spiritual expression when people were more comfortable in their living conditions as well as their self-esteem.’

The concept of God that Margaret Anna outlined wasn’t new to me, as it had been conveyed by Shebaka to me in previous communications. I accepted it completely as the only philosophy that made sense of life to me.

As she had promised, Margaret Anna had chosen to begin the process of illustrating what happens after the death of the body by outlining her own experience, including her apprehension about whether or how she might be judged, and where God fitted into the whole picture of life after death. Her constant rejection during her life on earth by the ecclesiastical authorities hadn’t helped to set her mind at ease on those questions. The answers she discovered (or rediscovered, I should say) and outlined are clear and unambiguous.

I found her way of unfolding the evolution of her experience most illuminating and comforting. Already she had shown that there was nothing to fear about the experience of death.