Guided By Angels: There Are No Goodbyes, My Tour of the Spirit World. Paddy McMahon

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ