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

Epigraph

Minds are like parachutes – they only function when open.

Thomas Dewey

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Epigraph

Introduction

1. How My Life Changed

2. Meeting Margaret Anna

3. Life after Death

4. In Come the Guides

5. Reincarnation

6. Spirit Guides at Work

7. Opening Our Minds

8. Looking Forward

9. A Place of Our Own

10. Earthbound Souls

11. The Commonality of Grief

12. Exploring Our Communication with Guides

13. Free Will in Practice

14. Learning from Experience

15. Love Never Fails

16. About Brian

17. There Are No Goodbyes

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

Have you ever wondered …

Is there life after death?

If so, where do people go when they die?

Can you keep in contact with your loved ones?

Are they able to help you?

Will you meet them again?

You’ll find the answers to these and many more questions in the following pages.

Introduction

If there is one thing of which we can all be certain, it’s the fact that we are going to die. At my age (76) most of my contemporaries are already gone.

In my early 20s there were five of us – a group who used to meet regularly every Saturday for years and often during the week, as we were all involved in theatrical activities of some kind. We kept in contact, although it became sporadic as circumstances and family responsibilities took over. Four of the five are gone now, and I’m the last man standing, so to speak. And I’m not standing all that firmly, so my turn will inevitably come in the not-too-distant future.

Many of my friends and acquaintances died suddenly, and for no obvious health reasons. One man died watching television, another asleep in his bed and another playing golf. One of my friends died eating his breakfast. These are mundane activities that somehow sparked the end of a life, and I could quote many more examples. Some people that I knew died in car crashes or accidents; some committed suicide. Some of those deaths were tragic shocks; others were expected, after months or even years of illness. In some of them, old age was the obvious cause. As it will be for many of us.

In 1977, shortly before my life changed in ways that I will describe in this book, I remember looking at the body of one of my friends, Tadhg Murray, as he lay silent and cold in his coffin. He had been a very vivid, articulate man, who carried his theatrical interests into the way he related to the world. There was nothing flamboyant about him in dress or appearance, but he managed to bring a sense of colour to his descriptions of even the most humdrum of happenings. He was a gentle and very popular man, much in demand as an actor and director in amateur-dramatic circles.

As I stood looking sadly – and with an almost overwhelming feeling of loss – at his now lifeless body, it made no sense to me that all that animation would be no more. Surely the death of his body just couldn’t be the end of his life, which had impacted so profoundly on all who knew him?

Less than six months after that I was introduced to a whole new world – and I didn’t even have to leave my body to experience it! Because of the events that transpired then, I no longer have any fear of death. I accepted totally the continuity of life, because I was given extensive information about what happens to the departing soul in the immediate aftermath of the death of the body – and how the mindset it carries affects subsequent developments. Most important, it has been a great comfort and joy for me to learn of the help that’s available to each and every soul on its passing – according to its readiness to receive help.

Fear plays a major role in all of our lives; in fact, it’s unlikely that there is – or ever has been – a human being who has not known fear. Fear takes many forms, and in many ways it guides our lives. We fear the unknown, and a potential crisis around the corner; we are afraid of being thought foolish or ridiculous, or being laughed at if we express a point of view. We fear punishment (both temporal and eternal) if we fail to live up to expectations; we also fear not being loved, not being able to love and even being unable to show love in order to experience happiness. We are frightened about being unemployable, not managing financially, losing control of our mental or physical faculties, through such things as senility or accidents; we are fearful of the future, and what will happen to our children when we are not around to help them grow up to be happy and successful. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Life is challenging for human beings on a daily basis, without even considering the fear of death. To some extent, this is the fear that overrides all other fears, and is, perhaps, the foundation upon which all other fears are based.

The word ‘death’ implies an ending. In between our birth and our death there are all sorts of endings, such as relationships, employment, and even mental or physical capacity. These are deaths of sorts; although not so final as the death of our bodies, they still represent the death of something that was vital and alive.

We fear death not just because we have experienced these smaller deaths as we progress through our lives, and therefore dread the possibility that there could be something worse; we fear death because it is the unknown.

What happens to us when we die is something about which we are all curious. Some people believe that when we’re dead ‘that’s it’. Others believe that we go on – but to what? Either way we’re unsure what death holds, and this strikes a chord of fear in the very heart of our beings.

This book provides answers not just to what happens when we die, but to many other questions as well. The main object of the book is to help people go through existence on earth secure in the knowledge that life continues towards complete freedom of spirit – and that there’s no reason whatsoever to be afraid of death. I hope it will have an incidental effect of helping to make life easier for everyone, including, ideally, freeing us from fear, generally.

My life and the way I live it changed entirely when I discovered that we all have guardian angels/spirit guides that are available and willing to help us in all aspects of our lives, if we so wish. Some of these guides are loved ones who have passed over; others are souls at an advanced level of consciousness who want to help all others who are not yet at that stage. All are familiar with life and its challenges, and are, therefore, in a position to guide us through the minefield of potential worries that inhibit our lives.

I have been on a momentous, life-changing journey in which I have developed active communication with my own guides over many years. In this book I’ll share details of that journey, with suggestions as to how others may be helped in achieving their own communication, if they so wish.

I think that one of the greatest things about life is the fact that we all have our own individual styles – we have our own way of doing things, and our own outlook on life. Our guides can help and encourage us in anything we choose to do, in whatever way we choose to do it. In no way do they impose on our free will; in fact, they encourage and help us to find our ideal form of self-expression. Spirit guides, or guardian angels as you may like to call them, are not magicians, and they do not have a ‘one size fits all’ approach to living. The ways they can help us are manifold, and the philosophy I have developed – and expanded, through individual consultations, workshops, talks and writing – is based on encouraging people to find and be comfortable with their lives and their individual style of living.

This book has been inspired by my communication with a soul who has acted as a spirit guide for me throughout my life – although I did not even become aware of it until I was in my 40s. Other guides have made significant contributions to the philosophy of life that suits me, and I have filtered the details of that philosophy throughout the book.

I feel deeply privileged to have survived long enough to be able to share this information with those of you who may be drawn to read it, and I hope that it may help you to see the apparent conundrum of life and death in a light-hearted and wholly reassuring way.

Paddy McMahon

Chapter 1

How My Life Changed

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.