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