Guided By Angels: Part 2 of 3: There Are No Goodbyes, My Tour of the Spirit World. Paddy McMahon
her for any details of her past lives. I assumed that she’d have given them to me if she thought they were relevant to what we were doing. Anyway, I’d only have been asking out of idle curiosity.
I suggested to her that she may, over time, change her mind and return again, but she was adamant that her choice was absolute. She said, ‘I feel I can play a more significant part in helping to raise consciousness by staying put. I don’t mean that to be taken generally – I’m just speaking for myself.’
She explained that we all make our own decisions as our souls evolve. Sometimes we don’t progress in a particular incarnation and may choose to reincarnate. The key is to free ourselves from what we’ve been taught about God as a separate, remote being, and to develop as souls, over several lifetimes, until eventually we move into a place of complete and perfect harmony. In Margaret Anna’s case, she has nothing more to learn from earthly life and has progressed spiritually to a stage where she’s working as a spirit guide in a totally unconditionally loving way.
Chapter 6
Spirit Guides at Work
Once a complete mystery, the workings of the spirit guides have begun to become clear to me over the years. My communication with Margaret Anna in particular has been resoundingly enlightening, as well as enormously reassuring, and it is through her words that I can best describe how the spirit guides effect the changes in our lives that they do, and how they communicate both with us and among themselves.
I was communicating with Margaret Anna one evening when I realised that I had interrupted the flow several times. I stopped to apologise, and she asked me not to do so any more.
‘I’m not controlled by time like you,’ she said. And so it was that I began to view our communications in a different way. They were also shaped by Margaret Anna’s view of memory. She doesn’t have memory lapses, she said, so she has no need for memory.
She said, ‘There’s nothing I need to forget so I can forgo the protective screen of memory.’
This is an interesting concept. In the human state we think of memory as the capacity to remember things, whereas it’s interesting to see it as an aid to forgetting things that we have no need to remember. In particular, it can be an aid to forget things that are often a source of guilt and depression. Speaking for myself at least, I think that one of the benefits of growing old is that a selective process takes place about what I need to remember instead of putting energy into dwelling on things that are usually of very temporary significance.
What’s in a name?
Margaret Anna commented to me about how many recorded spirit communications are from souls with exotic-sounding names, such as the names of Native American chieftains and so forth. She felt that people might relate more easily to communications from someone with a non-exotic name like hers: Margaret Anna Cusack. She said, ‘It’s ordinary, like everyman or everywoman.’
I’m not so sure about that myself. The concept of spirit guides (or guardian angels) can seem far-fetched for some people, and I think we are all guilty of being slow to accept that extraordinary information can come from apparently ordinary sources. Maybe it’s because we don’t think enough of ourselves to accept that people with ordinary names can be capable of extraordinary things. Exotic names somehow make it more convincing!
No spiritual hierarchy
When people get together to work on any project – political, social, religious or whatever – the first thing they do, almost inevitably, is to set up an organisation with rules and regulations and pyramids of hierarchical positions. In many religions we are told of a hierarchy of angels. In Christianity, for example, angels fall into orders, or ‘angelic choirs’. Is this actually the way that angels operate?
Margaret Anna has been very clear about this point, and she has stressed that nobody – including other souls in spirits – tells her what to do. She feels that it is important to establish this, because it is an all-too-common belief that there is a type of ruling hierarchy in spirit, who assign missions to their minions. So the structures that dictate our life on earth no longer exist. How do they operate?
According to Margaret Anna, guides have what she calls a ‘cooperative system’. It would be unthinkable for them to sit idly by while people struggle. There are hordes and hordes of souls in spirit engaged in all sorts of schemes designed to help their brothers and sisters on earth. They have conferences and they set up committees. They choose the ways in which they’d like to help, bearing in mind the areas that most suit them. They may decide to appoint a coordinator who will keep an overview of their different programmes and, of course, they meet frequently to discuss how they’re progressing.
Margaret Anna says, ‘While we’re very aware of human traumas and the suffering that many of our human “charges” are experiencing, and we certainly don’t take them lightly, nevertheless, because we can see the bigger picture, we retain our feelings of joy and are in what I might describe as states of concerned detachment. We wouldn’t be much help to anybody if we got caught up emotionally in every passing crisis.’
Here, for a reason that will become obvious later, I’d like to mention a friend of mine, Frank. I had come to know him when a mutual friend introduced him to me, after which we had established a great rapport. He was a member of the Catholic religious Order of Marist Brothers. He had qualified as a teacher and worked in Africa for many years, doing rehabilitative work as well as teaching. In his youth he had been an active and talented footballer. When he read them he was very taken with my books and used them in his work of helping recovering male addicts. He had died a few years ago, but on a number of occasions he has communicated freely not just with me but also with another mutual friend. He has been invariably accurate in all his communications. He is now participating in the type of cooperative system referred to by Margaret Anna, by easing the passing of souls into their new situation.
What crisis?
It’s comforting to know that when we are in our darkest hour there is someone looking out for us. But in spirit they look at things rather differently. Margaret Anna has said that what humans see as crises aren’t really crises at all. She had her own share of crises when she was on earth, and concedes that this may not be a particularly helpful statement for anyone going through what they perceive to be traumatic times. However, it’s fair to say that when we look back we often wonder why we got so worked up over situations that, in hindsight, seem trivial. From the guides’ perspective on the mountaintop, as it were, they can see the purpose behind the happenings, they rejoice in the understanding that sometimes comes later on, and are so grateful when they can help people to reach that understanding.
Margaret Anna says, ‘We have great fun here. Don’t let anybody think for a minute that we’re clones of each other. We’re able to express our different and unique personalities in ways that we didn’t feel free to on earth. And I think you can gather from the tone of my communications, even though you’re putting them into rather careful language, that I’m anything but a pietistic, antiseptic type of individual.
‘However, it would be misleading of me to present a picture of life in spirit as full of uninterrupted joy. It is for many, according to their states of awareness. But, unfortunately, there are still many souls in spirit who are experiencing what I can only call the tortures of hell, except that, mercifully, we know that it’s only a temporary hell. The duration of it is determined by how willing they are to open themselves to a new awareness of themselves.’
I wondered what she could mean. What could lead to souls in spirit experiencing the tortures of hell? She agreed to give me some examples.
Unhappy souls
In the religious teaching of my youth, suicide was regarded as a mortal sin that meant punishment by hellfire for all eternity. Any person who committed suicide wasn’t entitled to be buried in consecrated ground. I shudder to think that so many people – and, I’m ashamed to say, I was once one of them – subscribed to such a belief system. For all I know, many may still do.
Margaret Anna described the case of a man whom she called Johann, who was