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.
After that, the other guests asked me to do the same thing for them, with similar results. At this remove, all I can remember is that the general reaction was one of surprise and interest – which, I suppose, would have been true for me as well. It was all very odd.
As I didn’t want to be put into any sort of ‘guru’ slot, I asked the group to keep quiet about what had happened. Since the spirit guides first made themselves known to me, I’ve made every