Slowly but surely the wall that I had tried to build around my secret life began to crumble. Sometimes, much to my embarrassment, and after a little too much to drink, I was a bit too eager to impart the information provided by the spirit guides. As a result, word began to spread and a rapidly increasing number of people began to ask if they could come to see me. I was still very careful not to let any of that impinge on my work life, and kept things quiet when I was with my colleagues. My personal and social life was, however, beginning to follow a new track. The contact with people who were searching for meaning and direction in their lives was like an affirmation for me. I had to accept that guidance was coming to me from some benevolent source or sources outside of myself that I understood to be my guides.
My ability to provide people with guidance continued to perplex me. I had never regarded myself as being abnormally perceptive and, yet, when I asked for guidance I was able to tell people many things about themselves, their past experiences, their families, their relationships, their careers, their challenges and their gifts – facts that I couldn’t possibly have known in any other way. Many of these people were strangers to me, and the information I received about them was startlingly vivid and accurate. I was still, at that point, unsure where it was all coming from. I considered all the obvious explanations, such as telepathy, and subconscious or unconscious suggestion, but they made no sense in my situation. If I were using paranormal skills I would have been able to do so all of the time – not just on isolated occasions when people came to me for guidance. I considered it vitally important that I was completely unable to intrude on anyone’s privacy unless I was asked to do so by the person concerned.
The trouble was that word was getting around too fast. I was in a senior management position in the Civil Service, and part of my job included implementing a major reorganisation programme to do with property registration. I loved my job. It was enjoyable and fulfilling, but it made a lot of demands on my time. On the domestic front, the telephone was ringing constantly – day and night – with consequential inconvenience for the whole household, as people who had heard of my ability to make contact with spirit guides sought advice. All of this happened entirely through word of mouth. I struggled with my double life until I was given the opportunity to take early retirement from the Civil Service in 1988. This was a turning point for me. I was torn between continuing to do a job I enjoyed and accepting that something much bigger was going on. It was time to do something different with my life.
My family were supportive of my decision to retire from my job. My wife had long been interested in the area of communication with guides. I think they were glad that I was now able to deal with the telephone calls myself because they were less inconvenienced by its demands! And, of course, I was in a position to respond more frequently to requests from people to come to see me. After a session with me, individuals would tell their friends about the results and I’d get more calls until the whole thing snowballed.
Since that time, and across many years, I have had the privilege of meeting thousands of people. I have written eleven books under the pen-name Patrick Francis in collaboration with three spirit beings with whom I have established a strong communication. The first was an ex-nun called Margaret Anna Cusack. The second was Shebaka, an Egyptian pharaoh after whom the Shabaka stone in the British Museum is named. This stone was given to the museum by the First Lord of the Admiralty, George John, 2nd Earl Spencer (an ancestor of Princess Diana) in 1805, and registered with the museum on 13 July of that year. I spelled Shebaka’s name with an ‘e’ rather than an ‘a’ because I knew nothing about him initially, so it was a huge surprise when I found out about the stone. The third guide is Jiddhu Krishnamurti, the famous Indian philosopher and teacher. I set up my own self-publishing company but I did not actively seek publicity, nor did I advertise. I believed that people who would be interested in – or benefit from – the material in my books would be drawn to them. That arrangement suited me and it worked well.
One of the most rewarding and compellingly enlightening elements of my new work involved individual sessions with people. During these sessions all sorts of issues surfaced, including wide-ranging fears, relationship difficulties, career problems, a search for meaning in life, depression, financial issues, guilt, past lives, the desire for contact with ‘dead’ loved ones, communication with spirit guides, health problems, curiosity about what happens after the death of the body, and more. Most of these issues fell outside my own range of experience, which helped me to be non-judgemental in my approach. People came to see me about anything and everything, and the sessions that ensued moved into areas that were not confined to the particular issue that troubled my visitors. The floodgates were opened during our sessions, and both my visitors and I were often dumbstruck by what evolved.
I remained reluctant to intrude on people’s privacy unless they were completely open to the idea of hearing what the guides had to say. I knew nothing about the vast majority of my visitors, and put complete trust in my spirit guides to supply insights that would be in their best interests.
My life had changed, and through that I was beginning to help to change the lives of others. My story doesn’t stop here, though; in fact, this is and was just the beginning. I continued to devote a good proportion of my life to providing the guidance that the spirit guides offered. Later on in the book I will be going into more detail about guides and making suggestions about how people can connect with their own guides, if they so wish. First, though, since the book is primarily about what happens to people when they die, I must introduce the soul who inspired this book and who, as Margaret Anna Cusack, lived on earth from 1829 to 1899.
Chapter 2
Meeting Margaret Anna
In the late 1970s, shortly before I was, or more accurately agreed to be, catapulted into my new double life, I had an idea to try and write a film script about Daniel O’Connell, a charismatic Irish historical figure. He was a renowned barrister, the first Catholic member of the House of Commons in 1828 and the main campaigner for Catholic emancipation, which included the right of Catholics and Presbyterians and members of all Christian faiths (other than the established Church of England, which already had the exclusive right) to sit in Parliament. The enabling law was passed in 1829.
While I was researching O’Connell’s life I was guided to a rare biography of him, written by M.F. Cusack. In much the same way as I had been guided to Ruth Montgomery’s book in the library in Dun Laoghaire, I found myself holding the biography in my hands without consciously having sought it. I later discovered that the author was a woman usually known as Margaret Anna Cusack.
Something very odd happened when I held that book in my hands for the first time. I heard, or at least sensed, a new voice. Like the other guides who had entered my life, Margaret Anna introduced herself by way of a sort of telepathic communication. I looked down and saw her name, and there she was communicating with me. I was astonished to discover that this new voice belonged to someone who had been ‘real’. It hadn’t ever occurred to me that the guardian angels or spirit guides had been people who lived on earth. Up to that point I thought of them as ethereal beings. Why was this woman contacting me? Where did she come from? I had to find out.
Margaret Anna was a nineteenth-century celebrity; through her writing and her campaign for social reform she had become internationally famous as the ‘Nun of Kenmare’. Born in Dublin in 1829, she was brought up as a member of the Anglican Church. In her teens her parents separated and she moved to England with her mother. In due course she became engaged to a young man called Charles Holmes; however, during a visit to Ireland to see her father, who was very ill, she got news that Charles had died suddenly. She was devastated. She wrote: ‘I lay in a darkened room for months for it seemed to me as if the sunlight was too glad.’
After a period of mourning, Margaret Anna turned to intensive religious searching that led to her becoming an Anglican nun. About five years later, in 1859, she converted to Roman Catholicism, and a