I didn’t make any comment, but she went on to tell me that a woman in Austria had seen them in a vision and was able to describe the suffering in Purgatory and Hell in gruesome detail.
Eventually I could keep quiet no longer. I said, ‘There aren’t any such places. They’re all states of mind.’
That led to a verbal deluge about how wrong I was. Then, with a triumphant flourish, she stood up and said, ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’
She left the bus – and me to my fate!
So what was the truth? The Heaven, Hell and Purgatory scenario most certainly wasn’t like anything Margaret Anna had described. And what about God? Where did he fit in?
A loving union
The God of my youth was a patriarchal figure with a long white beard and a rather frightening expression – or so I thought. It wasn’t difficult to imagine Him (always a capital ‘H’) doling out severe punishment for even minor transgressions. It’s understandable that I thought that way – we are all conditioned to impose a sort of structure on concepts, so that we can relate them to our own experience. So, in order to understand something, we tend to put onto it a form that’s familiar to us. This does, however, have the unfortunate effect of imposing limits on our thinking.
The same can be applied to the notion of God, to whom we give a ‘form’ that we can understand. It followed that God had to be a ‘person’, albeit one who could see, hear and know everything going on in the world – and be everywhere, all at the same time. His ability to achieve all of this had to be taken on trust; it would only be possible to accept His existence and His role if we believed.
As far as I’m aware, most, if not all, religious teaching focuses on the idea of separateness; in other words, there’s a Supreme Being (God) who created all souls and is separate from them. Because God is separate, He has the ultimate prerogative of sitting in judgment on us. Interestingly, however, every one of my spirit guides stresses that the idea of separateness is what delays the evolution of life on earth in terms of awareness. They are adamant that whatever we call the animating force of life – God, the Universe or unconditional love – is not separate from us but that we are all part of it.
In order to understand that concept, we need to dispense with any notions of form or structure. I like to use the description ‘unconditional love’ because it makes it impossible for me to fall into a trap of trying to fit that into any kind of structure. While I can’t fully understand how it all works, I find it easy to accept its infinite, unlimited nature, as I don’t see how it can be enclosed within any boundaries, not even beginnings and endings.
Margaret Anna and all those souls who act as our guides are helping us to free ourselves from the feeling of separateness, and to align ourselves with unconditional love. In that way we’re no longer in a ‘Him’ and ‘us’ situation but, rather, in a loving union with the source of all life. A simple (but ultimately inadequate) analogy is that of a drop of water being in the ocean but the ocean also being in the drop of water. In other words, there’s no separation between the drop of water and the ocean. Extending the analogy to ourselves we can understand and, ideally, accept that we, however limited and insignificant we may perceive ourselves to be, are part of that unconditional, infinite, loving energy and can allow ourselves to be supported by its unlimited power.
Another analogy was suggested to me by Jiddhu Krishnamurti (whose stated mission in his earthly life was to set people absolutely, unconditionally, free from all forms of conditioning). Suppose we say that there’s an everlasting light in each person. There’s an equivalent potential brightness in each light. In some people it shines dimly, in others it’s glowing a little brighter, in still others the glow is stronger; in each one the glow is at a different level of brightness. What switches the light to an increasing level of brightness is the quality of the inner life of each person – security, self-esteem, an ability to respond spontaneously to the flow of light, and, above all, freedom from rigidity of thinking, going within, and allowing the light to spread throughout the whole being. As each light glows ever more brightly, it connects with all the other lights and illuminates the whole universe.
The universal connection might perhaps be illustrated by representing each person as a perpetually lighting candle with its own distinctive colour. The light from each candle spreads into a huge glow throughout the universe. Yet each candle retains its individuality, while being part of the whole confluence of light.
So it is that each soul is a part of God and God is in each soul.
Margaret Anna had explained to me that each of us is a soul in spirit before we are born into our physical lives, and I asked her why she didn’t carry the concept of God that she had known at that time into her life as a nun.
She explained that her aim in that life was to be an agent of change, a reformer, and that it was necessary for her to go into an environment and to be part of it before she could seek to transform it. She had to have a passion for what she was doing. She couldn’t be an outsider. Where there was injustice, she needed to be a victim of it. Where there was sadness, grief and loneliness, she needed to experience them. She needed to be human in every sense of what that meant at that stage of human evolution. She also needed to be female, because human evolution would remain stagnant unless it could be rescued by a balancing of male and female consciousness within individuals and then globally.
In the context of the nineteenth century, her priority was to try to create a climate of improved conditions for people, particularly those who had unequal rights and opportunities, such as women and the poor who, of course, included both sexes.
She said to me, ‘I felt that my role was to be a launching pad from which others could orbit. I sought to be a pragmatist rather than a philosopher – or perhaps, to be a pragmatic philosopher! Perceptions of God could wait. In any case, they would be as individual as souls and would continue to be. We could explore the higher reaches of spiritual expression when people were more comfortable in their living conditions as well as their self-esteem.’
The concept of God that Margaret Anna outlined wasn’t new to me, as it had been conveyed by Shebaka to me in previous communications. I accepted it completely as the only philosophy that made sense of life to me.
As she had promised, Margaret Anna had chosen to begin the process of illustrating what happens after the death of the body by outlining her own experience, including her apprehension about whether or how she might be judged, and where God fitted into the whole picture of life after death. Her constant rejection during her life on earth by the ecclesiastical authorities hadn’t helped to set her mind at ease on those questions. The answers she discovered (or rediscovered, I should say) and outlined are clear and unambiguous.
I found her way of unfolding the evolution of her experience most illuminating and comforting. Already she had shown that there was nothing to fear about the experience of death.
Chapter 4
In Come the Guides
In the early years after I found I could communicate with spirit guides, my main contact was with Shebaka. I wrote my first books about what he communicated to me. But by the time I started work on this book, Margaret Anna was the main spirit with whom I had regular ‘conversations’, although I still got interjections from others from time to time.
Margaret Anna seemed as keen as I was to explore the details of life after our death on earth, and to tell me all about her personal experience of settling in to a new life in spirit. She wanted me to pass on this information to others here on earth so that they know what to expect.
‘I want to shout a big YES to life, to the death of death, if I might put it like that, so that anybody and everybody can say, “I know my body is going to die, but I know, too, that there’s nothing to fear in that – it’s a celebration of continuing transformation in life.” I want to go into details about how I express myself in my present state and what life in spirit generally is like.’
She answered question after question, explaining the intricacies of the process of death, as I tried to