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 make sense of it all. Her answers jumped around like a patchwork that I had to make sense of. Sometimes she moved on from a topic and came back to it later, when she knew I was ready to hear about it. I never knew where our communications would lead, but I was heartened by everything I found out.
I discovered, for example, that it’s usual to have a looking-back process or ‘review’ of the physical life that is over. That’s when we assess how well we succeeded in whatever we set out to achieve in our lives. Of course, we may find ourselves disappointed by our efforts. It’s not intended to be a guilt-inducing exercise but, rather, an objective look at our progress on earth. Margaret Anna emphasised the fact that there is no pressure; we judge ourselves when we feel ready to do so. In fact, no one forces us to do anything at all, which would be interfering with our free will.
Although a review can be a positive experience, I did wonder if people might be anxious about looking back on past performance. Certainly it’s a far cry from presenting ourselves for judgment, as is often traditionally taught, but nonetheless it can be a daunting prospect. Margaret Anna’s experience was bound to be helpful, so I asked her whether she felt that she had achieved what she set out to achieve when she looked back at her earthly life.
She answered that, on the whole, she did. In her later years on earth she didn’t experience much of a sense of achievement. She had written a lot and talked a lot; she had raised a considerable amount of money to help people in need. She had consistently served in as loving a way as she could. But she had also been a source of dissent, and many of her projects had collapsed. She was often disillusioned and she see-sawed between religions. At the end, very much alone apart from a few stalwart friends, she couldn’t see herself as anything other than a failure, well-intentioned though she was. But, she told me:
‘In spirit there was – there always is – a very different perspective. It’s a futile and altogether pointless exercise trying to judge a life’s expression within its time span. When I looked at that earth life from the much broader vantage point of spirit I saw that, through my writings, my talks, my contacts with people, the ideas I put into motion, my passion for equal opportunities for everybody, I had opened doors to the raising of consciousness outside of the limits of a particular time scale. In other words, I had made a contribution – the effects of which would live on after I passed on. Once I had taken that on board in spirit I was able to forgive myself for all the human failings I had manifested and let myself enjoy the freedom I now had.’
Love after death
One of the major tragedies in our lives is when we lose our loved ones. I have come across this sort of situation many times and it can be heartbreakingly sad. Margaret Anna mentioned how much in love she had been with her fiancé Charles Holmes, her devastation when he died, and how different her future life would have been had he lived. But the good news is that they have resumed their relationship. She says, ‘We love each other in a more complete way than would have been possible on earth.’
So, while the pain of physical separation is very hard to bear there is great comfort in the thought that we will not only see our loved ones again, but also resume our relationships with them in a more profound way. Anything that is possible on earth is possible in spirit.
Communicating with guides
As I mentioned earlier, as a child I found great comfort in the idea of guardian angels, who were always helping me in a loving way. There was no fear associated with them. They helped me in ways too numerous to mention, and my belief that they were there, by my side, protecting me and my family from whatever I believed might endanger us, made my childhood infinitely calmer.
As I grew up into adulthood, I continued to believe in guardian angels – long after I had discounted most of the other elements of the belief systems of my youth. It was not something I actively thought about; rather, they were constantly there, on the periphery of my thoughts, and very real in many senses. In fact, I didn’t dwell on the angels much until I was dramatically reminded of their existence later in life. The most significant outcome of what I might call my reawakening was my acceptance not just of the reality of guardian angels, but the fact that it was possible to have conscious communication with them. Perhaps it was my earlier, unconscious acceptance of their existence that made me believe entirely that the voices I was hearing were
