[Irish Times] Imagine if you suddenly began hearing voices in the air that followed you wherever you went; heading to work on the train, or out walking on a busy street. Voices that offered wise, accurate and relevant information.This is what happened to an unassuming public servant named Patrick McMahon in 1978. While working as an official in the land registry in Dublin, he became aware of invisible entities communicating with him. For a man reared without electricity or running water, in the Catholic claustrophobia of rural Co Clare, it was a disturbing development, and he tried his best to block it out. But visions of other civilizations and other ages kept flooding his mind.
"Was it the devil and all his cohorts of evil spirits playing tricks on me?" he wondered. "Was I simply going mad?"
What became clear was that life couldn't continue as before, with this constant deluge of information that was as loud and clear as a person standing right next to him. He needed to gain control of it, and after three months of leading what he calls "a double life", he finally learned to shut off the flow and return to normal. This should have been the end of the story: a bout of stress-related psychosis, a temporary mental anomaly, like many of us have experienced.
Yet, once McMahon realised that he was able to start and stop the communication at will, he became more at ease with it, and began to realise that it provided eerily accurate and relevant information. Not only that, but much of it was wise and profound. He described it as "a vast vista of never-ending, evolving consciousness, which put all the happenings of day-to-day existence into a totally new perspective".
Over time, he began writing down the thoughts that were coming to him, imagining that, if they had any validity, someone somewhere might publish them posthumously and anonymously in the far distant future. But Dublin in the 1980s was too small to keep such things secret, and soon people began to hear about this quiet Clare man who had access to uncannily precise information about their personal lives, their past and futures.