Max and Isabel lived a busy, contented life writing and conducting research, presenting workshops, giving media interviews, and working with Geoff to build ESRs and Mind Mirrors through his company, Audio, Ltd. But their lives were not carefree, due to Max's deteriorating health. His twice-broken neck and exposure to high-power radar beams during his work with the Royal Navy caused his sight to fail, and he had been diagnosed as a diabetic at age 38. By age 50, his health was of increasing concern. Max proclaimed that "function is everything" and kept going.
In the early 1970s he suffered a stroke but insisted on teaching his Monday night class. Halfway through it, he realized that the class was not following him, and he had to accept that he was incoherent. Fortunately, the healer Addie Raeburn visited him at home the next morning to discuss healing research and laid hands on him. Later on Max said the experience was "like being in an express lift going down very fast."
He woke up the next day, 18 hours later, and Isabel cautiously asked how he was. To her surprise he answered lucidly: "I am very well indeed; thank you very much for asking." Max spent the rest of the day at his desk typing. The stroke was still in effect: he had to correct almost every letter on one sheet of paper. But he succeeded in regaining his typing skills. The next day, his Thursday evening group was delighted to see him back.
In 1980, the Thursday night group saved Max from having surgery on his diabetic toe, which turned black during a long car trip to Florence, Italy, where he, Isabel and Geoff drove to give a seminar for Bruce MacManaway and his group based there. The hospital in Florence wanted to amputate his toe, but Max and Isabel flew home and Max got busy concentrating his mind on his body's circulation.
Students in the Thursday class rallied to help. One of the students, Sidney Crawford, remembers: "Our group of 12 to 15 people would sit in a circle holding hands. Max's foot would be on a chair, and we hoped we were sending powerful waves of healing to the dark toe now visible. Over the months the dark wine colour of the toe began to fade and became a normal pink." The medical specialist was astonished. Day by day, the colour came back and finally an operation was not necessary. As Isabel said much later, "He died with his big toe on."
Max was fighting a losing battle, nonetheless. Isabel, who had been the helpful hostess and equipment guide in the workshops, began to develop as a teacher herself. Max walked with a stick to his chair in the classroom and spoke faintly at first, but soon his voice would grow in power. Geoff recalls: "By the time the group reached the 8.30 p.m. break, Max would be in full flood, inspirational and compelling as in earlier days. Body highly energised, he appeared to have risen above his earthly woes." To his students, this was a supreme example of how mind could rise above matter.
Geoff took over Max's courses in Psychocybernetics and Hypnopsychedelics in March of 1985 when Max was taken ill and went into the hospital for a routine prostate operation. The operation was successful, but Max died of shock a few hours afterwards, on March 28, despite efforts to save him. Isabel, Geoff, and his wife Helen stood around his body chanting AUM and HUM. To Geoff, Max's expression was anguished with pain. But two days later, at his funeral, there was an ecstatic smile on his face. The woman undertaker said she felt a presence in Max and asked if he was some kind of master. Her two Siamese cats loved to be with him and insisted on using him as a bed.
Others felt his spiritual presence, and none believed that he was actually gone, Geoff recalls. They knew, as the inscription on his gravestone read, that he had entered the oneness: "A source of inspiration to many/The dew drop slips into the shining sea."