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The Life of Ann Napier (6th March 1954 – 1st July 2014)

The Life of Ann Napier – By Geoff Napier 

Ann was born in north London to midwife Agnes Mary Macaulay and Woodcrafter Ernesto Alfredo Caschere. She has two sisters and a brother. From the very earliest moment of her life she realised that the world she was growing up in worked differently to how she felt it should do. Even at the age of three you could see this in a picture of her. She was not prepared to accept the conventional wisdoms of the time unless they proved themselves to be true!

For her, love was unconditional

Anything else was not the real thing. As a child she was determined to find out things for herself. She consumed books from the very beginning, moving on to writings of the wisdom teachings from all cultures from before the age of twelve. At the age of sixteen she had a dream. Twice in the same night, each time identical, as if to emphasize the message (see Ann’s editorial of Feb 2012: The Book, the Swan and the Star). She was with some people in front of a crowd that stretched to the horizon. There was a great book nearby with seals on it. She was told that her task was to tell all those people what was in this book with the seals. Ann pointed to someone else nearby and said, ‘Get him to do it, he’d do it much better than I can’. But they were clear, it was her task. When she woke up after the second time she wondered what it all meant. She had no idea, but it made a deep impression. So over the years she prepared herself to become as useful an instrument as possible, just in case. She learned to write English and teach, picking up a first class degree from the University of London. She learned to type and then to typeset. In her twenties, thirties and forties she translated into English about twenty commentaries on the wisdom teachings of Egypt, Gnosticism, Taoism, the Cathars and the Alchemical Wedding of Christian Rosycross. In the last twenty years of her life she searched for fragments of ‘The Book Of Life’ hidden in plain view, often within the pages of contemporary titles and when she found them she shared them with readers of the Cygnus Review. She selected just those fragments that seemed to resonate with the moment and that would feel real in the heart of the reader. The books, features and reviews just serve to ignite what you already possess, not to teach you anything new. And what you possess in your heart is already complete, entire and perfect. With unconditional Love as our foundation, we begin to spontaneously choose actions that are inspired by our hearts, in the spirit of not my will but Thy will be done. Wouldn’t it be fun to quietly explore this together, in our own communities!

With unconditional Love,
Geoff Napier

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