Dear  ,

I hope you are all well. We’re having some terrible weather in the UK - storms with high winds and incessant rain, causing a lot of flooding. Winter seems to have lasted for a long time - it will be a relief when spring comes. I feel the same about the world - that we’ve been going through a long period of darkness and coldness, but soon the light will break and the air will turn warm, and spring will finally come. It might seem as if things are particularly bleak at the moment, but it’s important to take a long term view. As I showed in my book The Fall, human beings have lived in a state of psychological and social suffering for thousand of years, and it’s only over the last 250 years or so that this has begun to change. We’ve begun to move into what I call the ‘trans-Fall’ era, in which a signifiant number of people have felt a new empathic connection to other human beings and to nature (and other species), and a new impulse for spiritual development. There is even evidence suggesting that spiritual experiences are becoming more common.

So despite our present difficulties, I remain optimistic. It’s really just a question - again, as I suggest in the Fall - of whether we can collectively awaken (at least some degree) in time, before our problems become insurmountable.