Spiritual Community on the Internet with Annie Raitt

ast summer I decided to go on the Internet to find like-minded people. My first day online I found a spiritual chat room--a magical site that is a real community. Imagine a place where you can come and share ideas and gather insights about your inner path; a place where spontaneous joy prompts a dozen people from all over the globe to take a romp in the sea with dolphins; a place where healing circles and classes occur on an on-going basis. This is the world of my Cyber-Kin--a community in Cyber-Space. As I edit this interview right now, Lindia, my cyber sister from Brooklyn, is sitting right here beside me. When Lindia and I met online, it felt like we were old college roommates. It's funny, but we actually know a lot of the same people (our life groups having crossed five or six times in the past). We talk on the telephone quite a bit as well as chat on the Internet. This is our fourth visit with each other since Christmas and we live 3,000 miles apart. She came here along with ten other cyber friends from all over the country for a gathering in Mendocino County this past weekend. Many of our online relationships translate into "3D" friendships. There is a numinous quality to these cyber contacts. As a dear friend wrote to me . . ."Let me tell ya 'bout a modern love, come from me from up above . . . by up above I mean across the telephone line . . . I mean to say my love is techno divine!" There are many positive things happening online--things that you probably never hear about, such as healings for friends with cancer, someone isolated in a remote part of Nova Scotia or Sweden having been brought to life, people who have never spoken to each other writing spontaneous poetry together in real time. Half a dozen marriages were born in this Cyber community in the past year. This is a hotbed of spontaneous creativity. On the shadow side there have been painful crushed romances and connections that cannot translate into "3D." We also have our share of people who come in for the express purpose of disrupting something they don't understand. The site was even "hacked" by an expelled person who insisted on profanity and violence. His banning took place only after our many attempts to make peace. Our sense of community has endured through it all. This is a spiritual chat room. Some people who come in here don't last because they present themselves in a way that is less than honest. After a period of time, anybody who is being unauthentic becomes obvious. They either leave or come clean. Also, projection is easy--since a lot of what goes on is what you picture in your mind. Therefore, you have to constantly check out what is happening with others. In this particular group of people the honesty level is pretty high. This in itself fosters a lot of personal growth. A friend from the chat room suddenly got very ill. He came to see me in California, and was obviously going through a lot. When he left here, he disappeared. Several weeks went by and no one knew where he was. Just as a group of us started to worry and were considering contacting his family, he reemerged. He had been in a coma and almost died. A guy in Eastern Canada near Toronto went to Wisconsin, picked him up and took him to a family in British Columbia. They nursed him for three or four weeks. Then he came to California and moved in with some people in the Peninsula. How did he know all of us? He knew us through the Internet! When he needed something, people rallied to be there for him. He had been dishonest in his sharing with us, but as he got to know us better from talking on-line and experienced our love and support translated into 3D, he decided it was safe to share what had happened. I don't understand what happens out there in cyberspace. How can typing on a keyboard and sending these electrons down the line engender such incredible soul touching as takes place in this chat room? How can you have a relationship and feel feelings for someone that you have never met? Ram Dass talks a lot about bi-planing--keeping your awareness on the soul level and the mundane level at the same time; bringing more of your higher self into your daily dealings. This concept of bi-planing is a great metaphor for what happens in cyberspace. You are free to take flights of fancy in all kinds of directions. We have what I call romps, which I delight in--as one of my characters known as Sophia Aviatrix, the bi-plane pilot. These romps and journeys are spiritual, psychic, intuitive, astral, emotional, and mental experiences--only the physical body is missing. All the non-physical aspects of ourselves can meet on the net. If a dark energy comes into the chat room in the form of trashing by kids or a fundamentalist who is pushing the message "my way is right," I put on my long white silk scarf and leather helmet and take them on bi-plane rides. What fun! Having a computer doesn't mean everyone is getting along financially. You would be surprised at the number of people who are holding on by their fingernails. Every once in awhile a man who runs a spiritual retreat center in Washington State laments about how hard it is to make ends meet. Then people will rally and send him money or take him supplies. A lot of this type of thing happens. People who have some extra cash also periodically send it to the man in Switzerland who started this whole thing--to help him keep our chat server online. We have a class in one of the public rooms every Sunday at 5:00 p.m. The leader is a woman from eastern Oklahoma, just over the Texas border. She is a nurse administrator for a hospital. She is very psychic and excellent at helping people focus on the truth of what is going on in a given situation. In this class, she makes a presentation or suggests a group experiment. Very powerful things have come out of that class. She and a guy from Ontario, Canada and I had been focusing and sending love to each other. We were experiencing a strong triangle of energy between us that overlay the geographical region from California to Ontario to Oklahoma and back again. One night the three of us went into the class and told the others what we had been doing. In the course of that class about twenty other people joined us in laying this network around the planet--those who were open to experimenting. I could feel the triangle expanding out to another point and another point, a growing geometric shape that wrapped around the planet. We had people from Prague, India, Australia, Singapore, the US and Canada. Focusing our energy was reinforcing our non-physical abilities --the intuitive and psychic. This woman from Oklahoma told me I had a phenomenal natural ability to do this. "Let's work with it." After a couple of weeks, I became acutely aware how much I do receive and how important it is for me to send as well. This is a good metaphor for what happens to all of us, as we become more aware of our interconnectedness to each other. It is just that this particular group of people has stumbled into a pod. We are like a dolphin pod. My existence here in Ukiah is pretty wonderful. I surround myself with people who are interested in their spiritual journey in one way or another. Cyberspace is the same. When I tell people in the chat room that our conversations are extensions of things that happen to me in my 3-D life, a lot them say they wish they lived in a place like this. For some of them, the chat room is their only outlet. Here in Mendocino County, we live in a nexus of energy that is pretty special. I feel that I have found the "Mendocino County" of cyberspace. One night I was talking to a woman in Colorado and a man in Washington State. A fourth person came in to our conversation--someone whom I had never met before. I have maybe seen him there twice since. We had been having a conversation about the Colorado plateau, which I think is one of the most wonderful places on the planet. I love the canyons and high desert country, and since I feel really at home there, a large part of my inner mythology revolves around this plateau. So, this person came in and started posting my inner meditative space with regards to that country. All four of us were amazed. I suddenly had an electric charge build up around me. All the hair stood up straight all over my body, starting on the back of my arms and neck. He then posted something about faith, stepping off the edge of a cliff and knowing you will sprout wings. I typed "We are kin." Suddenly all four of us were knocked off line. I have seen things like that happen over and over. A charge gets built up and you just literally blast each other off the phone line. Right before that moment, we had asked each other's email addresses. Each person got one address. When we later checked in, we found only the four of us had been knocked off line--no one else in the chat room. Last night a woman from the Midwest came in. I asked her how she was doing and she said she wasn't doing well. I distinctly felt she needed something. She was having a hard time coming to terms with the loss of people in her life who had passed over and was lamenting that she couldn't reach these departed spirits. We had a discussion that boiled down to--when we come into the physical body, we eat of the fruit of good and evil. We accept duality. When someone dies and you don't let them go, you are picturing them as separate. The fact that the mind thinks they are still separate in essence keeps them separate in duality. We then discussed the idea that separation is an illusion and that we can allow them to live inside us. She had never heard of that concept. We were having this private exchange open to the view of twenty-five other people in the open chat area. We could have gone into a private room to talk, but three or four other people were attracted to the conversation. When important information is being shared, the people who need to participate seem to join in. They just know. One night, somebody came in and trashed a woman by calling her a slut bitch. Instead of getting mad, she posted to ask the rest of us women to help her define the requirements to be a slut bitch. Within a few minutes we had established the SB Club. You needed black lace underwear, red nail polish, stiletto heels, leather, and stockings with seams. You had to have an attitude. A woman from Shasta named Lady Lucero came in with her lantern. We posted it up in the street corner. Now we had Lucero's Corner. The SB Club members were hooking and picking up dudes. As we were talking about how great we looked in our white boots, halter tops, and sequin dresses, Erin the Elf came in. We were working Lucero's Corner and I asked him if he wanted to go for a ride? Another Elf, Amindal showed up in a red convertible. Erin and I jumped in and we started posting this bit about screaming across the desert in a red convertible. Things were moving fast. As we got to the ocean and pulled up to the beach, I jumped out of the car, tore off my clothes and ran into the sea. My legs turned into flippers and I turned into a dolphin. The elves were right after me. They hit the water and wrote fantastic descriptions of their own transformation into dolphins. Then, of the twenty-five to thirty people in the room, ten more raced into the sea after us. We now had a boiling pod of dolphins in the ocean. This was a most amazing night. We experienced so much freedom. When that many people come together and add their input, the energy and creativity is astounding. I had no idea where we would be going that night when Lady Lucero came in, put her light up on the corner, and said, "Okay girls, let's start working this corner." I had no idea what would happen when we got to the sea. Some people went right for the water without reading any of the previous postings--there were all these leapings and splashings and people began posting beautiful poetry. At night most of the people are Americans and Canadians. The Europeans have gone to bed. The Ozzies are in the middle of their day. What concrete comes out of this? Relationships come out of it. Poetry, songs and stories come from here every day. This is high level spontaneous creativity. This creative matrix is also a very nurturing environment. This is not a commercial site. There is no advertisement, no banners. We express our feelings and moods through what are called emoticons (typed symbols like: :} S...{@}{@}) You come to recognize the unique and specific writing style of the people you talk to over a long period of time. If someone I talk to a lot came into the chat room using a different name, I would still know them. Sophia says, "Hi guys, Here I am being interviewed for a magazine article about our spiritual community. Anyone have any comments about what this place is? The angle of the article is looking at what community means in a rural county, what the different aspects of it are." "It is hard for people to connect and validate spirituality in day to day life. The net creates a unique environment for communicating soul to soul. It seems mysterious, but somehow a person communicates something of their essential nature, their truth, and sometimes another person resonates deeply in response back. It's like singing harmony, only without music. The words carry the vibrations. You certainly feel and respond deeply at times. I have felt more deeply open channels open here more than anything I have experienced. " "I am a lawyer. Most of my friends are lawyers. Most of them don't believe in God much less in a new age version of him or her. It is spiritually lonely out there for me." "This is a place to exchange the most diverse spiritual and fanciful ideas without too much fear of reprisal or challenge. Free speech." "Communicating like this allows us to move outside our communities and share what we are learning. It is truly a global village now. Live locally, share globally." "We learn a lot from each other. I have grown a lot more accepting of people's unique world-views. I used to fight them and try to make mine more valid. I listen more and judge less. You really think about what you are saying. In person you might just blurt out a reaction."

ast summer I decided to go on the Internet to find like-minded people. My first day online I found a spiritual chat room--a magical site that is a real community. Imagine a place where you can come and share ideas and gather insights about your inner path; a place where spontaneous joy prompts a dozen people from all over the globe to take a romp in the sea with dolphins; a place where healing circles and classes occur on an on-going basis. This is the world of my Cyber-Kin--a community in Cyber-Space.
As I edit this interview right now, Lindia, my cyber sister from Brooklyn, is sitting right here beside me. When Lindia and I met online, it felt like we were old college roommates. It's funny, but we actually know a lot of the same people (our life groups having crossed five or six times in the past). We talk on the telephone quite a bit as well as chat on the Internet. This is our fourth visit with each other since Christmas and we live 3,000 miles apart. She came here along with ten other cyber friends from all over the country for a gathering in Mendocino County this past weekend. Many of our online relationships translate into "3D" friendships. There is a numinous quality to these cyber contacts.
As a dear friend wrote to me . . ."Let me tell ya 'bout a modern love, come from me from up above . . . by up above I mean across the telephone line . . . I mean to say my love is techno divine!"
There are many positive things happening online--things that you probably never hear about, such as healings for friends with cancer, someone isolated in a remote part of Nova Scotia or Sweden having been brought to life, people who have never spoken to each other writing spontaneous poetry together in real time. Half a dozen marriages were born in this Cyber community in the past year. This is a hotbed of spontaneous creativity.

On the shadow side there have been painful crushed romances and connections that cannot translate into "3D." We also have our share of people who come in for the express purpose of disrupting something they don't understand. The site was even "hacked" by an expelled person who insisted on profanity and violence. His banning took place only after our many attempts to make peace. Our sense of community has endured through it all.

This is a spiritual chat room. Some people who come in here don't last because they present themselves in a way that is less than honest. After a period of time, anybody who is being unauthentic becomes obvious. They either leave or come clean. Also, projection is easy--since a lot of what goes on is what you picture in your mind. Therefore, you have to constantly check out what is happening with others. In this particular group of people the honesty level is pretty high. This in itself fosters a lot of personal growth.
A friend from the chat room suddenly got very ill. He came to see me in California, and was obviously going through a lot. When he left here, he disappeared. Several weeks went by and no one knew where he was. Just as a group of us started to worry and were considering contacting his family, he reemerged. He had been in a coma and almost died. A guy in Eastern Canada near Toronto went to Wisconsin, picked him up and took him to a family in British Columbia. They nursed him for three or four weeks. Then he came to California and moved in with some people in the Peninsula.
How did he know all of us? He knew us through the Internet! When he needed something, people rallied to be there for him. He had been dishonest in his sharing with us, but as he got to know us better from talking on-line and experienced our love and support translated into 3D, he decided it was safe to share what had happened.

I don't understand what happens out there in cyberspace. How can typing on a keyboard and sending these electrons down the line engender such incredible soul touching as takes place in this chat room? How can you have a relationship and feel feelings for someone that you have never met?
Ram Dass talks a lot about bi-planing--keeping your awareness on the soul level and the mundane level at the same time; bringing more of your higher self into your daily dealings. This concept of bi-planing is a great metaphor for what happens in cyberspace. You are free to take flights of fancy in all kinds of directions. We have what I call romps, which I delight in--as one of my characters known as Sophia Aviatrix, the bi-plane pilot. These romps and journeys are spiritual, psychic, intuitive, astral, emotional, and mental experiences--only the physical body is missing. All the non-physical aspects of ourselves can meet on the net.
If a dark energy comes into the chat room in the form of trashing by kids or a fundamentalist who is pushing the message "my way is right," I put on my long white silk scarf and leather helmet and take them on bi-plane rides. What fun!

Having a computer doesn't mean everyone is getting along financially. You would be surprised at the number of people who are holding on by their fingernails. Every once in awhile a man who runs a spiritual retreat center in Washington State laments about how hard it is to make ends meet. Then people will rally and send him money or take him supplies. A lot of this type of thing happens. People who have some extra cash also periodically send it to the man in Switzerland who started this whole thing--to help him keep our chat server online.

We have a class in one of the public rooms every Sunday at 5:00 p.m. The leader is a woman from eastern Oklahoma, just over the Texas border. She is a nurse administrator for a hospital. She is very psychic and excellent at helping people focus on the truth of what is going on in a given situation. In this class, she makes a presentation or suggests a group experiment. Very powerful things have come out of that class.
She and a guy from Ontario, Canada and I had been focusing and sending love to each other. We were experiencing a strong triangle of energy between us that overlay the geographical region from California to Ontario to Oklahoma and back again. One night the three of us went into the class and told the others what we had been doing. In the course of that class about twenty other people joined us in laying this network around the planet--those who were open to experimenting. I could feel the triangle expanding out to another point and another point, a growing geometric shape that wrapped around the planet. We had people from Prague, India, Australia, Singapore, the US and Canada. Focusing our energy was reinforcing our non-physical abilities --the intuitive and psychic.
This woman from Oklahoma told me I had a phenomenal natural ability to do this. "Let's work with it." After a couple of weeks, I became acutely aware how much I do receive and how important it is for me to send as well. This is a good metaphor for what happens to all of us, as we become more aware of our interconnectedness to each other. It is just that this particular group of people has stumbled into a pod. We are like a dolphin pod.

My existence here in Ukiah is pretty wonderful. I surround myself with people who are interested in their spiritual journey in one way or another. Cyberspace is the same. When I tell people in the chat room that our conversations are extensions of things that happen to me in my 3-D life, a lot them say they wish they lived in a place like this. For some of them, the chat room is their only outlet. Here in Mendocino County, we live in a nexus of energy that is pretty special. I feel that I have found the "Mendocino County" of cyberspace.

One night I was talking to a woman in Colorado and a man in Washington State. A fourth person came in to our conversation--someone whom I had never met before. I have maybe seen him there twice since. We had been having a conversation about the Colorado plateau, which I think is one of the most wonderful places on the planet. I love the canyons and high desert country, and since I feel really at home there, a large part of my inner mythology revolves around this plateau. So, this person came in and started posting my inner meditative space with regards to that country. All four of us were amazed.
I suddenly had an electric charge build up around me. All the hair stood up straight all over my body, starting on the back of my arms and neck. He then posted something about faith, stepping off the edge of a cliff and knowing you will sprout wings. I typed "We are kin." Suddenly all four of us were knocked off line. I have seen things like that happen over and over. A charge gets built up and you just literally blast each other off the phone line. Right before that moment, we had asked each other's email addresses. Each person got one address. When we later checked in, we found only the four of us had been knocked off line--no one else in the chat room.
Last night a woman from the Midwest came in. I asked her how she was doing and she said she wasn't doing well. I distinctly felt she needed something. She was having a hard time coming to terms with the loss of people in her life who had passed over and was lamenting that she couldn't reach these departed spirits. We had a discussion that boiled down to--when we come into the physical body, we eat of the fruit of good and evil. We accept duality. When someone dies and you don't let them go, you are picturing them as separate. The fact that the mind thinks they are still separate in essence keeps them separate in duality. We then discussed the idea that separation is an illusion and that we can allow them to live inside us. She had never heard of that concept.
We were having this private exchange open to the view of twenty-five other people in the open chat area. We could have gone into a private room to talk, but three or four other people were attracted to the conversation. When important information is being shared, the people who need to participate seem to join in. They just know.

One night, somebody came in and trashed a woman by calling her a slut bitch. Instead of getting mad, she posted to ask the rest of us women to help her define the requirements to be a slut bitch. Within a few minutes we had established the SB Club. You needed black lace underwear, red nail polish, stiletto heels, leather, and stockings with seams. You had to have an attitude. A woman from Shasta named Lady Lucero came in with her lantern. We posted it up in the street corner. Now we had Lucero's Corner.
The SB Club members were hooking and picking up dudes. As we were talking about how great we looked in our white boots, halter tops, and sequin dresses, Erin the Elf came in. We were working Lucero's Corner and I asked him if he wanted to go for a ride? Another Elf, Amindal showed up in a red convertible. Erin and I jumped in and we started posting this bit about screaming across the desert in a red convertible.
Things were moving fast. As we got to the ocean and pulled up to the beach, I jumped out of the car, tore off my clothes and ran into the sea. My legs turned into flippers and I turned into a dolphin. The elves were right after me. They hit the water and wrote fantastic descriptions of their own transformation into dolphins. Then, of the twenty-five to thirty people in the room, ten more raced into the sea after us. We now had a boiling pod of dolphins in the ocean.
This was a most amazing night. We experienced so much freedom. When that many people come together and add their input, the energy and creativity is astounding. I had no idea where we would be going that night when Lady Lucero came in, put her light up on the corner, and said, "Okay girls, let's start working this corner." I had no idea what would happen when we got to the sea. Some people went right for the water without reading any of the previous postings--there were all these leapings and splashings and people began posting beautiful poetry.
At night most of the people are Americans and Canadians. The Europeans have gone to bed. The Ozzies are in the middle of their day.
What concrete comes out of this? Relationships come out of it. Poetry, songs and stories come from here every day. This is high level spontaneous creativity. This creative matrix is also a very nurturing environment. This is not a commercial site. There is no advertisement, no banners. We express our feelings and moods through what are called emoticons (typed symbols like: :} *S*...{@}{@}) You come to recognize the unique and specific writing style of the people you talk to over a long period of time. If someone I talk to a lot came into the chat room using a different name, I would still know them.

Sophia says, "Hi guys, Here I am being interviewed for a magazine article about our spiritual community. Anyone have any comments about what this place is? The angle of the article is looking at what community means in a rural county, what the different aspects of it are."

"It is hard for people to connect and validate spirituality in day to day life. The net creates a unique environment for communicating soul to soul. It seems mysterious, but somehow a person communicates something of their essential nature, their truth, and sometimes another person resonates deeply in response back. It's like singing harmony, only without music. The words carry the vibrations. You certainly feel and respond deeply at times. I have felt more deeply open channels open here more than anything I have experienced. "

"I am a lawyer. Most of my friends are lawyers. Most of them don't believe in God much less in a new age version of him or her. It is spiritually lonely out there for me."

"This is a place to exchange the most diverse spiritual and fanciful ideas without too much fear of reprisal or challenge. Free speech."

"Communicating like this allows us to move outside our communities and share what we are learning. It is truly a global village now. Live locally, share globally."

"We learn a lot from each other. I have grown a lot more accepting of people's unique world-views. I used to fight them and try to make mine more valid. I listen more and judge less. You really think about what you are saying. In person you might just blurt out a reaction."