The Allspirit website came into being in the last months of 1998. The website started with just one page, containing the poem A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe. The site now contains well over five hundred pages, and many thousands of poems, by poets ancient and contemporary, Sufi, Christian, Taoist, Buddhist amongst others.
Allspirit grew from my meeting two people. In 1997 I was introduced to Terry Murphy, and he began sharing lots of wonderful spiritual poetry and literature. Then, in 1998, I met Ed Jason (Lobster) and he was encouraging everybody to learn HTML and set up mailing lists. The Allspirit mailing list was created on 5th November 1998; it started, I think, on Onelist, and has been on other hosts, including egroups, smartgroups, googlegroups and now yahoogroups. One quiet Sunday afternoon I sat down with the book HTML for the World Wide Web by Elizabeth Castro, and the one page site was born.
It has always been my intention to share as much as possible from an eclectic source of traditions, cultures and styles, from Advaita to Zen there is something for everybody. Most of the poetry and excerpts shared have a nondual focus, as in the words of Hazrat Inayat Khan:
When we are face to face with truth, the point
of view of Krishna, Buddha, Christ, or any other
Prophet, is the same. When we look at life from the
top of the mountain, there is no limitation; there is
the same immensity.
Gill