I began to think of myself as whole again. For her the Internet had been a place of healing. But, these activities can also be dangerous for addictive personalities. People have been known to live on line in MUDS all their waking hours because it's so much better than their real lives. Like anything, it can be dangerous at the extremes.
MUDs offer a form of fulfillment for our yearning for transcendence.
They allow us to transcend the limitations of our physical bodies. Western religion has always contained a tension between transcendence, something beyond the physical, material world, and immanence, the need to live in these bodies, in this time and place. In The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace, Margaret Wertheim explores the idea that the Internet resolves this tension in a new, and yet, an old, way. After the death of the body, souls would go to dwell in this immaterial world, or heaven. She devotes her book to exploring the parallels between the early Christian's view of this immaterial world, and today's Cyberspace.