Page - 177 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 03/01

Bridging Real and Virtual: A Spiritual Challenge | 177www.jrfm.eu 2017, 3/1, 159–181 tem of modern tarot. Carl Jung, the swiss psychologist, drew on the four ele- ments for his typology of the psyche, and new Jungians James hillman (1926– 2011) and especially thomas Moore (1940– ) built therapy on the rediscovered works of ficino. Moore elaborated ficino’s magical astrology in his 1973 book The Planets Within: The Astrological Psychology of Marsilio Ficino before writing his best-selling books Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacred- ness in Everyday Life (1992) and The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life (1997). Moore’s practical approach to therapy or “making a soul of one’s own” sketches a rough blueprint for bridges between reality and virtuality. BriDGiNG reAL AND VirtUAL By earth we see earth; by water, water; by air, shining air; but by fire, blazing fire; love by love and strife by baneful strife. Empedocles, Frag. 109 the active process of bridging real and virtual worlds can use the symbolic four elements to provide a psychologically soft landing for virtual travelers. the four elements can graft the virtual onto the real by using magical correspondences: “By earth we see earth; by water, we see water” and so on. The procedure is magical (associational) rather than rational, symbolic rather than literal, phe- nomenological rather than objective, and ritualistic rather than technological. Procedures of natural magic are commonplace but mysterious. flowers and candlelight are typical tools of natural magic. flowers in the hand are more than vegetation when offered with love, and under the right circumstances, candle- light is more romance than illumination. Magic applies symbolic procedures to achieve mood shifts in the self that daydreams, imagines, and invents goals for daily life. the deep self is also the self that worries over K&L’s twin issues: es- capism that damages personal life, and sensory deprivation that leads to body amnesia, insomnia, living mainly “in the head”. these dangers are not felt on the level of tangible external threats or disclaimers or of precautionary warn- ings found in hardware manuals. The deep self works from and is affected by visceral imagery. And since each virtual world has its own imaginal architecture, the bridging process will differ depending on the world. Different elements dominate each world and there- fore require special compensatory approaches to create balance. to illustrate the general procedure and to show differences in specific operations, this arti- cle concludes with two distinct rituals. One procedure covers the Oculus Lobby, and the other Land’s End. Both first-person phenomenological descriptions as-