Second Life Healing and Alchemy

The fairly common image of the ailing King in folk tales and the "wounding" of mythology have their equivalent in Alchemy known as the Nigredo. The Nigredo descends into the Mortificatio, often pictured as the king being buried in a coffin, ....so that's pretty ill.

Jung saw this as an archetypal image depicting the meeting with one's shadow as a result of the quest for self knowledge. That means that when you look in the mirror to see who you are, you can see both angel and devil. Seeing the devil looking back at you is a bit rough.
This Chaos situation is brought about by the unconscious (all our buried psychological baggage) rising up and flooding us.

I'm not really surprised that we all suffer from this to some extent as our Christian tradition (which permeates our culture, laws and education) has this nasty habit of branding the unconscious as evil and consciousness as good, unlike an Eastern tradition where Yin and Yang are understood to be equally necessary and no moral values attached to either one.

Jung suggested using a technique called Active Imagination. In this process you take a dream image or a phantasy and develop it, bit by bit, fleshing it out, changing and upgrading, recording it as you go,(or it just turns into day-dreaming).

Why?

Well, Active Imagination is a process of consciously dialoguing with our unconscious "for the production of those contents of the unconscious which lie, as it were, immediately below the threshold of consciousness and, when intensified, are the most likely to erupt spontaneously into the conscious mind."

It's like getting the microscope trained on what is trying to break through into our consciousness.

Everyone in Second Life is doing this.... from day one when you choose an avatar, even if you stay Ruthed forever.... you are involved in this process....
...the choices you make, the people you meet, the places you go...all of these factors are a development of your "virtual psyche". Your Virtual Psyche is a part of your unconscious made visible.

And so..... where does all this lead, and why should I be interested~??

Well, to put it quite simply, in amongst your unconscious baggage is some hidden treasure, and SL will help you find it.

It's a healing environment.

:))