Maud Oakes: The Stone Speaks – Quotations – Carl Jung Depth Psychology

The Stone Speaks: The Memoir of a Personal Transformation

“You Americans don’t know your own heritage. You know nothing about the American Indian!” -fired Maud Oakes with the determination to work with the Navaho shamans whose sand paintings she had read about in an anthropological study. ~Joseph Henderson, The Stone Speaks, Page x

From [Heinrich] Zimmer, Maud learned the symbolism of the Tarot cards and their use in divination. ~Joseph Henderson, The Stone Speaks, Page xi

Mary Mellon’s quite unexpected death threatened to end the Bollingen enterprise. Her last words to her husband- “I had so much to do!,,-heartened him [Paul Mellon] to carry the Foundation on under the leadership of John Barrett. ~Joseph Henderson, The Stone Speaks, Page xi

Six months later, while recuperating from an illness [Maud Oakes] she placed a photograph of the [Jung’s] ] stone before her as an object of meditation. ~Joseph Henderson, The Stone Speaks, Page xiii

Miss Oakes who studied Navaho ceremonials and sand paintings understood the need for psychic as well as physical treatment. ~Joseph Henderson, The Stone Speaks, Page xiii

You understand the stone as a statement about a more or less limitless world of thought-images. I quite agree with your view. One can read the symbols like that. When I hewed the stone I did not think, however. I just brought into shape what I saw on its face. ~Carl Jung, The Stone Speaks, xvi

You have not interpreted a dream or fantasy correctly if you merely tell the patient something he already knows. Only if you can enable him to learn something about himself he does not know, and this knowledge can be verified as indispensable for the progress of his therapy, has your interpretation succeeded. ~Carl Jung, The Stone Speaks, xviii

My father became very ill with cancer. Tommy and I stayed in the country with Cece [My Governess]. We were taken to see Father lying in a large double bed. He looked so thin and pale that I knew he was very ill and felt very sad. One night I dreamt that my father walked out the door of the town house and waved good-bye to me and rose into the sky. I woke Cece and told her the dream. It was 6 A.M., so we stayed abed. Around eight the trained nurse called and told Cece that my father had died around 4 A.M. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page xxv

Henry Miller said “I have been debating whether or not to give you the message I received this morning. As I sat at my work table thinking over my plans for the day a voice spoke to me saying, ‘I have a message for Maud Oakes.’ On the other side of the table I saw an elderly woman resembling Madame Blavatsky [the famous psychic] who had come to me before in fantasy. Her message was that if you went to Peru you would experience danger, despair, destruction, disillusionment and disaster. In the end however, things would change and there would be some kind of marriage.” ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 2

It was as I imagined one of the circles of Dante’s Inferno to be. I had read that the ancient Peruvians had buried their dead along this coastal desert north and south of Lima. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 4

Although there was much to see and enjoy in the short visit with Dr. and Mrs. Jung, it was Jung himself, and especially what he had carved on the central face of a stone placed in his walled garden, that captured me and remained most clearly in my thoughts. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 12

I wondered how Mrs. Jung coped with this primitive kitchen, where the only way to cook was over charcoal, and all water had to be pumped from an outdoor well. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 12

Erica Anderson showed me a small photograph she had taken of the mandala-face of Jung’s curved Stone. It seemed to jump out at me! There was no doubt that it was an “Opener of the Door.” It spoke to me and seemed to say, “I am a Stone that heals makes whole, if you become aware of my significance for you.” ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 13

At times it was a difficult and subjective experience not unlike an analysis, for it seemed that I had made a transference to the Stone in the way an analysand transfers expectations for a basic change onto the analyst. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 14

My friends, how can I help you? I realize how difficult your task is. The Stone is nothing. I am not an artist; I did it to amuse myself. It is a holiday thing-as if I sang a song. ~Carl Jung, The Stone Speaks, Page 15

How can I help you? I don’t know who I am. I am the last person to tell you who I am. I’m invisible. I am nothing; I am an old man. I no longer lie. Once perhaps, I had to, as a young scientist without a reputation. Now I no longer lie. What I have to say is so simple that it is hard to understand; it is refused. It is so far away ahead of now. It cannot be shown to those who do not think. In Switzerland my books seem to reach the most unlikely people-uneducated people. Truth is like water; it passes all barriers. ~Carl Jung, The Stone Speaks, Pages 15-16

In Switzerland my books seem to reach the most unlikely people-uneducated people. Truth is like water; it passes all barriers. ~Carl Jung, The Stone Speaks, Page 16

I hope I have given you some ideas of what I am.” Then he [Jung] looked directly at me, saying, “I need not have written any books; it is all on the Stone.” ~Carl Jung, The Stone Speaks, Page 16

Dear Miss Oakes, January 31, 1956

As you can imagine, I am quite astonished to hear about your project although I am fully aware of the fact that an imaginative person could easily write not one but several volumes about my stone. All the volumes I had written are “in nuce” contained in it. The mandala itself is just a sort of hieroglyph, hinting at and trying to express a vast background in a most abbreviated form. Your method to realize its contents through your subjective experience is unexceptionable, as a matter of fact the only correct way of reading its message. That is just the virtue of symbolic expression that it can be read in many different ways by many different individuals. And if they are honest, the reading will be correct. Thus, as you see, I am prepared for the shock to get the MS about a thing most emphatically belonging to my innermost self. I only ask you to be patient with the slow ways of old age-Deo concedente you will get an answer.-Inshallah! [If God Wills It.] ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 17-18

Dear Miss Oakes, February 2, 1956

I have read your meditation about the stone with much interest. Your method of reading its messages is adequate and in this case the only one yielding positive results. You understand the stone as a statement about a more or less limitless world of thought-images. I quite agree with your view. One can read the symbols like that. When I hewed the stone I did not think, however. I just brought into shape what I saw on its face. Sometimes you express yourself (in the MS), as if my symbols and my text were sort of a confession of a belief. Thus it looks as if I were moving in the vicinity of Theosophy. In America, especially, one blames me for my so-called mysticism. Since I don’t claim at all to be the happy proprietor of metaphysical truths, I should prefer that you attribute to my symbols the same tentativeness which characterizes your explanatory attempts. You see, I have no religious or otherwise convictions about my symbols. They can change tomorrow. They are mere allusions, they hint at something, they stammer and often lose their way. They try only to point in a certain direction, viz. to those dim horizons beyond which lies the secret of existence. They are just no Gnosis, no metaphysical assertions. They are partly even futile or dubious attempts at pronouncing the ineffable. Their number therefore is infinite and the validity of each is to be doubted. They are nothing but humble attempts to formulate, to define, to shape the inexpressible. “Wo fass ich Dich, unendliche Natur?” (Faust) It is not a doctrine, but a mere expression of and a reaction to the experience of an ineffable mystery. There is one point more I want to mention: the stone is not a product only of thought images, but just as much of feeling and local atmosphere i.e. of the specific ambiente of the place. The stone belongs to its secluded place between the lake and hill where it expresses the beata solitudo and the genius loci the spell of the chosen and walled-in spot. It could be nowhere else and cannot be thought of or properly understood without the secret web of threads that relate to its surroundings. Only there in its solitude it can say: Orphanus sum and only there it makes sense. It is there for its own sake and only seen by a few. Under such conditions only the stone will whisper its misty lore of ancient roots and ancestral lives. Thank you for letting me see your typescript. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages, 18-19

Through my transference to the Stone it became humanized by contact with the man. Jung then became the carrier of the Self for me. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 20

Mrs. Jung was a positive feminine figure who as Jung’s wife insured that my transference would not be misunderstood as being purely personal. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 20

I felt that Jung had built two houses in one his inner house and Bollingen, the latter being an outer expression of an inner process. Moreover,

Bollingen was created in the way a true artist creates a work of art. It was done with love, and I felt this. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 21

I touched it [The Stone] with my hand the way I would a well loved friend and thought “You are an Opener of the Door, unlike earlier stones that Jung carved for his house. They were prospective but you are retrospective of what Jung discovered and experienced and what he goes back to in thought.” ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 22

In reference to my manuscript Jung said “Yes, you have done it.” When I then asked his permission to publish it he said, “Yes, in America, but not in Europe until after my death.” ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 22

When it was time for me to leave, Dr. Jung and I stood silently gazing at the Stone. He then conducted me to the gate. His last words were a suggestion that I visit the prehistoric caves at Lascaux in France. My cousin Jerome and I went to Lascaux a month later. I will always be thankful to Dr. Jung for this great experience. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 23

I felt that I became a participant in the prehistoric ritual [Lascaux], overpowered by the beautiful paintings. I understood in a new way what Jung called the collective unconscious as a world of archetypal images. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 24

Dear Miss Oakes, October 3, 1957

Since you want to hear my opinion about your essay on the stone1 I should say that I find it a bit too intellectual inasmuch as it considers the thought-images only, but as I have already called your attention to its ambiente, I miss the all-important feeling tone of the phenomenon. This is of exclusively artistic consideration, but if you want to do justice to the stone, you have to pay particular attention to the way, in which it is embedded in its surroundings: the water1 the hills1 the view1 the peculiar atmosphere of the buildings, the nights and days1 the seasons, sun, wind and rain and man living close to the earth, and yet remaining conscious in daily meditation of everything being just so. The air round the stone is filled with harmonies and disharmonies, with memories of times long ago, of vistas into the dim future with reverberations of a world far away, yet the so-called real world, into which the stone has fallen out of nowhere. A strange revelation and admonition. Try and dwell in this wholeness for a while and see what happens to you. Sincerely yours, C. G. Jung ~Carl Jung, The Stone Speaks, Page 25

The Marn Indians with whom I lived in Guatemala feel that every stone contains a spirit. On the summit of one of their holy mountains the shamans and prayer-makers worship a sacred stone in the form of a bird. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 27

In a trance, I laid my head against its hard, cold surface and asked the spirit of the Stone to give me of its mana. The Stone sank down, down within me, rather like a sinker on a fishing line. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 28

To Lao Tzu the Uncarved Block is a symbol of our own original nature; I must return to my “original nature” by the way of the carved Stone. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 28

For years I had kept a record of my dreams and even illustrated them, trying to understand what they were telling me. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 28

In New Mexico I have seen Navaho medicine men heal patients with mandala-form sand paintings, in the same way that Jung’s Stone healed me. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 29

The analysand may eventually discover and experience his own mandala, “an inner representation of the soul.” This was not difficult for me to imagine, for I could see and feel the hypnotic power that came to me from Jung’s mandala. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 30

I compare Jung’s explorations and discoveries to those of an archeologist, one who finds an ancient temple overgrown by a vast and unknown jungle. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 30

“Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is as limitless. Thus we cannot define either the psyche or nature. We can merely state what we believe them to be and describe, as best we can, how they function.” ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 23.

If the human [soul] is anything it must be of unimaginable complexity and diversity, so that it cannot possibly be approached through a mere psychology of instinct. I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism. My consciousness

is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with nonspatial images. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors. . . . Beside this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche. ~Carl Jung, MDR, Page 399

It seemed perfectly natural to me that Jung’s Stone mandala should be an Opener of the Door and that the little figure in the center-his discovered treasure1 the end of his treasure hunt should represent my inner journey’s beginning. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 32

At the time I did not understand fully the mystery of my animal visitors. I can see now, however, that the healing help I needed came to me at the instinctual animal stratum of my psyche. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 36

After breakfast I walked in the grass to the back of the house, and cried out in amazement when I came upon a good-sized turtle. I then remembered a Chinese painting of a turtle supporting the world on its back, and I wondered if this turtle had come to hold up my tottering world. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 36

I remember my mother once saying: “Anyone who has a physical relationship to their own sex should be locked up in an insane asylum.” As I have an inquisitive nature, this remark did not deter me from experimentation. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 37

So, to find out for myself, I had a few affairs, not only with men but also with a woman. Unfortunately, all these people were not only as unconscious as I was, but also as inexperienced as I in the art of love and sexual expression. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 38

We are born out of the maternal fluid of the womb and out of the living waters of the unconscious. Speaking of his theory regarding the primary source of life energy, Dr. Szent Gyorgi, one of the world’s foremost biochemists, says: “The body’s water ceases to be just a neutral medium and becomes part of the living material, part of the living machine, part of the basic life process. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 39

The Taoists believed that from the low came the high, that “Tao, like water ‘takes the low ground,'” and that the low ground is the “dwelling-place of Tao. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 40

The collective unconscious, on the other hand, is the fathomless core of the globe, the inner circle within which the child Mercury stands. And these two circles, the inner and the outer, remind me now of the experience I had later under the influence of LSD. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 40

I see the unconscious as an artesian well. To dig this well, I would have to penetrate with great difficulty an outer stratum of rocky, sandy soil, a layer that symbolizes all the personal memories that would be forgotten or repressed. Beneath it, there would lie an immeasurable depth represented by a stratum of rock. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 40

As the evolution of the embiyonic body repeats its prehistory, so the mind also develops through a series of prehistoric stages. The main task of dreams is to bring back a sort of ‘recollection’ of the prehistoric, as well as the infantile world, right down to the level of the most primitive instincts. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Pages 98-99.

What we properly call instincts are physiological urges, and are perceived by the senses. But at the same time, they also manifest themselves in fantasies and often reveal their presence only by symbolic images. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 41

Jung thought of this energy as “a psychic analogue of physical energy.” ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 42

When I look back on my childhood, I realize that most of my training and education were suited for a sensory or outer world existence on]y. My inner world was almost completely neglected. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 42

While I was engrossed in thinking of the opposites a voice seemed to say to me: “Look at me in the center of Jung’s Stone. I stand between the opposites. As the center of this mandala I am between the four radiating lines of energy. I am between the Moon and the Sun and Jupiter and Venus; Mars is beneath my feet and Saturn is above my head. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Pages 43-44

“Every step forward, even the smallest, along the path of consciousness, adds to the world, to the visible and tangible God. There is no consciousness without the distinguishing of opposites.” ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 69.

An extrovert like myself has a compass only in the outer world. An introvert has one in his or her special world1 the inner world. The challenge is to develop a compass that will function in both worlds. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 44

My dominant function, I learned, is sensation; accordingly, my inferior function is intuition, that inner function that apprehends directly what is in the future or what arises from within. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 44

Thinking is my third function, and I am now trying to cultivate it. When I was in analysis, I noticed that I always seemed to make new friends with thinking-intuitive people-my opposites. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 45

With Dr. L., my medicine man, I moved spirally into the dark, mysterious, magic world of the unconscious. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 61

I felt like the Sumerian Goddess lnanna, who had to pass through the seven gates of the Underworld. At each portal she had to shed one of her worldly garments before she was allowed to pass on. Finally, she stood naked before the dreaded Queen of the Underworld. Her sentence was death; death with no guarantee of rebirth. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 61

Lao Tzu said: “We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; but it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the wheel depends.” ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 62

Again I heard the voice: “I am the Spirit of the Stone. I am as important to you as I was to my carver-creator Jung. Now is the time to tum away from me and rediscover me again within yourself.” “But I need you,” I said aloud. “I can’t give you up when I have just found you.”

“I shall always be here; for I am within you and outside you and all about you, as you will soon know.” ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 64

The analyst was not only my human guide, but also my animus in the role of medicine man, priest, and phantom lover. To me he was “my man/’ the recipient of my deepest feelings. My whole life revolved around him. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Pages 64-65

In 1941 I lived for six months on the outskirts of the Navajo reservation twenty-two miles from Gallup, New Mexico, before the Indians accepted me. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 74

the dream I told Jung when I visited him at Kusnacht in 1953.

In the dream I was sitting nude on yellow female pollen in a holy medicine basket. The Navaho Wind God was looking down at me. When I told this dream to the medicine man I was working with at the time, he said, “It is a good dream. If you were a Navaho I would give a prayer over you.” “What difference does it make, I would like a prayer,» I said. So he recited the prayer sprinkling me with holy pollen as he gave it. It was then and during the Purifying Rite that my femininity was born and I removed my mask, or the persona, as Jung calls it, and became myself. The Indians felt this and accepted me as a friend, a woman friend they could trust. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 75

When the spiral-shaped sperm cell with its male and female chromosomes penetrates the female egg it is like the snake line of the Stone entering the inner circle in which Mercury stands it is similar also to the line that divides the Yang and Yin of the Taoists. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 48

My mother was a wonderful woman. She had great dignity and inner beauty and was admired and loved by those who knew her. But there was very little affection between us; she was so introverted that she was unable to express her feelings. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 49

Latin was not a favorite subject with me, so the day I was asked to conjugate pigo I stood up and said, “Pigo, pigire, squeelie, gruntum.” I was dismissed from the class and sent home with a letter to my mother from the principal ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 49

However, in giving up communion I did not tum my back on God or Christ. I believed deeply within myself in a God, in a force or something beyond my comprehension. It was just the automatic way religion was presented to me that I could not accept. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 50

A mother and daughter were dining at a table near mine, and the daughter looked older than the mother. Her sad, lost expression and her drained, dry, sexless body horrified me, and I knew that this must not happen to Maud Oakes. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 54

This spiritual journey of mine, which lasted seven years, opened vast new horizons and afforded me much needed training in the fields of mythology, symbolism, and theosophy. But those who helped me the most were the Indians. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 54

It never ceased to amaze me that my outer activities always seemed to lead me into tense personal situations, like falling in love, or its opposite. These interpersonal dynamics were necessary at the time for my inner development. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 58

How strange that it is taken for granted that man can travel to the moon and can delve into other worlds on drugs, yet some people still consider it abnormal for anyone to enter analysis in order to explore regions of the psyche. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 70

When I reentered the hogan, Wilito gave me a new name, “Gleniba,” she who walks with her friends. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 71

He is the hero who has to kill the dragon of the underworld, an ordeal and trial of strength. For a woman it is the gradual realization of her identity as a woman, an awakening to consciousness. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 73

Without thought I spoke up. “I am very much aware of the mythology of the Indians” I said, “and I would give anything to be able to record the myths and sand··paintings of the Navaho.” ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 74

Every step forward, even the smallest, along the path of consciousness, adds to the world, to the visible and tangible God. There is no consciousness without the distinguishing of opposites. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 69.

An integral part of individuation is the theme of death for rebirth. It entails great suffering and a strong desire to attain a new approach to life1 a new personality, and, finally, inner and outer freedom. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 77

According to Jung, the feminine aspect of a man the anima produces moods, while the male aspects of a woman, the animus, produces opinions. ” … [As] the moods of a man issue from a shadowy background, so the opinions of a woman rest on equally unconscious prior assumptions.” ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 79

T. S. Eliot: “And any action is a step to the block to the fire down the sea’s throat. Or to an illegible stone; and that is where we start.” ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 92

In my horoscope, Leo is the rising sign. Jung himself was a Leo, and this is another reason I felt so strong an affinity for him and the Stone. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 93

For me Jupiter also represented Jung, Dr. L., and all medicine men and shamans who have insight into the veiled mysteries of Life. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 94

Venus was also an initiating goddess of the mysteries, and as the soul-temptress of man she was an enchanting, seducing, orgiastic woman. Venus is an important symbol for me. She stands for much of what was left out of my earlier sense of identity. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 95

‘It is a remarkable fact that perhaps the majority of cosmogonic gods are of a bisexual nature. The hermaphrodite means nothing but a union of the strongest and most striking opposites.’ ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, 98

“The Stone does not belong to me. You might have come by boat and stepped into the garden to photograph it.” ~Carl Jung, The Stone Speaks, Page 85

The Navaho never kill a snake, since they believe that a god might inhabit its body. That serpents move without legs in an undulating manner, that they are cold-blooded, and can strike, bite, and kill, make them a perfect symbol for the dark unconscious life of man. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 89

I was walking with an animus figure. The serpent ball shows a real block, a trauma at a deep instinctual level, since a serpent can symbolize the Earth Mother, she who rules the animal world of the instincts. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 90

Jung once told me that the mandala that he carved on the Stone was the eye of a fish and that in the small circle one can see his own reflection. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 102

When I lived with the Indians, time seemed not to exist. It had no importance. I was part of nature, one with natur and so experienced still another type of time: eternal time eternity that has no beginning nor end. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 104

The last line on the central face of the Stone [Jung’s] is a quotation from Homer: ‘He points the way to the Gates of the Sun.'” ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 108

The cross, or whatever other heavy burden the hero carries, is himself, or rather the self, his wholeness, which is both God and animal-not merely the empirical man, but the totality of his being, which is rooted in his animal nature and reaches out beyond the merely human towards the divine. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Par 284.

The saying of Maria Prophetissa is: One becomes two, two becomes three, and out of the third comes the one as the fourth.” When Jung first spoke to me of the prophecy, when I was at Kusnacht with Jerome in 1953, I showed him a color photograph reproduced in Life magazine of the life-cell division, and I asked if it wasn’t like the saying of Maria. “Yes,” he answered, “only the reverse. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 116

The necessity of the <ten thousand things’ unifying themselves, that is, the Four that is One becomes the Three, the Three becomes the Two, the Two gives birth to the One. You see,” he added, “in the middle of a person’s life, when the birth process is finished, the reverse must begin to take place. And here we can have some control.” ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 166

At Kusnacht I had asked Jung what he felt about numbers and he had said1 “Yes numbers! Numbers have always existed within and without. Maybe they existed before the world was created. Many people have questioned whether numbers were invented or discovered. They were of course, discovered. America was not invented; it was discovered. It has been there all along. You know, fantasy is always in the act of becoming fact.

Fantasy remains fantasy until man needs it and then he makes it fact. He won’t believe it until it is fact.” ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 123

If the individual is to develop and consolidate his ego, the ‘mother’ as the symbol of the darkness of unconsciousness must first be destroyed by the bright light of youthful consciousness, symbolized by the sun’s rays or by the arrow, sword, or club. ~Jolandi Jacobi, The Stone Speaks, Page 52

The development of modern art with its seemingly nihilistic trend towards disintegration must be understood as the symptom and symbol of a mood of universal destruction and renewal that has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the Kmp6<;the right moment-for a “metamorphosis of the gods,” of the fundamental principles and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. ~Carl Jung, CW 10, § 585.

A story told by the conscious mind has a beginning, a development, and an end, but the same is not true of a dream. Its dimensions in time and space are quite different; to understand it you must examine it from every aspect-just as you may take an unknown object in your hands and tum it over and over until you are familiar with every detail of its shape. ~Carl Jung, The Stone Speaks, Page 57

The meaning and the purpose of the process is the realization in all its aspects of the personality originally hidden away in the embryonic germ-plasm; the production and unfolding of the original1 potential wholeness. ~Carl Jung, The Stone Speaks, Page 69

It is built on the premise that the cosmos and man in the last analysis obey the same law; that man is a microcosm and is not· separated from the macrocosm by any fixed barriers. The very same laws rule for the one as for the other and from the one a way leads into the other. The psyche and the cosmos are to each other like the inner world and the outer world. Therefore man participates by nature in all cosmic events, and is inwardly as well as outwardly interwoven with them. ~Carl Jung, The Stone Speaks, Page 71-72

I remember a dream I had when I was living with the Mam Indians of Guatemala. I had been with them six months, and was trying to establish a rapport with them and particularly with the shamans, the medicine men. Every night I prayed for help, and finally it came. It was night and I was in a sort of village square. On my right was a fountain with no water in it. A very old man approached me1 dressed in the Mam costume, and he said: “I want you to take the male lead in a play that I am going to present.” I said, “But how can I take the male lead when I am a woman?” He repeated

what he had said. I looked down and saw I was dressed in a Mam Indian male costume, so I agreed. At that moment water began to rise upward in the fountain (source of the waters of life). ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 79

With my eyes still closed, I pictured the Stone’s mandala face very clearly in my mind. Hermes, with Mercury on his tunic, was between the Sun and the Moon and four other planetary symbols, making seven archetypal images. I knew that I must look on them with great care and be constantly aware that their message for me, a woman, is different from what they symbolize for Jung, a man. It was also possible that some of these symbols wouldn’t speak to me at all. Collectively, they are “The Sacred Seven of the Heavenly Bodies,” the inspiration for countless myths and gods that man has worshipped as a close family. In my research I had found an even more interesting fact: All these gods have in some way been worshipped as, or connected with, stones. Kronos-Saturn was fated to be overcome by Zeus-Jupiterj he was tricked into swallowing a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes that he thought was his son. Zeus-Jupiter was worshipped in the form of a stone that was used in the taking of oaths, as we use the Bible. Aphrodite-

Venus was worshipped in the form of a dorm or a conical stone, either black or white in color, showing the negative and positive sides of her nature.

Ares-Mars was knocked down by a stone thrown by Athena-Minerva during the battle of the gods. Hermes-Mercury was also worshipped as a herm, a carved stone placed on roads to protect the traveler. The Sun-god, Mithra, was born from a stone and the earliest representation of the moon in the form of a cone. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, 91-92

At one time I took a great interest in art. I painted myself, sculpted and did wood carving. I have a certain sense of color. When modern art came on the scene, it presented a great psychological problem for me. Then I wrote about Picasso and Joyce. I recognized there something which is very unpopular, namely the very thing which confronts me in my patients.1

Our psyche is part of nature, and its enigma is as limitless. Thus we cannot define either the psyche or nature. We can merely state what we believe them to be and describe, as best we can, how they function. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Page 23

As the evolution of the embryonic body repeats its prehistory, so the mind also develops through a series of prehistoric stages. The main task of dreams is to bring back a sort of ‘recollection’ of the prehistoric, as well as the infantile world, right down to the level of the most primitive instincts. ~Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, Pages 98-99.

Jung thought of this energy as a psychic analogue of physical energy. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 42

An extrovert like myself has a compass only in the outer world. An introvert has one in his or her special world the inner world. The challenge is to develop a compass that will function in both worlds. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 44 2f

Early that morning, I dreamt that I saw my father walking out the front door of our town house. He waved to me and said good-by as he vanished upward. Waking my nurse, I told her the dream. Afterwards she checked the time of my father’s death and found that it was approximately at the time of my dream. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Pages 48-49

It [Individuation] is not a withdrawal from life but life itself-a way between man-the-seen and his soul-the-unseen. It is a way of death-and-rebirth transformation toward experiencing wholeness. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 69

To me, individuation was an initiation, a sacred experience that should not be discussed. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 69

It may well be the most primitive element of order in the human mind. . . . That numbers have an arcetypal foundation is not, by the way, a conjecture of mine but of certain mathematicians …. Hence it is not such an audacious conclusion after all if we define number psychologically

as an archetype of order which has become conscious.” 1 Chapter XI

When I had questioned Jung about the symbolism of the foundation, he said, “The whole base was constructed on the bases of six and two. Six had the implication of Venus-the feminine-her number. It also represented the Star of David. The Stone’s foundation had three levels: the first level of six rocks; on top of them two rocks; and surmounting them the Stone as One itself.” ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 125

Jung also said: union of opposites in the stone is possible only when the adept has become One himself. The unity of the stone is the equivalent of individuation, by which man is made one i we would say that the stone is a projection of the unified self . . . the stone is a transcendent unity.” ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Pages 131-132

It is most significant that on Jung’s Stone there is one uncarved face. He must have had an important reason to leave that face of emptiness-perhaps to allow things to happen. ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 133

“You see” he said “four divisions into four-four parts: here are three lightnings and one river. Three were supposed to be equal and one had a double meaning and that’s the one here1 the river1 and this is an old alchemist secret, the so-called Axioma Maria. This has played a veiy great role through seventeen hundred years of alchemy.” . ~Maud Oakes, The Stone Speaks, Page 115

Here stands the mean, uncomely stone,

‘Tis very cheap in price I

The more it is despised by fools,

The more loved by the wise. ~Arnaldus de Villanova

The Stone which the builders rejected

has become the head of the comer.

This is the Lord’s doing;

it is marvelous in our eyes. ~Psalms 118:22