About this Oracle…
The Oracle of Nerja began as a conversation on holiday in southern Spain. We were wondering whether the various maps of the psyche we each worked with could be brought together into something coherent and usable.
We set down the lineages we felt were appropriate: Jung and Freud, Assagioli’s egg-shaped model of the self, Grof’s transpersonal psychology, Kegan’s stages of adult development, Wilber’s mapping from instinct to transcendence. Alongside these we drew on the older voices, Eastern and Western, that had questioned the sovereignty of the rational self long before psychology arrived on it.What surprised us was how quickly the system assembled itself. The matrix and the symbols came within days. The organisation into three layers, instinctive, personal, transpersonal, emerged naturally from Assagioli and Grof. Seven core domains aligned with the familiar chakra schema, which in turn ran parallel to findings from biology, sociology, and modern philosophy. Seven companion stones followed from the archetypes belonging to each domain. Within a week we had twenty-eight stones and a working logic. It did not feel like inventing something new but rather putting some building blocks together. The Oracle is built on a simple premise: the rational mind, useful as it is, only consults part of our psyche. Oracles creates the conditions for a larger part of our psyche to speak. Drawing a stone in the presence of a genuine question is not a suspension of reason but a temporary widening of attention, allowing material that usually stays beneath the surface to become available for reflection.
The book and a set of stones
We wrote a little book accompanying the stones that lays out the thinking behind the system: the psychological architecture, the symbol logic, and the readings for each stone. We offer it as a creative opening into your own inquiry. If you would like to order a copy of the book and a set of hand-painted stones, you can reach me at mark@hilife.nl.
