George Jung Quotes

May the wind always be at your back and the sun upon your face. And may the wings of destiny carry you aloft to dance with the stars.

So in the end, was it worth it? Jesus Christ. How irreparably changed my life has become. It's always the last day of summer and I've been left out in the cold with no door to get back in. I'll grant you I've had more than my share of poignant moments. Life passes most people by while they're making grand plans for it. Throughout my lifetime, I've left pieces of my heart here and there. And now, there's almost not enough to stay alive. But I force a smile, knowing that my ambition far exceeded my talent. There are no more white horses or pretty ladies at my door.

The official toxicity limit for humans is between one and one and half grams of cocaine depending on body weight. I was averaging five grams a day, maybe more. I snorted ten grams in ten minutes once. I guess I had a high tolerance.

The Golden Bough was popular with both scholars and laymen, and it dramatically influenced the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung—Frazer’s depiction of tales of myth and romance as echoes of ancient rituals chimed with Jung’s description of archetypes that exist within the collective unconscious—as

The unnamed narrator of Rebecca begins her story with a dream, with a first sentence that has become famous: Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again. Almost all the brief first chapter is devoted to that dream, describing her progress up the long winding drive, by moonlight, to Manderley itself. The imagery, of entwined trees and encroaching undergrowth that have “mated,” is sexual; the style is slightly scented and overwritten, that of a schoolgirl, trying to speak poetically, and struggling to impress. Moving forward, with a sense of anticipation and revulsion, the dream narrator first sees Manderley as intact; then, coming closer, she realizes her mistake: she is looking at a ruin, at the shell of a once-great house. With this realization—one of key importance to the novel—the dreamer wakes. She confirms that Manderley has indeed been destroyed, and that the dream was a true one. (“Dreaming true” was a term invented by du Maurier’s grandfather, George du Maurier, author of Trilby; it was a concept that fascinated her all her life. Daphne was aware of Freud and Jung: George was not.)

...but the problem was more fundamental. Powell and the State Department hoped an agreement with North Korea would be a positive step reducing the threat of nuclear war. Bush, Cheney, and the Vulcans, wedded to a view of the world as a Manichean contest between good and evil, rejected the idea of negotiating with a state they deemed immoral. If the United States had brought the evil empire of the Soviet Union to its knees, why deal with a state vastly smaller, weaker, and more repressive? Bush's response to Kim Dae-Jung's visit set the tone for the administration. The United States would not enter into an agreement that kept a brutal regime in power. For Bush, foreign policy was an exercise in morality. That appealed to his religious fervor, and greatly simplified dealing with the world beyond America's borders. 'I've got a visceral reaction to this guy...Maybe it's my religion, but I feel passionate about this.' Bush's personalization of foreign policy and his refusal to deal with North Korea was the first of a multitude of errors that came to haunt his presidency. Instead of bringing a denuclearized North Korea peacefully into the family of nations, as seemed within reach in 2001, the Bush administration isolated the government in Pyongyang hoping for its collapse. In the years following, North Korea continued to be an intractable problem for the administration. By the end of Bush's presidency, North Korea had tested a nuclear device and was believed to have tripled its stock of plutonium, accumulating enough for at least six nuclear weapons. Aside from their attachment to the idea of American hegemony, the worldview of Bush, Cheney, and the Vulcans was predicated on a false reading of history. A keystone belief was that Ronald Reagan's harsh rhetoric and policy of firmness had forced the collapse of the Soviet Union and ended the Cold War. In actuality, Ronald Reagan's harsh rhetoric during his first three years in office actually intensified the Cold War and heightened Soviet resistance. Not until Reagan changed course, replaced Alexander Haig with George Schultz, and held out an olive branch to the Soviets did the Cold War begin to thaw. Beginning with the Geneva summit in 1985, Reagan would meet with Gorbachev five times in the next three years, including a precedent-shattering visit to the Kremlin and Red Square. What about the 'evil empire' the president was asked. 'I was talking about another time, another era,' said Reagan. President Reagan deserves full credit for ending the Cold War. But it ended because of his willingness to negotiate with Gorbachev and establish a relationship of mutual trust. For Bush, Cheney, and the Vulcans, this was a lesson they had not learned. (p.188-189)

The human ego, through its discriminating function, assigns a good or bad valence to experiences. The degree of conscious awareness of the process of assigning a negative or positive valence can shape the ego's later capacity to integrate things into consciousness. Depression, for example, can be personally experienced as very negative, but from the teleological standpoint can be viewed as a positive process or moment in one's individuation. Jung has clearly shown that neurosis can often serve as a means to a higher level of development and individuation that could not happen any other way. By unifying negative and positive elements (experiences) an individual is able to "extract" greater meaning from life.

Einstein was a spiritual person who believed in God. It was his scientific exploration that opened his mind to the numinosum. His great insights show us that science and religion are not contradictory stances, but complementary, and when they are combined this can produce higher synergies. Jung and Einstein are examples of this possibility. Though science and religion each have their limitations, they can mutually enrich each other.

Writing in 1964, C. G. Jung accurately observed: Modern man does not understand how much his “rationalism” (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic “underworld.” He has freed himself from “superstition” (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this breakup in worldwide disorientation and dissociation.3 Once we accept that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, we can perhaps also see that we are coresponsible for our present situation. As Jung observed, we must see the shadow in our own psyche if we want to perceive reality clearly or, as the Buddhists put it, “see things as they really are.” We cannot become whole without this work on our shadow, the swampland consisting of all those aspects of our personality that we prefer to deny and instead project onto others: egotism, fantasy, greed, cowardice, laziness, irrationality, fanaticism, etc. To put it starkly: In order to become whole, we must discover the potential of terrorism in the complex circuitry of our own psyche. Terrorism is an expression of spiritual deafness, moral blindness, and irrational anger. Only when we can acknowledge the presence of these dark forces within us can we take responsibility for them. This brings me back to the mental discipline of Karma-Yoga by which action is transformed in such a way that it is not rooted in the shadow and therefore is not karmically tainted. Morally and spiritually sound action must be accompanied by self-observation, self-understanding, self-acceptance, self-transformation, and self-transcendence. Without these disciplines, we are likely to succumb to projection and wrong action (vikarma). These, in turn, are not conducive to inner and outer peace. On the contrary, if our behavior fails to be anchored in sound spiritual virtues and practices, it will predictably cause disturbance, disharmony, harm, hurt, and even chaos in the world. Krishna taught that there are circumstances when it is not only appropriate but essential to take a firm stand against evil. He was not a romantic pacifist who, in the interest of an abstract principle (however noble), allows evil to conquer good. When the moral or spiritual order is at stake, we must actively oppose the forces that seek to undermine it. He even condoned war to accomplish this end, though a war not tinged with hatred and conducted for selfish reasons.

When trying to interpret any myth, many people reflexively turn to the theories of people like James George Frazer, Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Joseph Campbell. While each of those thinkers has developed an intriguing personal philosophy that uses various ancient mythologies as points of reference, their works are dubious guides to any one particular mythology. Their goal is not to understand any one mythology as deeply as possible on its own terms, but rather to identify supposed universal patterns within myth as such, which turns a blind eye toward the factors that make any given mythology unique. These thinkers, while fascinating in their own right, have little to no light to shed on how the Vikings themselves understood their own myths - which is, after all, the kind of interpretation that matters by far the most in a book of this sort.

This theme—cash before all—is also a hoary one. George Gershwin relied on it in his song “Freud and Jung and Adler” for the 1933 musical Pardon My English. In a repeated refrain, the doctors sing that they practice psychoanalysis because it “pays twice as well” as specialties that deal with bodily ailments. Therapists are inherently comical Luftmenschen, impractical, except on this one front. They like their fees. Lucy’s perky insistence about billing gives the five-cents-please strips their final kick.