Kristiina Salo — we have to sacrifice consciously

Kristiina Salo, a reader from Finland, posted a comment in response to “Our Part in the Matter,” posted Dec. 13.
I thought it deserved more attention than it would get as a comment, so I asked if I might enter it as a post, rather than merely a comment. She replied:
“You’re free to place my comment anywhere you want – I am happy if you like it. TGU seem to skirt the topic of presenting these things a bit. To me, it seems sometimes it is enough to have thought certain things, sometimes it seems some tangible publicity is necessary. Book-form seems to be fading out, as TGU say. What will come in it’s place? Or is it this? But is has sometimes felt that I am just entertaining myself with this kind of thoughts – the voice of insecurity/judgement.”
I would agree – that is merely the voice of insecurity / judgment – I know it well! Here is her comment.
Submitted on 2015/12/16 at 7:20 am
Hello from Finland, been reading this from Sept./Nov. time. With alternating interest. Jung really perked me up, Hemingway – I kept asking myself: why am I reading about the intimate affairs of a long-gone guy? Is he just fishing for attention, using women as bait? And yet, in every post there was at least one sentence that made sense to me, here, now. So I kept coming back. And then, TGU turn up with really, really solidly interesting stuff (for me, that is) – and then, seems like Frank loses interest. Oh, well. And then TGU come back in a kick-ass cosmology mode, reminding we don’t have forever…

And the process – the way they describe, it is so accurate. And this was ripened for me this morning: we have to sacrifice consciously or we end up destroying unconsciously. I’ll explain: For some days now I have been churning and turning these things in my mind: Met my mother and re-connected with the desolate loneliness she touched off in me. Read a bit of Alice Miller after that, which describes the symptoms of emotionally unavailable mother very well, but is completely stuck in the victimhood drama, and does not say anything constructive about the mother. This tied with something I had discussed on FB a little earlier, about the emotion of loneliness. To me it seems like it is the land’s end of individuation. As a culture, we have made our task to explore individuation, self-carriage. It has an end of sorts, complete isolation. A point where one can’t get any further. A place where you face it as a fact that you don’t want any more loneliness. But to reach there, one has to have the guts to go on one’s own for a long time. And this is what, culturally, our mothers have been teaching us – by being unavailable. We have been taking the lonely journey to individuation, to see what is there at the furthest reach of it. Without the emotionally unavailable mothers we wouldn’t have had the perseverance to get to the outermost reach of separation & isolation. So it is not about the failed mothers (as per Alice Miller), it is just our culture exploring the experience of separate individuality to its fullest expression. Many fail and fall by the roadside. Looking at the reality of this in my circle of friends: the challenges of motherhood in our culture are really significant. Many new little soldiers marching in the army of solitude are in the making right now. Feelings of great sadness about the whole process, both for mothers and for their children. How is it that such destruction just goes on and on?
This ties with my thoughts about Freud & Jung. I’ve been thinking Freud is just a garbage-collector compared to Jung, chewing on the leftovers when Jung is traveling further along the roads of human experience. And still, Freud’s definition of health (capable of work and love) – can’t argue with that, an excellent definition, by all means. And lately, I am realizing I have to hand it to him, there is something in us that looks very much like what he called thanatos, death-wish. Jung talks about shadow, something we have to deal with at the beginning of our individual path of self-realization. But it is quite obvious that there are those who never get past that. Self-sabotage and sabotaging others, in a quite unconscious but extremely vicious manner, happens all the time. Like the emotionally unavailable mother – who themselves may feel like the most perfect mother there can be. We have, we carry that destructive part in ourselves. The idiocy of many religions is that we can somehow push it away, declare it invalid. And end up enacting it in a completely unconscious manner. Like the emotionally unavailable mothers, like the foreign policy of many countries: Repression at home, aggression abroad. Pretending that we can just choose to be good and so-called bad is always in the other.
Ok, apologies if this is incoherent, but it is a new perspective for me. Never had seen the significance of sacrifice in this way before. Give something up – sacrifice it before is becomes a corpse and a rotting burden.
Thank you very much for the blog, it is extremely interesting & inspiring. Agree with TGU about books – after a lifetime of feeling books are my closest friends, Now I can’t seem to finish a tiny volume anymore. So maybe books are not where it is at anymor
So, the garbage collection… This is the way of nature: Things are constantly being born and dying, all at the same time. We have gotten it into our heads that being born is good, dying is bad. So we work hard trying to keep alive things that are ripe for garbage. In our homes, in our culture, in our societies. Everywhere dead, restricting forms that burden down what is alive. We entertain ideas of apocalypse and armageddon that would take care of cleaning the slate so that we don’t need to do our own dirty work for ourselves. We expect God to wipe our asses, and that definitely is dangerous.