Spiritual Child

In this dream, I hold a magical tiny baby girl in the palm of my left hand. The baby has an old woman’s face.

The significant feature is the old face which represents spiritual wisdom, in the body of a new-born baby which indicates new birth (of consciousness).

This dream depicts the motif of the Spiritual Child, which occurs when the mystic knows that they are an individual manifestation and an organ of perception for God/ the Self to know itself.

He who knows himself knows his Lord. He [God] is the he who knows himself through myself, that is, in the knowledge that I have of him, because it is the knowledge that he has of me, it is alone with him alone, in this syzygic unity, that it is possible to say thou. (Corbin, 1998, p. 95)

The spiritual journey takes us on ever-deepening experiences of the human-divine-relationship until we arrive at the knowledge that the individual and divine are two sides of the same coin.

Because it is impossible to prove God, there is no other answer than to “make oneself capable of God.” Indeed, as Jalaluddin Rumi also says, each of our eternal individualities is a word, a divine Word, emitted by the Breath of Divine Compassion. When this Word penetrates the mystic’s heart, that is, when the “secret of his Lord” unfolds to his consciousness, when divine inspiration invest his heart and soul, “his nature is such that there is born within him a spiritual Child having the breath of Christ which resuscitates the dead” (Corbin, 1998, p. 172)

This experience equates to the unio mystica (mystical union) and unio sympathetica (sympathetic union) – the union of human-divine forever united – and is considered to be the final stage of the spiritual path but not the end of the endless journey.