[STAGE VI | ULTIMATE REALITY] The Ancient Newborn: Wisdom in the Palm of the Hand

In this dream, I cradle a magical, tiny baby girl in the palm of my left hand—a newborn with the face of an old woman.

The striking feature is the aged face, symbolising spiritual wisdom, set within the body of a newborn—a sign of the birth of new consciousness.

This dream illustrates the motif of the Spiritual Child—a symbol that emerges when the mystic realises they are both an individual manifestation and an organ of perception through which God or the Self comes 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 leads us through ever-deepening experiences of the human-divine relationship, ultimately revealing that the individual and the 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 is akin to the unio mystica (mystical union) and unio sympathetica (sympathetic union)—the everlasting union of human and divine. It is viewed as the final stage of the spiritual path, yet not the conclusion of the endless journey.