How Can We Connect with the Forces of the Divine Child Archetype?
Depth and Archetypal Psychology Course — Session Three / Part Two (2-3)

The child is focused on process, the adult on outcome. A child understands life as timeless play, and gradually this play becomes, for adults, a game. It is the transition from process-orientation to outcome-orientation that eventually empties life of enthusiasm and joy. Without a process-oriented way of being, the pleasure of living will be stripped from life and we enter an endless cycle of having and attaining. Illumination itself is a process: not a goal to be reached, but a way of living.

The child stands at the boundary between heaven and earth, order and chaos, being and non-being, the known and the unknown. Whenever we place ourselves at this boundary, we are in contact with the child archetype; whenever we stand absolutely on only one side of these pairs, we move away from the child archetype.

The child looks upon existence with wonder and is filled with endless questions whose purpose is not to find an answer, but to express wonder transformed into speech. The adult world is filled with questions emptied of wonder, seeking only answers and demanding truth as though it were an answer, without understanding that truth has never offered itself to anyone as an answer. Without wonder, our spirit eventually becomes a lifeless cemetery, dead and emptied of our lost childhood.

The child is our point of connection with our feelings. Whenever our relationship with our feelings is broken, we become alienated from ourselves. Children may not possess the cognitive clarity of adults, yet they can experience suffering to the same degree, and sometimes more deeply. This is something adults often fail to understand about children.

The voice of our inner needs is a doorway to the inner child, and the inner child is an open doorway to the miracle of creativity. By listening to our inner needs we can open a path toward individuation and the meaning of our life—a path that begins within us and is realised in the external world. For the apparently material need of every human being is, at its depth, connected to the true need of the divine child beyond what initially appears: a path toward the Self and the meaning of life.

In the second part of the third session of the Depth and Archetypal Psychology Course, we discuss these themes and ways of connecting with the divine child archetype.

Aydin Areta
November 2019