So we can conclude that people are born with Essence but end up without it later on. Obviously, it is somehow lost, or the connection with it is lost. This does not mean that a baby experiences Essence exactly the way an adult does. A baby does experience Essence, but for the adult it will be more developed, more expanded, more distinct, more powerful and it will function in ways that are only potential in a baby. The baby’s Essence does not have the immensity, the depth and the richness of the adult’s experience of Essence.

The soul desires the presence of Brilliancy because the soul needs it in order to feel safe to come out and meet the world, to learn to have a life of her own. The soul has an innate need to see the aspect of Brilliancy, which is a part of herself, because as you know, the soul learns first by seeing things outside herself. As children, we don’t know that we have Essence with all its aspects and qualities. A young child cannot express and embody the functions of the essential aspects. She needs them to be expressed, to be shown, by the human beings who take care of her. She first sees them in her parents, who, as they embody and express these qualities and functions, become mirrors for her own innate qualities. Then by identification with her parents, she can manifest those qualities and become more that way. Thus, there is an intrinsic need for modeling of what the child can be by both father and mother. In other words, the child’s need for the presence and functioning of the father is actually the need for a part of her essential self—the aspect of Brilliancy and its qualities and capacities.

Consequently, the child's experience includes a wordless and imageless Essential Self, and at the same time an objectifiable experience of body and mind. This objectifiable experience of body-mind is what becomes the representation in the self-representation, which is then present in his consciousness with the wordless and implicit experience of Self. Clearly, since he is not aware of the Essential Self in an objective way, he cannot but connect this sense of Self to the representation. This explains how the infant comes to associate the representation to the category of self, instead of something else ... the final result is the internalizing of a self-representation (an image or an impression) that is associated with the feeling of self.

At the beginning, the mind is able to discriminate only the grossest and hence, most superficial, aspects of the experience of the self. The capacity for subtle discrimination does not develop until much later. The infant mind cannot conceptually discriminate essential Presence, the subtlest dimension of the self. Thus, the self-representations that develop contain superficial layers of the self, but exclude the deepest core, because representation depends on conceptualizations, or at least on discriminations. Thus, since the Essential Identity is not a discriminated aspect of the infant's experience, it tends not to survive as part of the self-representation.

Quoting Joyce Edward: Separation-individuation involves progression along two tracks. Separation refers to the child’s movement from fusion with the mother; individuation consists of those steps that lead to the development of an individual's own personal and unique characteristics. Moving from autism to symbiosis, through four sub phases of separation-individuation, namely differentiation, practicing, rapprochement, and a fourth open-ended sub phase, the child advances to a position of on-the-way to object constancy... which represents a beginning sense of the self as separate from others, continuous in time and space.

We are opening the field of consciousness and inviting it to reveal itself to us. We want to be able to suspend our idea of the relationship enough to invite in something new by opening to what’s there right now. This means opening to things besides the color of a person’s hair, the things he says, their interests, where she was born, what culture he is from. All of those are real in the sense that they are part of our experience in the world, but to invite our spiritual nature into the field means opening into other possibilities, new possibilities. Growing up and maturing through the experiences the world has offered us has been important for our development. The next level of development involves starting out as a child in the spiritual world and maturing into adulthood by becoming a complete human being who knows her true nature and is nourished through it. In other words, the adult of this world is the child of the spiritual world. The adult of the spiritual world has a foot in both worlds and feels them as one. And real relating can only happen between two mature adults. The more mature we are, the more the relational field can open to new potential, and the less the past dictates the content of experience. Our maturational process does not flourish if we disregard this world, push it away, or disown our parents. It is a matter of embracing everything and finding an opening to that other possibility, that next dimension of experience—the inner dimensions.

At the beginning, the capacity of the infant to simply be is intact. He is, without knowing it. His being himself is completely natural and nonconceptual. He does not know that he is being himself, for he does not even have the concept of self. He is being Presence when he is being himself. Our discovery in the experience of self-realization reveals that in simply being, one is identified with Presence; and when observing young infants we see that there is no self-reflection and no alienation from immediate Presence.

The Essential Self is completely ignorant of the physical world and its laws. If the child continues to be the Essential Self he will not learn about his body, and how to live in the world. Under normal circumstances, he would not survive. He must gradually cathect his physical body, and the rest of physical reality. At the beginning he is, although pure, not able to survive and grow in physical reality. The sense of grandeur and omnipotence of the Essential Self is actually quite dangerous for his survival.

We will not use Kohut's terminology here because the self is the soul in our view and not merely the soul's later structuralization. In other words, the self exists in the beginning as the psychic life of the infant. In fact, the psychic life as commonly known is not exactly the psychic life of the infant, because she lives in the condition of primary self-realization, in which psychic life, as we understand it, exists as an expression and manifestation of Presence.

Personality, then, begins with the child's identification with the qualities that the child experiences through merging with the environment. During the merged condition of the symbiotic stage, the child has no conception of what is his and what belongs to the environment represented by the mother. There is still no concept of self and other. This is the meaning of dual unity. So a feeling that might originate in the mother could end up as the childs. The child experiences the feeling because of the merged condition. If, in time, he identifies with it, it becomes his. In fact it becomes part of his developing personality.