When we realize we didn’t have the father we thought we had, we might get pretty gloomy and depressed; it might start seeming to be the end of the world. We forget that what we need is not exactly father but what father represents. You are knowing yourself by recognizing yourself at that age. So, as you recognize that part of yourself, it grows, gets bigger and stronger. To really be the father toward yourself is to protect and guide your inner child. So integrating Brilliancy means, among other things, to be the right kind of father to the child within you. You need to see that you wanted the good father; but this longing reveals a hollowness that gets replaced by the brilliant presence, which you then recognize as exactly what you wanted from your father. In other words, by longing for the good father you are actually longing for Brilliancy. This association between father and Brilliancy is universal. In contacting the longing for father, you find your soul the way it was when its development was arrested. This is what I call the Soul Child. When you integrate the Brilliancy by working through the relationship with your father, you become the needed protective or guiding father for yourself, the father you never had. More accurately, Essence becomes the protecting and guiding father for the soul. As the soul grows and matures, it attains the qualities and capacities of Brilliancy. In this way, the soul becomes whole, integrated, and inseparable from the qualities and capacities of Brilliancy. One more thing I wanted to say. The absence of Brilliancy manifested in the lower chest, and staying with this area allowed this bright presence to arise there. This place at the sternum is the center of this aspect, the center I call the mobius.  

At some point we can perceive that the inner child, the ego, the ego identity, the emotional self, the mind, the false personality, the observer, the doer, the actor, the one who resists, and the one who hates, are actually all one. They’re just different faces of the same thing that we call personality, appearing in different forms depending on the situation. We have seen that Essence is a substantial presence, but we are surprised when we realize that it is not only Essence that is substantial; the personality itself is a substantial existence. You can observe that even your personality itself is a material. It has an inner substance. It is true that there are thoughts and feelings and sensations connected to it, but at some point you feel your personality as a kind of presence. It doesn’t have the sense of immediate reality and freshness, the sense of truthfulness, brilliance, and luminosity of Essence; in fact, it is usually felt as a thickness, a dullness, a heaviness. But personality is not just a collection of thoughts; it exists as its own kind of material or medium. Many systems claim that the personality does not exist, that ego does not exist. It is true that from a certain perspective one can see that it does not exist. But at the level where personality does not exist, neither does anything else. Your body does not exist on that level, nor does physical reality for that matter. As long as there is conceptualization, your personality exists just like anything else, just as Essence exists. When we can see this substantial existence of the personality, it is possible for us to comprehend what it would mean for the personality to be purified and clarified. 

Maturing has to do with the true development of who you are. It is not the development of the inner child; the inner child cannot develop because the child does not exist now. It is only an image in your mind. How can an image in your mind develop? Your body was the body of a child thirty years ago. It isn’t now. So if you take yourself now to be a child, how can that grow? It cannot grow because it’s an image. It’s not real. What develops is what is real in you, your Personal Essence. That is what goes through the personal development to maturity. 

The inner child is a deep structure of the person you take yourself to be, the image that you have adopted to form you. Of course, you do not always experience yourself as a child. Sometimes you feel like a child, sometimes like an adult, other times somewhere in between, and sometimes even like an infant or an embryo. The image changes all the time; it does not stay exactly the same. Sometimes it is just a little thing floating in space, sometimes it is the image of a man or woman, sometimes a teenager, sometimes grandiose, sometimes helpless. The image structures the soul into an ego-self, which we end up believing is who we are, all that we are, while it is actually only one form that the soul assumes. But it is important to understand that the inner child is simply an inner structure, a construct of history, and neither exists on its own nor has to continue existing as a formative structure in our experience. All of the manifestations of essence, truth, and reality are needed to deal with this infantile part of us. True nature, with all of its qualities of compassion, love, acceptance, will, strength, and so on, ultimately needs to become the teacher for the immature part of our soul. We understand and accept this ego structure and immature part of the soul by allowing it to feel whatever it feels and think whatever it thinks, without judging its feelings or thoughts or needs. We don’t reject it because it has a bad thought; rather, we look and see what is happening. If it is angry, let it be angry, even if you can’t understand why it is angry. Most likely, there is hurt under the anger. If it is grandiose and proud of itself, find out why, because it probably feels deficient and scared. If it is scared and terrified, it needs your compassion more than anything else. It is important to understand this infantile part emotionally and psychologically, not only epistemologically as a construct, for it to yield to being integrated into our maturity. 

Ultimately, not only the inner child but all of our thoughts, fantasies, feelings, and dreams need to be understood, not judged and rejected. The immature ones continue to arise in our experience because of a lack of knowledge and understanding and, ultimately, because of ignorance. No thought or feeling should be prohibited in you. Every feeling, every thought, every idea, regardless of how wonderful or disgusting, should be allowed. There needs to be absolute freedom to think, feel, desire, imagine, and dream. These things, however, should be allowed within the context of understanding and not indulgence. We cannot be free of the power of concepts if we are not open to them and their emotional manifestations. Understanding the ignorance of the ego, the ignorance that results from what we have forgotten, is necessary in order for the immature to mature. The soul, our individual consciousness, is much more than this immature ego part. However, she does not grow, or grows with various imbalances, when she does not deal with this immature part of her. In most cases, she does not grow because she identifies with this immature part and believes it is the totality of her. Only by becoming liberated from this inner child and integrating it into a larger context can she grow. She grows, then, as this part grows, with it and inseparable from it. In those cases when the soul develops without dealing with this immature part, the development is askew, not balanced, and usually leads to oddness and strange behaviors and attitudes, common in many spiritual circles. There is no real maturity here. The only way for the soul to move toward true maturity is by coming to terms with this immature part in a genuine way, integrating it, and including it in her development. Then the soul grows as a whole, with balance and grace. 

At that age the soul is not yet completely structured as ego, and the fixation has not yet been fully established. (The fixation supposedly becomes set around age seven.) This means that the soul is not fully a personality—not completely mentally structured by ego as in the final type, with a shell patterned by its idealization. Therefore, when we study the type psychodynamically, meaning looking at the underlying forces and structures of childhood, we come upon the child’s heart type, before it has settled into ego and its fixation. Since the child is not completely ego at that point, it means the soul is still somewhat active as its living presence—dynamic and alive. The child is a mix at that time of soul dynamic aliveness and ego structures and patterns. This is what we call the soul child, different from what many traditions recognize as the inner child. Because the inner child includes all phases of childhood, it also includes the soul child. But the soul child represents a particular developmental phase of the inner child. What we find is that the soul child of each type is patterned by the ego ideal of the type before it in the inner movement of the Enneagram. So, type Six’s soul child is characterized by the Nine ideal, which is boundless love. Type Seven’s soul child is type Five, which is patterned by its idealization of diamond guidance. At this stage, however, it is not just a reflection or imitation of the idealized aspect. Because the soul child is still not completely structured by mind and memory, it is still open to its natural essential endowment. So, the soul child of type Seven is a Five child with the presence of diamond guidance in its experience. It is essential intellect that is mixed with imitations of it and some distortions. Mixed into all of that is the usual conditioning from childhood experience of the child’s interactions with their parents or parental figures.

This child within you, which is the core of what we call the ego or the personality, feels totally alone without these comforting objects. This child comforts itself with all kinds of blankets, transitional objects, teddy bears, and soft things to help it feel that things are okay. The ego-self, or the inner child at its core, is not enlightened; it does not know it is okay to let go of the blanket. This part of your soul is scared, angry, hurt, and full of doubt. This inner child needs to be educated. Your essence is the educator, the teacher. This perennially infantile part of the soul will not listen, let alone learn, unless there is enough compassion, love, and acceptance. The child is scared and doesn’t know whom to trust. It doesn’t know whom to turn to. So when it hears you or me talking about ego death, it thinks, “Uh-oh, now they are going to kill me.” This deep part of your personality doesn’t understand what ego death means; it hears death and gets terrified.

In other words, a deep and central part of you thinks like a child. Rational things neither reach nor touch it. We need to approach this part of us with love, gentleness, kindness, and understanding. We need to understand its helplessness, fear, vulnerability, hatred, anger, dependence, and ignorance. Ultimately, the inner child isn’t real, but it doesn’t know that. You know that, but it doesn’t. The inner child takes for granted that it is you. It feels terrible about itself, angry, guilty, but it doesn’t know how else to be. This is a real dilemma. We each have an inner child that is ignorant, scared, and disconnected from the real essence, that is not touched by our lofty and transcendental experiences, that still needs to be cared for and loved. We cannot try to get rid of it, nor does it simply vanish because of our enlightenment experiences. Trying to get rid of it is both impossible and the wrong way to go. If we try to get rid of it, the inner child only becomes more obstinate and more scared. We need to educate it gently and lovingly. Then, in time, the inner child will dissolve, mellow out, and become softer. It will naturally melt into essential nature and get integrated. But it will allow itself to melt only if it feels loved and secure. If we reject it and judge it, it will tend to isolate and protect itself. 

Because these early primitive structures tend to be more flexible than the more mental ego structures, they will become readily unstructured when investigated. We then may experience them as an amorphous, blobby kind of presence, instead of the clear and crisp presence of essence. We group them into two levels, reflecting two degrees of primitive structuring.

The less primitive group has more ego structure, and hence tends to be formed by the body image. These structures are formed by an image of being a young child, who is still somewhat in touch with its animal, instinctual, primitive impulsive emotionality, and with the remnants of some essential aspects. The primary structure is what we call the “soul child,” which is the state of the soul before she was completely structured and became estranged from her primitive animal forms and her essential ground. This is the structure popularly known as the “inner child”—the child of joy, the emotional child that is still in touch with its original qualities of aliveness, curiosity, mischievousness, openness, and so on. It is what is popularly called the emotional child, but slightly different. The emotional child is only the emotional part of the soul child. In reality, as children we were not only emotional; we were livings souls, full of life and vigor, adventurous and curious, joyous and playful, but also capable of exploding in rage and frustration, or going into fear and terror. Our emotions are still fully present, but so is our animal nature in its aggressiveness and excitement about life and its pleasures and objects. At this level there is some ego structure, for there is a body image of a child patterning the soul, but the soul still retains her original aliveness and responsiveness. The soul child can experience essence but it is not its constant state. Essence appears in the soul child when it is experiencing satisfaction and contentment, or expressing one of its original positive qualities like those of boldness, brightness, or cuteness. The dominant condition of the soul child is a soul presence patterned with the child’s image, but presence mixed with emotions and impulses.