Jung is pulling Eckhart's mystical child out of Christian iconography and installing it somewhere the church never intended: in the undeveloped, the infantile, the parts of yourself that embarrass you at dinner parties. The Kingdom of Heaven is not above; it is in those places you keep trying to graduate out of.

This is where the passage cuts against its own comfort. The pneumatic reading — God within, transcendence internalized, the kingdom as elevated inner state — wants the child to mean innocence, purity, spiritual potential rising toward light. But Jung immediately redirects: what makes the God-child visible is precisely what you call childish and dismiss. The undignified thing. The unfinished thing. The longing that never quite grew up. Whatever you have already developed is, in his terms, finished. It has arrived. It holds no future. The continuation runs through what has not yet been made respectable.

That is a hard sentence to sit with, because the ordinary move is to interpret it as invitation: go become childlike, cultivate wonder, learn to play again. But Jung is not issuing an instruction. He is describing a structural fact about development — that it always originates in what remains incomplete. The child in the vision is not a model to imitate. It is what is already moving underneath whatever you think you have become.