3504.'So that my soul may bless you' means allying it to its own life, consequently life that corresponds to the rational. This is clear from the meaning of 'being blessed' as being endowed with celestial and spiritual good, dealt with in 981, 1731, 2846, 3017, 3406. For the good of early childhood and consequently the good of life, which is the same as the good of the natural, and which is represented by 'Esau', is not spiritual good, for the good of early childhood is devoid of knowledge and intelligence, and so of wisdom. The good of early childhood becomes spiritual good through the implantation of truth, and so through regeneration, see 1616, 1802, 2280, 2290, 2291, 2299, 2304, 2305, 2307, 3494 (end). This is how the correspondence between rational things and natural is effected, and so how the allying of the natural man to the life of the rational is effected. This allying to its own life is what is meant by 'my soul may bless you'.

2290. People who know nothing about the state of the life after death may think that young children acquire angelic intelligence and wisdom the moment they enter the next life. But I have learned through much experience that this is not so at all. Those who die not long after birth have the minds of young children, almost the same as on earth. Nor is the amount of what they know any greater, for they possess no more than the capacity to know, and from this to have intelligence and from this to be wise. Yet that capacity is more perfect because they are not living in the body but are spirits. That this is the mental condition of young children when they first enter heaven I have not merely been told but have also been shown, for on several occasions, in the Lord's Divine mercy, groups of young children have been sent to me, and I have been allowed to read the Lord's Prayer to them. As I did so I was given to perceive how the angels whose company they were in were instilling into their tender and newly-formed ideas the meaning of the things that are in the Lord's Prayer - filling their ideas with it in the measure that the young children were able to receive it - and after that how the young children were given the capacity to think about things such as these as if from themselves.