God was telling me about His interaction with the earliest animals, long before homo sapiens.
It is mainly an instinctual unselfconscious rapport that we have. But (I feel) a great excitement at the process of life and evolution itself.
“Why isn’t that enough?”
In a sense it is. Animals do have uniqueness. Each animal is distinct, has its own soul. But they lack self-awareness, and that is true even of cats and dogs and apes. You can interact with them but there is no second-order reflection, hence a very truncated sense of time—just a sense of temporal motion, of passage from an immediate moment-just-passed to a next moment anticipated. And even that cannot be thought about, represented symbolically or made available to self-consciousness.
So I cannot develop solely through interacting with them. It is static, inert. We just are together. I could not become a Person without there being other persons. The personal is essentially interpersonal. Like a child who first lives in an undifferentiated world, in which other people are merely contents of his or her own oceanic flow of consciousness, I needed to separate Myself from other persons. And so I created mankind.
