“The Personal is essentially interpersonal.”

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.

“A Step in the Right Direction”

Nilsson says, “Another step in the development of polytheism was thinking of the great forces of nature (such as sky and seasons) and of human life (such as love and death) as gods.”

Yes, and the same story applies there.  It is quite apt, and not incompatible with understanding a single divine reality behind them all.  In fact, seeing them as gods—as personal beings with desires, plans, loves, and so forth—is a step in the right direction, of acknowledging that God is a Person and one with whom one can interact.

“Lord, did the polytheistic response affect You in any way?”

Oh yes, in many ways.  When someone sensed My presence in a place and responded respectfully, it increased My awareness of My presence there, and of what it was about Me that evoked and deserved respect.

Then I was given an analogy.

Sometimes someone might be the pillar of a particular institution and not realize their distinctive role until a crisis.  And they notice that everyone rallies around them or sees them as their savior or seeks their advice or expects them to get them through it.  In a sense, they were the pillar all along, but it was almost latent and not fully actualized until the occasion arose and they saw it reflected in the eyes of others.

I gather that God’s experience was something like that.