“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.