"Millions of Spiritual Creatures"

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth

Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep.

All these with ceaseless praise his works behold

Both day and night: How often from the steep

Of echoing hill or thicket have we heard

Celestial voices to the midnight air,

Sole, or responsive each to others note,

Singing their great Creator? oft in bands

While they keep watch, or nightly rounding walk,

With heavenly touch of instrumental sounds

In full harmonic number joined, their songs

Divide the night, and lift our thoughts to Heaven."

~Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV

If you are awake you can never be alone. Intimacy is the heart of the cosmos. This is the good news: consciousness is never merely I Am, but I-Thou. In Self-awareness there are two, not one. Awareness reflects itself, groks itself, and vibrates not merely as vast oneness, but as an intimate relationship of Lover and Beloved. So intimate, indeed, that the wedding of the Two happens in the secret heart of the One. This subject-to-subject relationship in the depth of the Divine is the paradigm of creation, through which every earthy and celestial relationship is born. Being cannot help but know its Self and love its Self as the most intimate Friend, through every creature. You can never be lonely. Your very pulse, your very breath, remind you that one beats as two, two flow in and out as one. This is why, in the first verse of the Bible, the word for God is not singular, but plural: Elohim, "Gods." And this is why, when Elohim reveals the divine name to Moses, Elohim does not simply say, "I Am," but "I Am who I Am." The name "I Am" is doubled, for in the very essence of consciousness is the nearness of the Friend. Friendship pervades creation, and a riot of Otherness overflows from the nectar of the One.

Painting: Joseph Paton, 1849, The Faery Kingdom on Midsummer's Eve