"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. 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 as vast oneness, but as intimate relationship: 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 is the very paradigm of creation, through which every relationship is born, and the whole manifestation of relativity pours out of the unmanifest absolute. Being cannot help but know its Self and love its Self as the most intimate Friend. Intimacy is the heart of the cosmos. You can never be lonely. Your very pulse, your very breath, remind you that one beats as two, two breathe 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 God reveals the divine name to Moses, Elohim does not simply say, "I Am," but "I Am who I Am." The divine name, I Am, is doubled! For in the very essence of consciousness is the nearness of the Friend, and Friendship pervades all creation. The riot of Otherness overflows from the nectar of the One.

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