My thesis is this: our wonder at the being of particular things is an intuition of a god, or divine being.
Am I saying that when I look at my cat and experience this sense of wonder I am intuiting that my cat is a god? Yes and no. The wonder I experience is that things such as this exist at all. I can just as well have this experience when contemplating the sun, the wind, the rain, the ocean, the mountains, etc. My wonder at the being of these things just is an experience of their divinity. Thus, there are gods of the sun, the wind, the rain, the ocean, the mountains, and, yes, of cats (the Egyptians saw this quite well). In truth, all things shine with divinity; all things are God. And there is no contradiction between this statement and the statement that there are gods. These are just two different ways of looking at the same thing. In so far as the divinity of cats shines through my cat, it is the god of cats.
There is a further aspect to this experience. When we confront things in their being, and wonder that such things are at all, our perception of time and space changes. When a thing is regarded with wonder, in the sense I have described, we simultaneously experience its being as stretched beyond the temporal present. The object is there before us, in the present, but simultaneously we intuit an aspect of eternity in the thing. When I wonder that such things as my cat exist at all, what I am wondering at is, in a sense, the “fact of catness” in the world. As Alan Watts would probably have put it, we wonder at the fact that there is catting, and dogging, and peopling, and flowering, and fruiting in this world. This is the aspect of divinity that shines through the thing, regarded in a certain way.
We might think of the gods as “regions” within being. There are as many gods as there are regions of being. Our awareness of regions of being does not come through philosophical analysis or speculative system-building. It comes through experience and intuition. There are as many regions as there are experiences of wonder at the fact that “things such as X” exist at all. And there are regions within regions. It was thus with supreme good sense that the Indians left things very vague with respect to the number of their gods. Hindu accounts differ. Some say that there are 330,000,000 gods. Such a huge number is not meant to be an exact figure. It is meant to suggest, in fact, the infinity of gods, an infinity grounded in the fact that there are infinite possible experiences of wonder at things. In just the same way, ancient Chinese authors speak of “the ten thousand things,” not to give an exact figure, but to suggest the incomprehensible vastness of existence.