One way perhaps of thinking about this may be: the gods represent more or less the highest ontological reality. Their shared reality, as it were, gives rise to everything else—so we don’t necessarily have discourse with them, as in a two-way conversation, but rather we participate in the cosmos that they give rise to.
While I am not privy to the interactions you speak of and therefore cannot judge, I conjecture that you are interacting with the “intelligible” aspect of certain gods—the aspect that manifests in some way that can be apprehended by mortals. Proclus lays out in some detail the distinctions between intellective, intelligible-intellective, and intelligible gods, but this is where things get heavy and tricky for me, as the language becomes highly technical. endymions_bower has significant writings on these topics, but the going gets challenging, for me, at least.
For my purposes, I would say the entities we feel familiar with are—barring us being hoodwinked by malign forces, gods forbid—the aspects of a god that they have chosen to unveil to us in some limited way.
Re: perfect, therefore unchanging
While I am not privy to the interactions you speak of and therefore cannot judge, I conjecture that you are interacting with the “intelligible” aspect of certain gods—the aspect that manifests in some way that can be apprehended by mortals. Proclus lays out in some detail the distinctions between intellective, intelligible-intellective, and intelligible gods, but this is where things get heavy and tricky for me, as the language becomes highly technical.
For my purposes, I would say the entities we feel familiar with are—barring us being hoodwinked by malign forces, gods forbid—the aspects of a god that they have chosen to unveil to us in some limited way.
Axé