I have long recognized that the concepts we have of a God are a reflection of ourselves. Most of my notions of a God were fashioned in an imagined images of myself. This is not especially unusual because so much of the world I create around me is a reflection of what is present in my imagination.
What my eyes perceive is built on top of a life of experience. The tree I see is largely a reflection of what is present in my memory of what a tree is like. My reference to being able to experience the tree is, regrettably , often a reflection of my self. Most of the time, the tree is out there, I am in here.
It takes a developed skill to learn to be aware of what a tree in front of actually is. It takes being able to enter into the tree and becomes intimate with it. It requires me to put aside notions of self, and forget that there is the other.
If there is no self, then there will be no reflection of self in how I regard the world. There will be scant reflection of self when any awakened individual regards the world. An awakened individual would experience a vastness in which they are intimately present.. There is no self. There is no personification.
I wonder if this is what individuals like John of the Cross experienced when they felt the dark night of the soul. He talks of the abandonment. There was absolute aloneness. Perhaps, having let go of the notions of self, there was no longer a personification of God. Without a sense of his own person, he no longer had a notion of the person of a God.
Perhaps he had broken through the mirrored illusion. There was only emptiness. Then, the story goes, there was intimacy, bliss, ecstasy.