God in Our Image: Why the Anthropomorphization of God Fails Logic and Experience

This essay challenges conventional ideas about God. If you’re a firm believer, deeply committed to a specific religious tradition, you may find some of what follows uncomfortable—or even offensive. If so, I invite you to consider pausing here.

But if you’re open to reexamining long-held assumptions… if you’re curious about perspectives that honor both reason and reverence… then read on, dear reader.

For the record: this is not written by an atheist.
But I am a scientist. A rationalist.
I am also not a follower of any organized religion.

And I believe that our capacity for discernment—our ability to question, reason, wonder, even revere—is the most extraordinary gift we’ve been given.

It would be a betrayal of that gift to switch it off just when the questions get hard.

He watches. He judges. He forgives.

Or so we are told.

He rewards the faithful, smites the wicked, has plans for your life, and hears your prayers—unless, of course, He doesn't. Then, His plans are mysterious; not for us to know.

This is the God many of us grew up with.

But when the scaffolding of certainty collapses, when illness or tragedy strikes, or when the fundamental laws of nature come under serious contemplation, this God-as-Sky-Being begins to look less like the creator of the universe and more like a character in a story we told ourselves.

The flaw is not in reverence. The flaw is in our projection.

Here's the central method of this inquiry: Whether we believe our capacity for reason was given by divine agency, shaped by evolutionary processes, or both—and the second doesn't exclude the first—choosing to apply it selectively is a fundamental dishonoring of that gift.

If God exists and granted us the ability to think, question, and discern, then deliberately switching off that capacity when faced with uncomfortable questions isn't humility.

It's betrayal. It's dishonoring the giver of the greatest gift.

If evolution equipped us with sophisticated reasoning to navigate reality, then refusing to use it when reality gets complex is a willful abandonment of our primary survival tool.

Either way, intellectual honesty and rigor aren’t optional. They’re obligatory.

This essay examines one of the most pervasive ways we violate that obligation: by projecting human qualities onto ultimate reality, then protecting those projections from further scrutiny.

In December 2023, on a gurney in the ER, I discovered this firsthand. Every mental structure I'd used to navigate reality suddenly seemed irrelevant. Identity, achievement, plans, fears—all of it dissolved.

What remained wasn't a bearded figure in the clouds or a cosmic judge weighing my deeds. It wasn't the blue-skinned Shiva I'd seen in temple paintings as a child, nor the personal God of my Catholic schooling who "had a plan" for my life.

What remained was something that defied all categories—a stillness that had no face, no preferences, no human qualities at all. Not absence, but presence beyond description.

Was this "God"? Even that question assumes too much.

To name it is to domesticate it.
To define it is to limit it.

The experience itself resists every concept I have attempted to wrap around it, including the concept that it was an experience of the divine. Perhaps it was a quirk of neurochemistry, a random firing of neurons. Perhaps that's just another story. What I know is only that something beyond categories was present when all categories fell away.

The refusal of the infinite to fit our categories is not failure but fidelity to its nature — any reality worthy of the name “perfect” must elude every label we give it, even those that seem beyond the human — including the non-anthropomorphic ones.

Let's examine this carefully.

Perfection Defined

What do we mean by “perfect”?

We use the word casually in daily speech—“a perfect evening,” “a perfect score”—but when applied to ultimate reality or the divine, “perfect” carries a stricter, more precise implication.

To say something is perfect, in the philosophical sense, is to say that it is complete — lacking nothing, dependent on nothing, and subject to neither change nor limitation. It needs nothing added and admits no improvement.

This is the definition we will use here.

Every attribute we ascribe must be tested against this standard. If it introduces lack, dependency, time, or perspective, it contradicts the very definition of perfection.

The Materialist Shortcut

The materialist skeptic's reflex is predictable: "That was just neurons firing in a particular pattern during crisis. A neurochemical event, nothing more."

But "just neurons" is as much a projection as "God's presence." Both are interpretive frameworks imposed on raw experience. The materialist who reduces my ER moment to brain chemistry is doing exactly what the religious believer does when attributing it to divine intervention—mistaking the map for the territory, the explanation for the thing itself.

Consider the pattern: across millennia, across cultures with no contact, contemplatives report strikingly similar phenomenology when they go deep enough. Christian mystics, Sufi saints, Zen masters, Vedantic sages, indigenous shamans—they use different vocabularies, but the structure of what they describe shows remarkable convergence.

This isn't proof of anything metaphysical. But it's significant data.

When thousands of independent observers, using different methods in different contexts, report comparable experiences—experiences that defy the categories their own traditions provide—dismissing it all as "just brain chemistry" is intellectually lazy.

Yes, there are neural correlates. Every experience has neural correlates — that’s what it means to have a brain.

But correlation is not explanation.

Identifying what parts of the brain light up during an experience doesn’t tell us what the experience is, what it means, or why it arises. It describes the where, not the what or why.

Knowing which neurons fire during an orgasm doesn’t explain sexuality.
Mapping brain activity during mathematical insight doesn’t explain mathematics.

The materialist explanation doesn’t explain at all. It observes a correlation. But correlation is not causation—and it certainly isn’t meaning
It accounts for mechanism but not meaning, for correlation but not content, for the biological substrate but not the lived reality.

And crucially: the materialist framework is itself a human projection — one interpretive lens among many, shaped by the assumptions and biases of post-Enlightenment Western thought. It treats consciousness as epiphenomenon and matter as fundamental.

But what if that’s backwards?

Descartes famously declared, “Cogito ergo sum” — I think, therefore I am — making thought the foundation of being.

But what if the arrow points the other way?

“Sum ergo cogito” — I am, therefore I think.

Being precedes thought. Existence precedes cognition.

What if Consciousness isn't something that emerges from matter but matter is something that appears within consciousness?

What if consciousness is fundamental and matter is the epiphenomenon?
I am not claiming it is—just noting that materialism is an assumption, not a proven fact, and one that most of humanity across most of history has not shared.

My ER experience, and the broader pattern it fits into, suggests that something real happens in these states—something our current models, whether religious or materialist, don't adequately explain.

Perhaps the most honest position is this: we don't know what it is, but dismissing it is premature at best, intellectually lazy at worst.

This is the essence of what I've called Rational Mysticism elsewhere—holding the tension between rigorous skepticism and genuine openness. Not claiming that any single experience proves ultimate truth, but also not dismissing such experience because it doesn't fit our preferred explanatory framework.

The Human Template: Why We Can't Help Ourselves

The human brain is a meaning-making machine.
Faced with the unknowable, we first reach for what we do think we know¹: ourselves.

And so we cast the Infinite in our own image.

Kings gave us God-the-King.
Fathers gave us God-the-Father.
Judges gave us God-the-Judge.

Each culture, each era, projected its own dominant authority figure onto the canvas of divinity.

This isn't accidental. It's anthropomorphism—the attribution of human traits, emotions, and intentions to nonhuman entities. It's how we domesticate mystery.

The cognitive scientist Justin Barrett documented what he calls "hyperactive agency detection"²—our hair-trigger tendency to perceive intentional agents even where none exist. Rustling in the bushes? Assume a predator until proven otherwise.

This bias kept our ancestors alive.
Better to flee from wind-blown leaves than to become breakfast for a sabre-tooth tiger.

This same mechanism, transplanted into the domain of existential meaning-making, generates gods in human form. We take agency, intention, preference, emotion—the familiar furniture of human psychology—and project it onto the cosmos.

And so, across time, our gods became jealous, loving, vengeful, just, petty, wise, cruel, or benevolent—not because the cosmos whispered those traits to us, but because we whispered them to the cosmos.

We can't entirely help this. The cognitive machinery runs automatically, beneath conscious awareness. But recognizing that we do it—that anthropomorphization is a predictable artifact of how our minds work—is the first step toward seeing through it. And perhaps, a necessary step in our motion forward, in our evolution as a species.

The Ubiquity of the Impulse–Not Just a Western Problem

It's tempting to think anthropomorphization is mainly a feature of Western monotheism—the old man with a white beard sitting on a throne in the sky, the God who "so loved the world" that he sacrificed his son, the deity who demands worship and punishes sin.

But the pattern appears everywhere humans have constructed religious systems.

In the Indian religious traditions, millions worship Shiva as a blue-skinned ascetic with a snake around his neck, sitting in meditation on Mount Kailash. Vishnu reclines on a cosmic serpent, periodically incarnating to restore cosmic order. Ganesha—the elephant-headed god—removes obstacles and grants success to devotees who offer the right prayers.

These aren't understood by sophisticated theologians as literal beings running around the universe. Yet for vast numbers of practitioners—not just the uneducated, but engineers, doctors, scientists who compartmentalize their reasoning—these deities are real, personal entities with specific forms, preferences, and powers.

In Buddhism, which began as a non-theistic path focused on liberation from suffering, anthropomorphic tendencies crept back in. Across much of East Asia, the Buddha himself became a cosmic figure to whom one prays for blessings. Bodhisattvas—enlightened beings who postpone final liberation to help others—acquired elaborate mythologies, iconographies, and devotional practices.

Even in monotheistic Islam, which explicitly rejects anthropomorphism (shirk, idolatry, is the unforgivable sin of associating anything with Allah's unique nature), folk practice often includes saints, jinns, and a God who is described with attributes like "hearing," "seeing," "speaking"—human capacities scaled up to cosmic dimensions.

The pattern is universal because the cognitive tendency is universal. We are meaning-making, storytelling, face-seeking, intention-detecting creatures. We make gods in our image because that's the only kind of mind we directly know.

Projection Is Not Revelation

But universality doesn't equal validity.
That we all do something doesn't mean it makes logical sense.
Doesn't make it right. Or even appropriate.

To imagine a cosmic being who wants things, plans things, rewards or punishes us based on obedience or loyalty, is to shrink the Infinite into something psychologically palatable.

And in so doing, to besmirch perfection with human taint.

But the Infinite is not palatable. It is not polite. It does not explain itself.

A virus does not ask permission before it enters your cells.
A black hole does not care about your morality.
Gravity does not favor the good.

And yet, life emerges, beauty astonishes, love endures.
None of it requires a Sky Being.

Let's examine the claim carefully: "God"—defined in most traditions as ultimate, perfect, infinite, eternal—possesses human-like qualities such as emotions, preferences, thoughts, and intentions.

The logical problems multiply quickly.

Problem 1: Perfection Admits No Lack

Human emotions—anger, jealousy, disappointment, even love as we experience it—arise from lack, incompleteness, or dependency.
We get angry when things don't go as we wish—our will is thwarted.
We feel jealous when we fear losing something we need or want.
We experience love partly because we need connection, because isolation hurts, because attachment provides evolutionary advantage.

These are often beautiful, meaningful experiences—but they arise from limitation, from being a finite, vulnerable, mortal creature navigating a world we don't control.

A perfect being, by definition, would have no unmet needs. No frustrated desires. No dependencies that generate emotional responses when threatened.

To say God gets angry implies God's will can be thwarted.
To say God loves implies God needs or desires relationship with creation.

The theologian might object: "No, God's love is selfless agape, needing nothing in return." But even this introduces limitation. If love is God's unchangeable nature, then God cannot choose to be otherwise—which is itself a form of constraint. "Unchangeable" itself is a limitation. And if God could choose not to love but doesn't, we're back to preference—which implies that some states of affairs are better than others from God's perspective. But preference introduces values, values introduce perspective, and perspective introduces position. A perfect being cannot occupy a position; doing so would mean seeing from somewhere rather than everywhere.

Either way, perfection is compromised.

Problem 2: Time Binds Human Thought

Human thinking unfolds in time. We plan, react, remember, anticipate. Our mental life is fundamentally sequential—one thought following another, building toward conclusions, changing based on new information. We compartmentalize into past, present, and future.

But if God is eternal—not just everlasting but outside time altogether—then divine "thought" cannot be like this.

God cannot think "I'll wait and see how humanity responds, then decide what to do next." That's a time-bound process. God cannot "change his mind" as portrayed in traditional narratives where prayer or sacrifice alters divine intention.
Change requires time.

If God is truly eternal, divine "knowing" must necessarily be something utterly different from human cognition—perhaps something like simultaneous apprehension of all states, outside temporal sequence entirely.

The moment we describe God as thinking, planning, or responding, we've imported time-bound human cognition into a being supposedly beyond time. By definition, beyond all human frameworks, concepts, idealizations.

Problem 3: Perspective Requires Position

Human preferences, emotions, and judgments arise from perspective—from occupying a particular position in space, time, and circumstance.

We care more about our children than strangers' children—not because we're evil, but because our children occupy a particular position in the web of our relationships.

We judge actions as right or wrong based partly on how they affect us and those we care about. Our entire moral and emotional landscape is perspective-dependent—we see from here, not there.

But perfection cannot occupy a particular position.
To do so would introduce partiality, limitation, a view from somewhere rather than everywhere.

When religious texts describe God as having a "chosen people" or favoring one nation over another, they've made God partial—seeing from a particular angle rather than from the wholeness perfection requires.

And in so doing, tainted perfection with human foibles.

Problem 4: Form Requires Boundary

Perhaps the most obvious problem: any form whatsoever—blue skin and snakes, bearded elder on a throne, even the more abstract "person"—requires boundary, definition, and therefore, limitation.

Form is bounded by what something is and what it is not.
Inside and outside.
A human body ends at the skin.
Shiva's blue complexion distinguishes him from Vishnu.
The bearded God is not the clean-shaven Buddha.

But the infinite, by definition, has no boundary.
To give God form—whether physical or even in terms of definable characteristics—is to make God finite.

The Upanishads recognized this clearly: "neti neti"³—not this, not that. Any quality you name, any form you envision, any attribute you assign—that's not it.
Not because God is absent, but because God transcends every category, every boundary, every limiting description.

The Failure of the Man-God

The anthropomorphic God fails at the very moments we most need truth.

When a child dies, the God-who-has-a-plan seems monstrous.
When a natural disaster strikes, the God-of-justice seems asleep.
When the laws of thermodynamics show no evidence of divine tinkering, the God-as-engineer looks increasingly contrived.

Such a God is not transcendent. He is merely tribal, inflated to cosmic scale.
Atheists often reject this cartoonish version of God, unaware that mystics across many diverse traditions did so too.

The Transactional God: Ultimate Reality as Cosmic Vending Machine

Perhaps the most revealing form of anthropomorphization is the transactional God—the deity who operates on quid pro quo.

Light a candle in church, and your prayer will be heard.
Offer a novena, and your sick child will heal.
Perform a puja, and wealth will follow.
Conduct a yagnya, and your enemies will fall.

This isn't spirituality. It's commerce dressed in ritual.

The transactional God is built on a simple premise: ultimate reality operates like a cosmic vending machine.
Insert the right ritual, say the right words, make the right offering—and out comes the desired outcome. It's the divine reduced to an exchange economy, where blessings are currency and worship is payment.

This reveals the projection in its rawest form. We deal with each other transactionally—I give you money, you give me goods; I do you a favor, you owe me one—so naturally we assume the divine works the same way. We've taken the most mundane aspect of human social interaction and scaled it up to cosmic proportions.

But notice what this implies: a God who can be bribed, bargained with, manipulated through the right combination of actions. A God who withholds blessings until proper payment is rendered. A God who, like a merchant, weighs offerings on a scale and dispenses blessings accordingly.

This is not perfection.
It's not even a particularly endearing human being.

Any parent worth their salt knows better than to operate purely transactionally with their children.
Any teacher understands that real learning can't be purchased.
Any genuine relationship transcends the ledger of debits and credits.

Yet we imagine the infinite, eternal, perfect ground of being operates on a cosmic balance sheet—credits and debits, sins and indulgences, prayers and blessings, all carefully tallied like a divine accounting department.

The transactional God is perhaps the clearest proof that we've made God in our image, not discovered something true about ultimate reality.
Because only humans—finite, needy, dependent beings—require transactions. Only we need exchange to survive, cooperation to thrive, reciprocity to maintain relationships.

A perfect being would have no need to bargain.
No requirement for worship.
No desire for offerings.

The very concept of transaction requires at least two separate parties with different resources and needs–an exchange of value.
But if God is truly one, truly infinite, truly complete—what could you possibly offer that it doesn't already contain? What could you withhold that would make any difference?

Even in traditions with karma, the goal was never to optimize the cosmic ledger but to transcend it entirely.
The mystics understood this. They didn't make deals with the divine. They dissolved into it.

God as Mathematician—Yet Another Projection

Even when we shed the image of a Sky King with moods and motives, many of us scientific types still cling to a subtler archetype: God as Mathematician.

We invoke phrases like "the language of the universe is mathematics," or "the divine architect," or "geometry is the handwriting of God." Einstein famously said, "God does not play dice," while others countered that quantum mechanics shows that He not only might, but is sometimes inclined to throw the dice where they cannot be seen.

But even here, we are projecting our reverence for elegance, structure, and symmetry outward—onto the void. The mathematical order we discover may say more about the structures of human cognition than the intentions of a Creator.

Pattern does not imply purpose. Beauty does not prove a Designer.

To say that God is a geometer is not fundamentally different from saying God is a clockmaker, or a poet. These are all metaphors that reflect us—our ideals, our fascinations—refracted onto the cosmos.

The universe may be mathematical. But mathematics is not a person.

The Lazy Piety of "God's Ways Are Mysterious"

There's a particularly insidious brand of intellectual surrender that hides behind religiosity: "God's ways are mysterious." "He has a plan we cannot understand." "His ways are not for us to know."

This sounds pious. It's actually just plain lazy.

If we believe God gave us a brain capable of inquiry, logic, and discernment, then refusing to use it isn't humility—it's abdication. It's an insult to God.

The mystics never did this. They questioned everything, pushed language to its breaking point, tested every assumption.

Meister Eckhart was tried for heresy because he wouldn't stop asking uncomfortable questions.

Al-Hallaj⁴, the sufi mystic, now known as "Love's Poet", was condemned for heresy and executed for speaking of complete absorption in the Divine presence.

The Upanishadic sages relentlessly interrogated the nature of reality.

The Buddha explicitly told his followers not to accept teachings on authority—test everything, including what he himself said.

Real reverence isn't blind acceptance.
It's rigorous inquiry in service of truth.

When someone says "God's ways are mysterious" to shut down a legitimate question about suffering, injustice, or logical contradiction, they're not defending God—they're defending their mental model of God.

They're protecting their projection from examination.
And in so doing, insulting the very creation they claim to revere.

If ultimate reality is truly infinite, what need does it have for our protection?
And what exactly are we protecting the Infinite from?
Perfection can handle our questions.

In fact, honest questioning may be the most authentic form of engagement—treating the divine as robust enough to withstand scrutiny, rather than so fragile it shatters under examination.

The imperative to use the brain we are given isn't irreverence. It's the recognition that whatever gave rise to consciousness—whether you call it God, Brahman, the Tao, or simply nature—didn't equip humans with sophisticated reasoning capacity only to have us deliberately switch it off when the questions get hard.

Intellectual honesty isn't the enemy of the sacred.
Intellectual laziness is.

Beyond the Cartoon: What the Mystics Saw

The Upanishads did not speak of a god with emotions and plans. They spoke of Brahman⁴: pure Being, pure Awareness, that from which all arises and into which all dissolves. Beyond all labels, beyond all categorization.

The Tao Te Ching speaks of the Tao as that which cannot be named⁵.

The mystics of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—Meister Eckhart, the Kabbalists, the Sufis—all gestured toward a divine beyond attributes, beyond language, beyond concept.

Meister Eckhart⁶ wrote: "God is not good, not better, not best. Anyone who thinks that God is good is as wrong as someone who thinks the sun is black."

Shankara⁷ in the Advaita tradition taught that Brahman has no qualities, no attributes, no form—yet is the ground of all existence.

They're not being obscure or mystical in the pejorative sense. They're precisely describing what happens when you stop projecting human categories onto ultimate reality and encounter the limits of all categories.

To speak of God as a person with preferences is to mistake the finger for the moon.

Language and Model Error

Language is symbolic. It is map, not territory.
As Alfred Korzybski⁸ reminded us: the map is not the territory.
Yet we live as if it were. We name the divine and then worship the name.

Here we arrive at a genuine paradox: I've just spent thousands of words arguing that ultimate reality transcends all human description—while using human language to make that argument.

I've called it "perfect," "infinite," "eternal"—all labels, all human concepts, all necessarily inadequate to what they point toward.
Even the word "God" itself is a label, freighted with millennia of anthropomorphic baggage.

So what are we to do?

The answer isn't to abandon language or pretend we can speak from a position beyond human limitation. We can't. We're stuck inside the skull, working with the cognitive tools evolution provided, using symbols and concepts to point toward what exceeds symbolization.

The solution lies in recognizing what we're doing: using language provisionally, as a ladder⁹ to be climbed and eventually discarded, as Wittgenstein suggested. Or in Buddhist terms, using concepts as a finger pointing at the moon—useful for directing attention, disastrous if mistaken for the moon itself.

"God is perfect" is a useful pointer—it suggests something complete, lacking nothing, infinite in capacity. But the moment we reify "perfect" into a definable attribute, we've lost the thread. Perfection isn't a quality God has; it's what remains when all limiting qualities are absent.

What if God is not a person, but the very possibility of personhood? Not a being, but Being itself?

Then the need to defend, promote, or interpret divine intention collapses. We are left not with a puppet-master in the sky, but with a mystery vast enough to include galaxies, quantum fields, joy, and suffering—without resolving any of them into tidy moral tales.

The mystics call this apophatic theology—defining God by what God is not rather than what God is. It's not negativity but precision: every positive claim (God is loving, God is just, God is powerful) imports human limitation. Every negation (God is not bound by time, not subject to emotion, not contained by form) removes a barrier.

The goal isn't to end up with nothing. It's to end up with everything—once "everything" stops meaning "a really big collection of things" and starts meaning something our categories can't even begin to capture.

Why This Matters

This isn't just a philosophical or theological preference.
It matters because our projections shape our inquiries.

When we imagine the universe as being run by a Sky Engineer, we look for purpose in entropy, intent in randomness, moral lessons in disaster. We confuse physical laws with psychological dramas.

But the Second Law of Thermodynamics does not care whether you learn your lesson. It simply is. Energy is conserved not because a divine accountant balances the books, but because that is how the fabric of physical reality unfolds.

If ultimate reality is defined as perfect—and most traditions begin there, however they later contradict it—then perfection itself demands transcendence of all human qualities.

Not because human qualities are bad or inferior. Our capacity for love, compassion, creativity, reason—these are profound and beautiful. The problem isn't that they're unworthy of divinity; it's that they're limited, and perfection by definition allows no limitation.

Love as we know it requires an other to love—subject-object duality.
Knowledge as we know it requires something outside the knower to be known.
Power as we know it requires something to be acted upon.

Each human attribute, no matter how exalted, introduces division, boundary, perspective.
Perfection must necessarily be prior to all such divisions.
It cannot be on one side or the other of any duality—good versus evil, creative versus destructive, merciful versus just. Those are human categories, arising from our position within the world, our need to navigate moral complexity from a limited perspective.

Perfection must somehow include and transcend all opposites—not by being a bigger, better version of one pole, but by being the ground from which all dualities emerge and to which they return.

This is why the Tao is described as both emptiness and fullness, why Brahman is said to be "beyond being and non-being," why mystics resort to paradox: ordinary logic operates through distinction and opposition. It cannot capture what precedes all distinction.

Undoing the projection is the first step to seeing clearly.

The Undoing: What Remains

This is not atheism. It is not belief. It is unknowing.

It is the stripping away of the stories we tell ourselves about the divine so that we might encounter what lies beyond all stories.
Or perhaps, see that the one encountering and what is encountered were never two.

In that ER hallway, when everything human fell away—identity, story, plans, even the comforting narratives about cosmic order or divine oversight—what remained wasn't terrifying emptiness but profound fullness.

Not fullness in the sense of containing many things, but fullness as the space that allows things to be at all.

No bearded God watched over me that night. No blue-skinned deity danced in the corner. No cosmic parent held my hand.

Yet something was present—not an other, not "God," not "pure awareness" or any other label I might apply. The experience itself resists categorization. What I can say is only this: when all categories fell away, what remained was more real, more present, more intimate than any concept could capture.

In the silence that remains after all projections fall away, there is no bearded man in the sky. No plan. No punishment. No puppet strings.

There is breath. There is stillness. There is something that cannot be named without domesticating it, without tainting it.

And in that un-nameable presence, a question:
What if the divine was never a who, but a what? Never an entity, but the context in which all entities arise?

If we strip away the human projections—the bearded sky-father, the blue-skinned cosmic dancer, the personal deity who cares about our prayers and judges our sins—what's left?

Not nothing.

What remains is what the mystics keep pointing toward: reality itself, stripped of our conceptual overlay. Not a being among beings, even a supreme one. Not a person, however cosmic. Not an entity with qualities, however exalted.

Instead: the ground of existence itself. The fact that anything exists rather than nothing. The consciousness within which all experience arises. The silence underneath all sound, the stillness beneath all motion, the awareness prior to thought.

And here's the extraordinary part: this isn't distant or abstract or cold. When directly encountered—as sometimes happens in meditation, in crisis, in those unbidden moments of radical clarity—it's more intimate than breathing, closer than hands and feet, more present than the present moment itself.

The anthropomorphic deities, with all their human warmth and personality, turn out to be projections that actually create distance. We put them "up there" or "out there," making relationship with them a matter of external connection.

What remains when those projections fall away is already here, already now, already the most intimate fact of existence—so intimate we usually miss it, looking for something more exotic, more "spiritual," more other.

Living with the Recognition

Does this mean we should abandon religious language, imagery, stories?
Stop depicting gods and goddesses in art? Cease using personal pronouns when we pray?

Not necessarily.

Understanding that anthropomorphization is a cognitive limitation and logical fallacy doesn't require us to expunge every trace of it from practice.
We are human; human language and imagery are our tools.
What changes is our relationship to these tools. We hold them more lightly. We recognize them as pointing devices, not accurate portraits. We use them when useful—as devotional focuses, as meditation objects, as symbolic vehicles for insight—while remembering they're not the thing itself.

A "Hindu"¹⁰ worshiping Shiva might fully recognize that the blue-skinned ascetic is symbolic—that ultimate reality has no color, no form, no gender—while still finding the image a powerful doorway into states of awareness that ordinary conceptual mind cannot access.

A Christian praying to "our Father in heaven" might understand that divine reality transcends gender and spatial location while still finding the parental metaphor emotionally resonant and practically useful.

The key distinction is between useful construction–scaffolding, and confused fact.

Problems arise not from using anthropomorphic concepts but from forgetting they're anthropomorphic—from thinking our images and ideas capture what they only gesture toward, from defending one tradition's metaphors against another's as if metaphors could be true or false rather than more or less useful.

When we forget we're using pointers, we start fighting over which finger is holier rather than looking at what they all point toward.

Conclusion: The Beginning of Reverence

Ultimate reality, if those words mean anything at all, must mean this: not a person, not a being, not even a consciousness as we understand it, but the ground prior to all such distinctions—the Is-ness within which all that is arises from and returns to.

Every human quality we assign—love, justice, power, knowledge—introduces limitation into that which cannot be limited, by definition. Every form we envision creates boundary in what has no edge. Every story we tell turns mystery into mythology.

This isn't an argument against religion or devotion or the profound human need for meaning and connection. It's an invitation to go deeper—past the stage props and costume changes to the stage itself, past the images flickering on the screen to the light that allows them to appear at all.

We make God in our image because that's how minds work.
But logic, clarity, and direct experience all point in the same direction: past the image to what the image obscures, beyond the word to what the word can never capture, before the thought to the awareness in which all thinking occurs.

Anthropomorphization is the primary obscuration.
Not because human qualities are unworthy of the divine, but because they're human—limited, perspectival, bound by the conditions of our particular form of consciousness.

Perfection, by definition, transcends all such limitation.

It has no form because it's the formless within which all forms appear.
No emotions because it's the awareness within which all emotions arise.
No preferences because it's complete already, lacking nothing, needing nothing.

And this isn't cold or abstract or distant. It's the realest thing there is—more real than the thoughts thinking it, more present than the breath breathing, more intimate than the sense of "I" that imagines itself separate from it.

That recognition is not blasphemy.
It is the beginning of reverence.

A Personal Note

For me, this recognition isn’t just conceptual — it’s visceral.

I see the gift I was given on that day in December.
This recognition—this reverence—has stayed with me.

I feel it now, every day—most clearly in my meditation practice, where I sometimes touch that same Stillness I encountered in the ER. Not every session, not on command, but often enough to know it's real.
No words, no concepts, no bearded deity watching from above — just that presence beyond all categories, closer than breath itself.

I see the divine in trees, in birdsong, in my dogs’ eyes, in the movement of wind across water.

Of course, I still have lapses.
I board trains I never intended to board — habits, reactions, old narratives.
But I catch myself sooner.
I return more easily.

I feel the wonder.
And more often than not, I find myself at peace.

The journey continues...

Your Turn

Have you encountered moments when anthropomorphic concepts fell away and revealed something beyond categories? What was it like? Did it feel like loss or liberation—or both?

Where do you notice yourself projecting human qualities onto ultimate reality? What happens when you try to think or feel beyond all human attributes—including the refined ones like "consciousness" or "awareness"?

If you're willing, share your reflections—publicly in the comments or privately at undoing_raaj (at) proton (dot) me.

Footnotes:

¹ Though from a Socratic perspective, even this “knowing” — of what we think we know — is itself a lifelong inquiry.

² Barrett, Justin L. Why Would Anyone Believe in God? AltaMira Press, 2004. Barrett’s theory of “hyperactive agency detection” posits that humans are cognitively predisposed to see intention and agency where none may exist.

³ “Neti neti” – Upanishads Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 2.3.6. The phrase “neti neti” (not this, not that) is a classical teaching method in Advaita Vedanta, used to strip away all limiting identifications and approach Brahman by negation.

⁴ Al-Hallāj (858–922 CE), a Persian Sufi mystic, was executed in Baghdad for declaring “Ana al-Ḥaqq” (“I am the Truth”), a statement viewed by orthodox scholars as heretical identification with God.

⁵ Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Verse 1: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao…

⁶ Meister Eckhart – “God is not good…” Often attributed to Meister Eckhart, this idea appears in various sermons. A representative version: “God is not good in the way we understand goodness… He is beyond good and evil.” See: Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings, trans. Oliver Davies, Penguin Classics, 1994.

⁷ Shankara’s Brahma Sutra Bhashya outlines the concept of nirguna Brahman: the formless, attributeless absolute reality in Advaita Vedanta.

⁸ Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 1933.

⁹ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Proposition 6.54: “He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder…”

¹⁰ The term “Hindu” is a geographic and cultural label historically applied to a wide array of South Asian traditions. Its use as a unitary religious identity emerged during colonial rule. A forthcoming essay explores this idea in depth.

Quiet thanks to Kitera Dent on Unsplash for the image.