the universe was created by an act of love.

[Syne]

Kabbala is especially interesting in this regard, since some Kabbalists took this imagery very literally. They imagined that God literally broke himself into pieces at creation, he flew apart into phenomenal reality, and that the mystical role of the Jews is to literally put God back together again.

That neatly accounts for the problem of evil and for the hiddenness of God. (God is literally gone.) But I suspect that most conventional monotheists will be repelled by the idea.

That would also neatly accounts for a god's omnipresence, participation and interest in the affairs of men, eternal and necessary existence, omniscience (maximal available knowledge), and omnipotence (maximal available power). It may be a stretch to say "god is literally gone", as it would just be transmuted. "Supreme being" would apply equally to all mankind taken as a whole.

But yes, many monotheists (who typically have fairly dogmatic notions of a god) would likely find that troubling.

Yeah, it's possible to imagine that as long as all of reality exists as one undifferentiated unity, it would be impossible for individual consciousness like our own and for interpersonal relationships to exist. So to make us possible, God had to separate us from himself.

If we push that idea harder, we can say that in order for diversity to exist, unity had to go away, meaning that God had to more or less commit suicide so that we can be. It's even possible to imagine that event as some kind of Christ-like divine self-sacrifice in which God died to release us.

And it's possible to imagine the task of all of the universe's finite intelligences to be the mirror image of that, to reascend, to put God back together again, which would necessarily involve their own self-sacrifice as they give up their individual existence so as to merge everyone and everything into One.

The idea that self-sacrifice of one's own individuality is necessary for "becoming One" seems to be a fairly common misunderstanding. That would imply that one's sense of self had to somehow end, and with it, any sense of oneness. Instead, sense of self would merely expand. It would be just a matter of what one refers to as "I" encompassing more. "We" becomes "I" in a seamless transition, where the internal lives of others (previously isolated from the individual) first become transparent (telepathy, for example) and then become so familiar and thoroughly understood that reasoning and motivations merge. Any two individuals so merged would both think of the merger as their own self, as complete understanding lends itself to sense of ownership (for lack of a better word).

 

[Hapsburg]

...Instead, sense of self would merely expand. It would be just a matter of what one refers to as "I" encompassing more. "We" becomes "I" in a seamless transition, where the internal lives of others (previously isolated from the individual) first become transparent (telepathy, for example) and then become so familiar and thoroughly understood that reasoning and motivations merge. Any two individuals so merged would both think of the merger as their own self, as complete understanding lends itself to sense of ownership (for lack of a better word).

That is basically what ego death is. And it is why psychedelic experiences, and related religious, spiritual, and mystical experiences, are expressed in terms of 'consciousness expansion' or 'mind-expanding'.