The key here is "come away from" and so is necessarily within the domain of critical analysis. This is where the normal conscious mind tries to compartmentalize the experience in neat terms that fit understanding. The simple fact is, having been through this numerous times, that the individual does not know what they have experienced but the conscious mind has to come up with something and more often than not, because the experience is so divorced from normal experiences they determine that it is from some kind of god.
I wouldn't conclude that is the default go-to. I'll explain in a second...
In those terms, but in those terms only, there would be some truth to the assumption. But... and it's a rather large but, it is just an assumption the conscious mind superimposes on the experience.
You could call it an assumption, but rather it's more modeling. When we have an experience beyond the norm, we try to fit it into something we can relate it to - such as a deity figure from our culture's symbol set of the transcendent. What is known is the experience was transcendent, and so if the primary language available to them is that of the gods, and they for the most part "believe" in them conceptually, that they are part of the framework of reality for them as they look at the world as a whole, that will be what comes to mind to 'explain' the experience, or to call it that, to represent it as an encounter with the divine.
If however someone's primary language, or mode of translation of the world of experience is more modernistic, and they have some transcendent experience, they may hang it on some other symbol, such as the "scientific explanation", i.e., "I had an hallucination." Or in a more postmodern fashion, "I had a peak experience of a transpersonal nature". The default go-to is not necessarily "God", if one does not filter reality through such frameworks of mythic and archetypal forms.
There is something to be said however for someone at the higher modes of perception (worldviews) to utilize the forms from the earlier ones, as they are after all deeply engrained in our psyches evolutionarily speaking. The world of magic, the subtle realm, was very much a part of the fantasies of our youth and subsequently is in fact a language we already to understand, and can take advantage of in powerful ways, without it being a regression into actual magical thinking as the norm, throwing out the gains of rational and critical thought.
In larger terms, the conscious self has simply created a fantasy that papers over what they are grappling to understand in order to understand.
Well, the exact same thing can be said of our sciences as well!
In reality, the world is to us what lenses we choose to filter it through. It may be more powerful and predictive, but it is still a highly selective set of thoughts and ideas trying to fit a preconceived fantasy of our minds, ignoring what doesn't fit, that for instance we can truly understand it by using the tools of reason and analytic thought. That's a fundamental flaw right there, and not really all that different from modeling it with gods. Instead of deities, we now have scientific "laws", and we elevate them as holding the promise of "truth" the same as we did in seeking deities.
Even though its more sophisticated, it's just a more sophisticated mythology. We do the same thing as someone who concludes they actually met Jesus in a transcendent experience.
It's akin to shooting oneself in the toe, really. I will admit, that due to the incredible nature of the experience, one cannot easily understand it and so the leap to some kind of deity is fairly common, natural and not unexpected. It's all part of the cognitive process. With luck, that process with not stop there however.
We leap to what is familiar to us, some language that we can relate our experience to. We all do that with every single experience, actually, whether it is transcendent or mundane. Our minds constantly fill in the blanks with knowns, which is why a lot of time we actually misread the thing. I read this that if someone had no reference whatsoever, or belief in say for instance an "angel". If they were to actually encounter a real one (hypothetically speaking), their minds would relate it to something they could recognize, and they would make it an "old woman" or something.
That angel would be believed in and experienced by them with a pre given known, "old woman". It is really only an "old woman" because that is what the person's adopted framework can allow it to be. We cannot leave it as an unknown, so we reconfigure it to fit our constructed reality we are operating within. All else gets filtered out. The true nature of it of course is beyond what we perceive it to be.
While this is true, presented in this way, one comes to understand that "the oneness of all things" is itself an illusion, a stepping stone, as it were to an even greater understanding. To understand a greater picture of reality, one does need to go through this phase. On that, I will agree.
It's nice you point this out. Oneness is not the ultimate reality, but a damned good beginning.
