It's hard not to sound poetic at this level smile emoticon I
   find myself there too. I like an essence / energies distinction.
   It's old fashioned (like 1500 years old old-fashioned) but it
   works. The more esoteric aspects of the Eastern Orthodox stuff
   that drew me in at the time (and I'm not suggesting it - just
   explaining my path) was precisely my ongoing fascination with
   quantum physics as a teenager. They have a concept of the
   Uncreated God. The equivalent to this would be the Nothing
   concept you talk about. This Uncreated God's essence is just,
   well.. 'there'. It's not pantheistic but it has pantheistic
   elements to it, which is why the Ecumenical councils were so
   keen on getting things precise or trying to. Forget the Jesus
   part of it at the moment. Now, something that's Uncreated is
   Nothing. It's there but it's not. We can't trace it back.
   There's no history really. No before to speak of before Time.
   Yet, here we are. At the tiniest levels you have fields. In the
   Nothing, the Uncreated Nothing that's just Nothing, there's
   still energies. But energies of what? We can visualise them
   using lines on paper. Wavy things. We can turn them into
   numbers. probabilities. All intangibles. There's no there,
   there. Yet there, is there. So, yeah, things get wonky, whenever
   you get to this level, whatever external construct you place
   around this nothing/everything thing. -- Indeed. There's
   limitations to logic - there's something at the / inbetween the
   either/or. I love this zone myself. All the interesting stuff
   happens here. Physical systems, conceptual systems, whatever it
   is. I love this zone.