Hi David,
Thank you for the effort you have clearly put into exploring material in Sacred Dimensions that I have always found forbidding. Bringing to bear the parallel approach of Stern is very helpful. The concept of the “unformulated” lying behind the formulations we make and remember is somehow simpler, at least more familiar for me. I expect that this familiarity means that I am allowing myself to feel comfortable with formulations already familiar to me and that I am thereby missing a more radical exploration. But when confronted with zero and zeroless, the elaboration of 16’s, I need all the help I can get.
I feel that your exploration is helping me get a better sense of “zeroless”: if zero is the portal, the entry point into our world of appearance, itself prior to elaboration, interpretation, and the cataloging of the new in the ledgers of the already established; then (as I understand it) the zeroless is on the other side of this portal, the realm of the unformulated?
I noticed that you use the word “absence” to invoke this realm of the unformulated. Makes sense. But I have used that word extensively in the past few years to denote the absence of what was once present. That feels different: the experience of loss in this familiar realm, not the souceless source of present experience.
Michael