As usual, we can find ourselves lost in semantics, and the words we use cannot help but fall into a specific connotation. In this case, the word nothing is, as you suggest, important to clarify.

Clearly, the mind cannot conceive of something coming out of nothing because nothingness is difficult to understand. Our minds have only been trained to work with, and recognize, things, whether material, spiritual, mental, or emotional But no-thing is inconceivable. The mind has also been conditioned to value only that which can be described, sensed, or thought of. "Nothing" falls in a category beyond mentation.

I am not sure what you mean by the "cosmic whole," but anything that is explainable, conceivable, and cosmic falls into the realm of some-thing and not no-thing, even if it cannot be adequately explained or demonstrated.

I cannot explain what it is like to be nothing, though I have repeatedly known this state. I know it even as the mind is busy or the senses are engaged. It is always available to me. But as we have discussed in previous exchanges, this knowingness does not occur in the midst of nothingness, but rather prior to and afterwards. And so nothingness remains indescribable.

You aptly wrote: "Just because a certain mental state seems paramount to us or to spiritually disciplined individuals, doesn't mean the rest of the universe must conform to it or that that state is the source of all things." I agree, because what is made apparent to me is not shareable or common to all. We can call this subjective and perhaps every single thing that we know, experience, claim, and realize is subjective. Ultimately in my own life experience I had sought something that would prove to me that which is beyond the egoic self, the material reality, thought, phenomena, experience, and so on. And this is what I have found, but it remains ineffable and unlike most ideas it cannot be passed along to others.