And so we have both the presence of absence and the absence of presence. Is there a difference? When you open the garage door, and you see that your spouse's car is not there - that is is the absence of presence. However, when you open the garage door knowing that it will not be there already - that is the presence of absence. Both contours of reality exist simultaneously - as you perceive, and your pattern-recognition software makes predictions, such data as that which fulfills a pattern creates a presence in the mind. Expectations of that pattern set up a binary - there/not there. When you perceive that a pattern is not met, or expectation fulfilled, you have the absence of presence - the notion and feeling that something is missing. But a pattern that tells you there is inherent incompleteness, something that you know cannot be there, that you would like to exist or be true; there is the presence of absence, the void, the abyss. So it is with god and the self.