"Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."
-- Sir Arthur Eddington
A few things to address...
1. The idea that Something Always Was, as opposed to Something Coming Into Being.
Whatever the "ultimate ground of being" is (energy, consciousness, void, God, left-over potato salad, all/none of the above), it is by definition Infinite: infinite in all and any way. It has to be, because if it isn't, if there is something beyond it, than That Totality is what's infinite. Even if there is an infinite regression, then That is our Infinite Ground: infinite in space and time...which means no beginning. The advantage to this is that it fits perfectly with Occam's Razor: Something That Always Was is a simpler proposition than Something Coming Into Being, because we don't have to explain any creation.
2. Since we are 3-dimensional beings, it is impossible for us to visualize a "higher space." We can understand it mathematically, but not via a sensory metaphor, at least not w/o distortion in one or more dimensions.
For example: we can draw a cube (a 3D figure) on paper but with distortion in that 3rd dimension because the paper is a 2D surface (the 3rd dimension has been collapsed, so to speak). We can draw a 4D cube (a tesseract) on paper, but now we get distortion in 2 dimensions. We can even make a 3D model of a tesseract, but this still leaves us with distortion in 1 dimension. There's no way around it: the best we can do is make models with some measure of distortion. So when scientists try to understand higher spaces, they reason through metaphor, often scaling down a dimension or two.
3. A "false vacuum" (higher space) is thus best understood through metaphor. I refer to the Big Pencil falling down, going Boom, as one of my faves.
If you could balance a pencil upright on its point, and look straight down on it, you'd see the pencil as a circle, symmetrical in all directions. But, on its point, the pencil is highly unstable; conditions could change at any instant. When the pencil does fall over (ala Big Bang), symmetry is broken. But the pencil is in a much more stable condition, this being a true vacuum.
Sorry if I wasn't more clear. This is because 1) my own understanding of this stuff is hardly expert level; and 2) I'm in a rush at the moment. I also wanna address the Oscillating Universe idea, but in that thread.