  If death is an ever-present opening, the other side of that opening, so to speak, is the absolute. To die is to stand vis-à-vis the absolute. In the discussion of the “I-You” relation, this term appeared as the absolute other in one’s interior; here it shifts to the absolute in contradistinction to finite beings. Nishida calls it God as well, but makes clear that he is not referring to a personal, transcendent being. If transcendence is involved, it is a going beyond by going within. He also implies that it is not synonymous with absolute nothingness. If relative nothingness as opposed to being is implied, it is in the verbal sense of self-negating. The absolute “lives” through its own self-negation and inclusion of the relative self. It does not die in the sense that relative beings do, for it embraces all others whereas they, by being individual, exclude others. God cannot be wholly transcendent to or exclusive of the self or the world. Even Nishida’s early work, An Inquiry Into the Good , had spoken of God in a way that undermined the notion of a transcendent being outside the world; it conceived of God as the infinite activity of unification at work behind the articulations of spirit and nature out of pure experience.