At this point I am sitting in the living room, with dim lights, and the darkness of the night pouring through the window. The darkness of death feels deeper and much more profound than this darkness of night, but the two become one, and I am enveloped by a deepening blackness. The blackness peers at me through everything. I begin to feel a curious aloneness, peaceful and poignant. This is what death is: total aloneness. In fact, it is simply the acknowledgment of my already existing fundamental aloneness, the aloneness of Being. I am alone, in death. My experience of my existence is all there is, and this existence is the presence of death itself. The awareness now is that the mysterious blackness is the face of death, which is aloneness—a peaceful, pure aloneness. The aloneness begins to reveal a quality that I do not usually associate with aloneness. I begin to feel an exquisite intimacy, as if the atoms of my consciousness have become its very essence. Death seems to coincide with both intimacy and aloneness. The mysterious blackness of death brings aloneness and intimacy together, joining them into one quality. There is a sweet and delicate intimacy in the heart as I contemplate death and see the presence of blackness. Contemplating the intimacy and sweetness pervading my chest, I realize that my body has lost its usual boundaries; it is now all of existence. I am the room, everything in the room, and everything beyond the room, all as one presence. The sense of what I am is an immense, adamantine crystal presence, an indivisible totality. This totality which I experience as my body is all of the universe. Also, curiously, at the location of my physical chest this unity of existence is a sweet intimacy. The contemplation of death has led me to the mysterious blackness underlying all of existence, and this has made it possible for me to experience the unity of Being as my body.