Examining the relationship between water and life is the easiest way to see that we have to respect the non-separate nature of our individuality as co-occurring and interdependent with the separate nature of our individuality. What type of relationship do we have to soil, water, and the atmosphere?

The individual is irrevocably interconnected with the environment. We are literally made of the environment on the physical level; water, air, and soil are us. When our individuality is experienced with little acknowledgement of our non-separate self it seems as if the earth is our garden. The earth then becomes something like an extension of our needs, something related to primarily from the perspective of being something useful to us.

Human beings are conscious individuals. Awareness of individuality gives rise to questions about the nature of human existence. How individual are we? If we examine our internal subjective experience of thoughts, feelings, and sensory perception we realize that we are aware of them but that others around us are not aware of our inner experience in the same way that we are. When we examine our actions we realize that we alone can initiate movement or speech even though we do not know exactly how we do it.

As a self-aware entity I can speculate about the existence of individual life without awareness but my speculation is irrelevant to developing a description of human existence because human beings are self-aware. Consciousness, awareness that we are aware, is for us the key factor that makes meaningful individuality possible. Consciousness is the primary factor in all human behavior and is in fact so omnipresent that we frequently ignore it in favor of concentration on the objects of awareness.

Franklin Merrell-Wolff, the American mystic philosopher, has explored the existence of consciousness in a particularly deep and thoughtful way and developed a philosophical system that posits consciousness without an object as the ground of all reality.