A single cell, among billions, insisting it is separate.

Monism and the old objection to oneness usually start the same way: but I am obviously separate, a different person sitting right here. Alan Watts, in his "We as Organism" framing, hands us the quiet correction: the trillions of cells in one body are radically different from each other, far apart, doing unrelated work, yet remove any of them and the whole thing dies. We mistake distinct for separate, but they were never the same word. A blood cell is genuinely its own cell, immune cells and gut bacteria are genuinely strangers to one another, and still there is only one body breathing them all at once. Two whirlpools in a river are truly two whirlpools, never to be confused, and there is still only water. So when we feel our edges and call them walls, what if the edge is just where the one organism happens to be looking out from here?