Tagged separateness

The idea that the self is an illusion stops sounding mystical once you watch a newborn, who has almost no boundary between hand and world, self and other. That sense of being a separate "me" is not switched on at birth; it is grown. The brain's default mode network, the circuitry behind all our self-referential thought, takes years to mature, and ordinary infancy is what trains it: this hand obeys me, that pain I can only guess at, so a line gets drawn and slowly hardens into fact. But a thing we acquired the way we acquired our first words is a fluency, not a law of nature. We are not less ourselves for noticing the wall was learned. What might soften if we held our separateness as a habit rather than a given?

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?