When we abstract our view from our own individual life and existence, we may sometimes see the inter-connectedness of our existence with the universal existence. We do not exist in a vacuum as an independent being. Without the sun, there would be no plants. Without plants to create oxygen and provide food, there would be no animal life, or human existence. Without animals and humans, exhaling carbon dioxide, plants could not survive. Without various insects, plants could not propagate. Everything in the world is so interconnected as to have existence become inconceivable without this complex web of apparently separate beings all acting and responding as one complex organism.
Science has found that indiividual trees may be part of a single being, interconnected in a forest of trees. Science has also found that individual mushrooms may be part of a vast being of mushroom. The line between individual and collectivity fades, the more we learn about the interconnectedness of all existence. There is a truth of individuality, but not as a separately existing and functioning being without the context of the universal existence of which it forms a part and of which it partakes.
Sri Aurobindo notes: “But also we may enlarge the idea of the self and, as objective Science sees a universal force of Nature which is the one reality and of which everything is the process, we may come subjectively to the realisation of a universal Being or Existence which fulfils itself in the world and the individual and the group with an impartial regard for all as equal powers of its self-manifestation. This is obviously the self-knowledge which is most likely to be right, since it most comprehensively embraces and accounts for the various aspects of the world-process and the eternal tendencies of humanity. In this view neither the separate growth of the individual nor the all-absorbing growth of the group can be the ideal, but an equal, simultaneous and, as far as may be, parallel development of both, in which each helps to fulfil the other. Each being has his own truth of independent self-realisation and his truth of self-realisation in the life of others and should feel, desire, help, participate more and more, as he grows in largeness and power, in the harmonious and natural growth of all the individual selves and all the collective selves of the one universal Being. These two, when properly viewed, would not be separate, opposite or really conflicting lines of tendency, but the same impulse of the one common existence, companion movements separating only to return upon each other in a richer and larger unity and mutual consequence.”
Sri Aurobindo, The Human Cycle: The Psychology of Social Development, Chapter 6, The Objective and Subjective Views of Life, pp. 60-61
Sri Aurobindo Studies 