What is an individual?

What makes us  “Individuals” ?

An individual is a person or a specific object. Individuality (or selfhood) is the state or quality of being an individual; particularly of being a person separate from other persons and possessing his or her own needs or goals. (taken from wikipedia)

A single human being as distinct from a group (Noun – oxford dictionary) 

A single member of a class (Noun – oxford dictionary) 

so far I have described what our society and the world has agreed makes us “individuals”  but for us to truly understand who and what we are, we first and for most need to understand what the idea of “us” is and where it comes from; this can only be done by analysing what “knowledge” is and the origin of it, because as human beings we are not born with any pre installed characteristics or ideologies which forms part of who we are along side our perception of life itself and the world around us (also taken from knowledge) and these are the very basics that forms our individualism (The habit or principle of being independent and self-reliant – oxford dictionary)

Knowledge – Facts, information, and skills acquired through experience or education; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject (noun – oxford dictionary).  The definition of the word itself is self explanatory, knowledge is acquired, meaning it is obtained from somewhere (that I will explain  another day), our peception, ideologies and character is groomed by the knowledge we obtain, I.E what we as “individuals” perceive as right or wrong. So if this is the case and the origin of knowledge can not be narrowed down to one particular thing because it is obtained through living life, e.g. we wouldn’t know humans would drawn under water if it wasn’t experienced, then surely the whole idea of being an “individual” is flawed because we can not have been who we are today, without a collective of  knowledge which is obtained and gathered from all around us. There is simply no new and original way of thinking, everything done, spoken about, thought of etc is simply part of a branch of a wider and bigger tree of connected energy.

Everybody is now so consumed with trying to be “different” in todays world that the whole process itself is far from what we would label something done by “individuals”, this is evident in everyday life, from fashion to how we carry ourselves, the simply truth is, we need to appreciate the world around us, one andother and accept that no single person on earth is truly an “individual” or supreme. who we are, our behaviour, thought process etc is simply a collective of information (knowledge) gathered from everything around us.

With that being said, the world “Individual”  should not be used when trying to explain ones phycological thought process but should be restricted to only our genes which makes us who we are physically, (even this can be argued, i.e, it takes two people to create another human being, but even within that human being there are many dominant and recessive genes from part generations etc which makes them) yes I know genes can impact our psychological state of mind as well to an extent but this is a whole new chapter that will be discussed on a later date but for now scientist have not discovered for definate a evil gene for example that makes people do “evil” things, so one can only conclude although a person may come from criminal minded people etc, the knowledge they pick up is what forms who they are and leads them to continue family inherited problem.

so back to the question, what makes us an individual? well NOTHING, in plain words, without going too in-depth into the origin of identity and knowledge. we are all connected, so I guess it is about time we all became a little bit more humble and accept no human on earth owns the right to be placed on a pedestal.