Consciousness is more than self awareness. And individuality is more than just yourself. Think of consciousness as an infinite field of awareness. Your individuality is tuning into this broadcast. Everything does so on its own channel: Plants. Angels. All kinds of life forms! You’re not assimilated into a beehive mentality–you’re intimately connected with the field. Imagine an atom. It’s an individual, yes? So just envision how trillions of atoms come together to make a cell and trillions of cells come together to make you. They’re one with the whole living body. They are individual forms of one consciousness, as we are. 

=D