I called the IRS yesterday, and a nice gentleman helped me understand their complicated system for online payments.
Was he the IRS? He certainly spoke on behalf of the IRS. But was he actually the IRS? Suppose I had spoken to the IRS Commissioner. Would I then have been talking directly to the IRS? Well, the Commissioner could be fired in the middle of my conversation… but the IRS would continue to exist.
Whenever I speak to an IRS agent, I talk to someone who expresses the totality we call the IRS, but I cannot speak to that totality itself. And the interesting thing is, how naturally and completely each agent does express that totality, how each agent in a sense “becomes” the IRS, in a holographic way.
Human intelligence is more ant-like than we notice day by day. There are social or collective intelligences of which we, as individuals, become manifestations. This seems to be a spontaneous phenomenon. While it’s obvious that the IRS, as an organization, absorbs the agents that work for it, what is less obvious is how each agent in turn “absorbs” the IRS. This explains the brutal behavior that can sometimes appear in armies or security forces, from individuals who might otherwise be decent people. It perhaps explains why a United States President might behave in ways that are dramatically at variance with his past values as an ordinary citizen.
But those are easy examples to observe.
What I find harder to answer is this question: What collective intelligence am I a manifestation of, without even realizing it? How is the human colony to which I belong doing its thinking, and how is it doing this thinking through me?