From Crisco to Surveillance Capitalism: Seeing Through Illusion and Awakening Collective Consciousness
Michael Ebbinghaus • September 3, 2025
Shaping the Future in the Age of Deception
When it comes to the modern era, where we are, and where we are headed, we need to know what we're up against.
What I am about to share will create some urgency, but I do not want to alarm anyone. While the circumstances may be dire, perennial wisdom teaches us that all oppositions, including good and evil, are two sides of the same coin, the Universe in the process of balance.
While the feeling may at first strike you as terror, if you continue to meet it, it will transform into opportunity and sure-footedness.
You might agree that the world seems out of balance. I'll provide some examples below, but first I would like to explain how things have gotten out of balance, and it has to do with consciousness, illusion, and deception.
The Narrative
Perennial wisdom has always taught us that this world of manifestation is an illusion. Vedic philosophy refers to it as Maya, Gnostic Christianity as the Deluge, Sufi Islam as Dunya, and so on.
We currently inhabit the materialist paradigm of modernity, which turns perennial wisdom completely on its head. Rather than see the world of matter and manifestation as a helpful illusion, our current society holds it to be the only thing which bears any reality. Seeing how spirituality has been used to keep people from reality rather than meeting it, we can see why we would have wanted to start to investigate the material world and deny the spiritual one.
That is precisely what the alchemists were doing when they were investigating the natural world for a way to complete Christ's work, i.e. to bring Humankind to a place where it could fully awaken to its Self, to turn our leaden consciousness into a golden one.
The Age-Old Problem of Deception
Deception is not anything new. This world being an illusion means that deception is alive from the very beginning. Just because this world is an illusion does not mean it is apart from reality, but a part of reality.
Things get very tricky, however, when we deliberately attempt to deceive one another. This could be lies in our intimate relationships, lies to ourselves, or the lies of nations towards its people.
The big lie that the United States has been telling for the last half century or more is that it has the best interests of "the people" at heart, when in reality it has been using people primarily as consumers. As consumerism and mass marketing have taken over more and more of the globe, the American Dream has spread far beyond its borders.
One example would be the myriad of processed food products marketed as “healthy” when actually they were ploys to turn waste products into cash mines (see the thread of lead into gold here?). Notable examples are Crisco
where Proctor & Gamble turned an inedible cottonseed oil byproduct into a billion dollar product, marketing it as a modern, healthier alternative
to lard and animal fat, as well as breakfast cereals, which likewise turned milled grain byproducts which had no financial (or nutritional) value, and marketed them as nutritious “breakfast staples”.
Deception to Influence Public Opinion and Justify Violence
The lies do not end at consumer products, of course. In the 1950s the United States painted Guatemala as an unstable dictatorship due to their agrarian reforms, justifying a CIA-backed coup which implanted an actual dictator. The proposed reforms, which would have given unused land to peasants and subsequently increased banana export prices, did not sit well with the United Fruit Company, who used their ties with Washington to implement the martial takeover of the country, as well as Edward Bernays, father of American propaganda and public relations, to create the social justification for it.
"...to have the same buying power that Boomers had in the 1970s, the minimum wage would need to be $43/hour..."
Bernays is famous for his "Torches of Freedom" campaign in 1929, which essentially made it cool for women to smoke cigarettes, associating the cigarette as a symbol of women's rights and equality.
This is just one example of many. The entire Vietnam conflict was likewise a campaign based on lies that sold a great deal of arms at the cost of some 60,000 servicemen, just on the US side. Somewhere between 1 and 3 million inhabitants of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laotians died as well.
Deception Today
Our folks did not have the luxuries of truth that we now enjoy, but the luxuries of a well-painted illusion. The world was a smaller place then, and the American Dream was alive and well. The greatest broadcast technology that existed was the television, whose programming ended at the end of the day. Someone working a technical job with only a high school education could easily purchase a home, support a family, and enjoy a reasonable level of freedom.
Fast forward to today and there are more cameras than there are people. The internet has connected us all and loosened—to some degree—the monopoly on the media and the narrative. We are wise to the sins of our recent ancestors, as well as disgruntled at the economic difficulties we face.
For comparison, in order to have the same buying power that Boomers had in the 1970s, the minimum wage would need to be $43/hour
(it is currently $7.25/hour, which it has been since 2009).
While it is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the systemic economic policies behind wealth inequality, disappearing middle class, and surveillance capitalism, the reality of it cannot be denied.
And these folks on top: Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Alex Kamp, and others, are all making decisions beyond us, without any sense of democratic or civic discourse, that will be painted as "for our safety and best interest."
Meanwhile Thiel wanted to build a bunker
in the one place in the world that can survive Nuclear Winter (the local council said "no" last month, citing environmental impact).
Chalk up one for the people.
Do Not Look Outside for the Truth, Look Within
You probably have felt stirrings within your being. Perhaps you are meeting them, perhaps you are avoiding them. Has your action increased? Are you finding yourself in unfamiliar circumstances, or doubling down on what you already know?
This is where it starts to get real.
Carl Jung, the German psychologist, was able to peer behind the veil. His initiatory experiences are documented in his Red Book.
Jung had several premonitory experiences, most notably his vision of the German countryside filling with blood in October of 1913. The Great War, of course, would begin less than a year later and plunge Europe into chaos and bloodshed to the tune of ~18 million souls.
Fewer know about the vision he had at the end of his life where he saw whole continents burning.
The vision so terrified Jung that he shared it only with his closest followers, like Marie Louise von Franz, who likewise kept the vision locked away in a drawer, both literally and psychologically.
Premonitory visions
show us what is in store if the collective consciousness does not shift. If we can bring the past forward, remember that visions have power and real meaning, then I believe we can avoid a genocide that will shock even those of us in the 21st century, we who understand cognitively and at some deeper substratum viscerally the scope of what Humankind is capable of—genocide, war, nuclear weapons unleashed on civilians.
Just as the Great War and WWII after it shocked our forebears, there is something coming which we dare not imagine.
But if we wake up, if we strive towards what is burgeoning inside of us, which will call us to our highest both within ourselves and our communities, I believe disaster can be avoided and the beautiful future that we dream and yearn for can be brought forth.
We do that by embodying our archetypal potential, our mythopoetic identity.
Explore below to see what your strengths and edges might be in the coming transition.
The Sentient Soul
What is Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy? Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) is a modality that uses low dose ketamine alongside talk therapy to access non-ordinary states of consciousness, helping clients process trauma, depression, and anxiety in a new and deeper way. One of the most common complaints about traditional psychotherapy is that it can take a very long time for unconscious material to surface, even after a solid relationship has formed with your therapist. While there are techniques we utilize in our practice that do not require substances (e.g. dreamwork, sentence completion, automatic writing/drawing, etc.), the introduction of intentional medicine work can reliably shift one into an altered state of consciousness, catalyzing access to unconscious material. After a brief introductory period, you will take ketamine under supervision from your therapist either in-office or virtually in the comfort of your own home. The therapist will guide you to take your own journey as well as direct you towards areas that might benefit from exploration in an alternate perspective. Learn more What is Ketamine? Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic acting primarily on the glutamate neurotransmitter system. This differentiates it from the traditional psychedelics like LSD and psychedelic mushrooms which are much more prominent in the serotonin system. Ketamine increases neural plasticity, meaning that the brain becomes more flexible to change, open to new insights and behaviors. Ketamine has been used for over 50 years as a surgical anesthetic. It has no impact on the respiratory system, making it one of the most safe and effective medicines available. It is classified as a WHO top 10 essential medicine, and it is so safe that it is still the anesthetic of choice for children. It is a schedule III medication approved for off-label use in assisted psychotherapy, meaning a healthcare professional must be supervising in some capacity. Screening is essential, see below for more information. How KAP Works One of the things we like to stress is that the medicine is taking you to a place within yourself. It is not the ketamine "doing" anything other than relaxing your emotional defenses and allowing for exploration of consciousness. That said, you will feel a degree of relaxation in your body as well as your mind, which allows things which we keep buried to come up to the surface. By shifting into an alternate state of consciousness, we are able to sublimate many of the barriers we have in place that remain opaque to us. Oftentimes simply allowing this material to surface creates greater harmony, and you ma find yourself saying "Oh - this is what I've been afraid of for so long? It's not so big and scary after all." This is not always the case, of course. The nature of what is hidden can also be very painful, which is why the presence of the therapist as well as the therapeutic relationship is imperative when first working with alternate states of consciousness and healing trauma. What Does KAP Treat? Ketamine's claim to fame comes from its potent and immediate anti-depressive effect . While this requires lifestyle change and further exploration - greatly benefitted by depth psychotherapy - this can be incredibly helpful to those experiencing treatment resistant depression. It does this primarily through breaking up rigid neural networks (enhanced neuroplasticity), limiting one's ability to ruminate. Ketamine for depression can be powerful, indeed. In a meta-analysis of over 2,500 patients, it was found that 45% of people had significant drops in clinical depressions inventories, with 30% in remission. The benefits were often sustained at 6-month follow up. Ketamine-assisted therapy can be helpful for those who experience post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD . The clinical evidence here is quite strong, with multiple meta-analyses and an open label study showing durable and significant reductions in PTSD symptoms in as many as 69% of respondents and up to six-months' follow up. Ketamine for trauma is widely studied and efficacious. Anxiety is also significantly reduced after brief KAP treatments. In a glimpse, ketamine can treat: Treatment-resistant depression PTSD and trauma-related symptoms Anxiety and existential distress Addiction and maladaptive coping Spiritual exploration or life transitions What Does Treatment Look Like At Ebb & Flow Depth Psychotherapy, we believe in the importance of a strong therapeutic relationship to help sustain the positive effects from ketamine treatment. To this end, prior to any medicine session, there are 6-8 preparation sessions (this can be reduced to 2-4 if you are already working with another therapist). From there, we will conduct two initial dosing sessions with an integration session in between each. We would then conduct another 6-8 dosing sessions, also with an integration session in between each. Our Approach During each session, you will be gently guided into your body utilizing a simple meditation or, if preferred, ambient music. We utilize sublingual lozenges, tablets which will be dissolved and swished in the mouth for 10-12 minutes, then spit out. This offers a psycholytic approach rather than a psychedelic approach. We prefer the psycholytic approach for two main reasons: 1) This helps to make ketamine-assisted psychotherapy more affordable, as the presence of a medical professional such as an RN is not needed as they are in IM (intramuscular) or IV (intravenous) injections. 2) Psychedelic ketamine therapy can be effective, but in our hustle and bustle world, the subtle work often gets overlooked, and it is the subtle work that carries us the farthest. If you’re seeking a full psychedelic experience, I often recommend doing so on your own time and terms, ideally in nature or a supportive setting. There are few practitioners I would trust to guide me through such an experience, and they come at an extraordinary financial cost more often than not. With psycholytic ketamine therapy, we are nudging gently and entering into an altered state but not breaking open the doors of reality. Through the experience and through the journey you've taken thus far, which includes your triumphs and your traumas, we will expand not only on who you are but who you are meant to be. Your exuberant and mature presence is sorely needed in this world, and it requires reconciliation of our darker nature and highest aspirations. Who is KAP for? Ask yourself now: "Am I in a place where I am ready for deep self-exploration?" "Am I open to the idea of letting go of things which both pain and comfort me?" "Can I remain off of substances and away from process addictions (such as pornography, over-eating/bingeing and purging, sex, etc.) for at least three days?" You may not be ready for KAP if: Are experiencing active psychosis or mania Have untreated Bipolar I or II disorder Have a personal or family history of schizophrenia Are currently struggling with active substance dependence If you are in a grounded place and ready to make shifts in your life, KAP may offer the support you've been looking for. Ketamine Therapy In Austin, TX - How to Get Started Contact me today for your free consultation to see if ketamine assisted depth psychotherapy might be right for you. Myself and the fine clinicians over at Journey Clinical are ready to help you find deeper meaning in life and be the change in the world you wish to see. We conduct ketamine-assisted therapy in Austin, Texas as well as virtually all over the state. Reach out to us today!
Fallen idol, or fallen into idolatry?
