From Crisco to Surveillance Capitalism: Seeing Through Illusion and Awakening Collective Consciousness

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.