The essay was published well before the Manson Family murders, before the Rolling Stones’ Altamont Speedway concert debacle, the Kent State shootings, the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison — before any of the infamous totems of the death of the Sixties. Yet the picture Didion paints of an already decaying counter-culture is bleak: rather than discovering the kind of fluid, boundary-less utopia imagined in the new culture of psychedelic drugs, thousands of young people had squandered their minds and lives chasing a pseudo-enlightenment sold to them by gurus and cult figures — the most famous of course being Timothy Leary, who had traveled across the country inviting every American to “Turn on, tune in, and drop out”. Instead of precipitating a glorious era of mass enlightenment, LSD ended up creating a burned-out, drug-addled generation of lost children.

Considering Didion’s prophetic picture of that burned-out acid generation, it seems entirely possible that our own society stands on the edge of something similar, even if its own destructive ideals of utopian design have been institutional and technological, where the Sixties dream was countercultural. Beset by internet addiction, climate anxiety, depression, overwork, ADHD, and a general tendency towards distraction and retreat from the world, ours is a culture of burnout and exhaustion which looks like nothing so much as a recapitulation of the Sixties fallout, only with the internet as our new mind-altering drug of choice. Yet these eerie similarities are no accident.

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From the release of formerly clandestine information, in the Seventies, we know that LSD was introduced into America by concerted governmental programs in the early Fifties as part of Cold War MK-ULTRA operations, in an attempt to develop new forms of brainwashing and mind control. For years, the United States government experimented with psychedelic drugs on people in asylums, prisons, and clinics. The journalist Tom O’Neill, in his rather persuasive book CHAOS: Charles Manson, the C.I.A., and the Secret History of the Sixties (2019), has even gone so far as to suggest that Charles Manson himself may have been the product of deep-state testing, during his time in prison. Whether or not this is true, the fact remains that the drug which unleashed massive anti-societal, anti-institutional energies onto an unsuspecting American public was the product of a state experiment, an attempt to discover a new technology of power.

As the Sixties dream collapsed, these mass collective visions were channeled into more explicit cults, and into narrower, individualist ideas of therapeutic soothing. The Seventies saw the proliferation of guru-centered religious cults such as the Rajneesh Movement and Jim Jones’ People’s Temple — the latter infamous for its congregational mass suicide in 1978 in Guyana. The decade was also dominated by what came to be known as the New Age, a vague bricolage of spiritualist practices including Americanized popularizations of Zen and yoga; neo-pagan groups like Wiccans and the Church of Satan; even expanding middle-class interest in Freudian and Jungian psychotherapy. The emerging popular images of “spirituality” at the time — healing crystals, meditation retreats, soothing muzak — were all part of this new climate, stemming from the collapse of the commune movement, an emergent global recession, and increasing fragmentation into individualist anomie. This was the “Me Decade” which the great socialist critic Christopher Lasch detailed acutely in his 1979 book, The Culture of Narcissism.

For Lasch, the new therapeutic language of the Seventies had combined with the slow constriction of family life, an addictive obsession with professional sports, ingeniously distractive media, and a collapse in popular faith in institutions, to create an isolated and narcissistic culture losing all sense of shared vision or communal life. For all its potential value, the increasing middle-class obsession with therapy was ultimately only teaching people to further obsess over themselves: people were growing more and more concerned with tracking and transforming their own feelings and thought patterns, instead of turning outwards to the world, or confronting the need for real public, political transformation. The ever-unattainable ideal of “mental health” had effectively replaced the Christian doctrine of the salvation of the soul. In place of religion, or even those utopian visions of mass psychedelic enlightenment and countercultural communalism, the West now had a myriad of individual spiritual projects — all increasingly packaged, marketed, and thoroughly commodified.

Around the same time, Silicon Valley had begun to form. With the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), California university researchers funded by the US Department of Defense had created a new mass packet-switched network, functionally connected by 1969. This ARPANET formed the foundation for what would later be the Internet. Given the name “Silicon Valley” by Dan Hoefler in 1971, that section of the San Francisco Bay Area played host to the world’s largest concentration of hardware and software developers, start-ups, and inventors of new computer technologies. With the introduction of the IBM Personal Computer in 1981, and the establishment of the official Silicon Valley Bank in 1983, the place became the epicenter of the coming digital revolution.

Silicon Valley had its own emergent culture, too — one which, as it turned out, had much to do with that death of the Sixties counterculture, and all those lost dreams of a boundaryless utopia. In an influential 1995 paper, University of Westminster media scholars Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron gave this loose ethos a name: “The Californian Ideology.” This “bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley… promiscuously combin[ing] the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies”, made up the set of liberatory ideals which had formed the ideological basis for these new networks, from its earliest days to 1990, when the British researcher Tim Berners-Lee from CERN had built the first web browser, along with the software behind the creation of the World Wide Web.

According to Barbrook and Cameron, the creators and theorists of the Internet had come to see an unlimited, untamed cyberspace as a chance to finally achieve the old utopian dream, following the collapse of the New Left movement and the burnout of the Californian counterculture. What the Sixties had failed to bring about at the level of consciousness might now be done through technology. But Barbrook and Cameron noticed something disturbing going on, namely a strong rightward drift, into fantasies of “perfect” markets and totally sovereign individuals, freed by the ultimate “democracy” of the internet from any societal responsibility. They reported that the new hi-tech and media industries were becoming rhetorically very important for the New Right, since “both capitalists and well-paid workers fear[ed] that the open acknowledgment of public funding of their companies would justify tax rises to pay for desperately needed spending on health care, environmental protection, housing, public transport and education.” They also wrote, despairingly, about how many people in this new “virtual class” had been “seduced by the libertarian rhetoric and technological enthusiasm of the New Right. Working for hi-tech and media companies, they would like to believe that the electronic marketplace can somehow solve America’s pressing social and economic problems without any sacrifices on their part.”

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Of course, this is a paradigm we’ve seen repeat itself many times over in the past decades. It’s fairly well accepted at this point that the 2024 US presidential election was at least partially clenched for Trump by the support of tech titans like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel, whose Orwellian corporation Palantir has already benefited immensely from working with the new government. Democratic socialists in America have argued for years that the sway tech companies can purchase in the government only further facilitates the transfer of federal money away from new infrastructure, or welfare for a struggling population, and into the coffers of these already exorbitantly overvalued and over-subsidized monopolies.

The parallels on the historical scale are also obvious if we look at the beginnings (and the end result) of the Californian Ideology. First introduced as a technology of control, with large-scale military investiture, psychedelic drugs and the counterculture which emerged from them took an entire generation from mass public defiance of conformism, and celebration of spiritual transcendence, into mass psychological crash-out, followed by a descent into narcissism and myopia. Via those inventors and businessmen of Silicon Valley who successfully globalized the Californian Ideology, a similar project was envisioned, only now at the institutional and technological level. It was no longer merely counter-cultural: it was the underlying impetus for the new technological regime itself. And it, too, had decades of concerted investment by the US military to thank for its sudden widespread effect.

Which brings us to the present moment, and what it shares with the death of that older utopian ideal. All pretensions towards the “democratizing” power of Web 2.0 social media died with the Arab Spring 15 years ago; since then these sites have only increased our political polarization and intra-group hatred. We’ve even begun to develop our own cult leaders and cultish language: consider accelerationists following the example of Nick Land, or new anti-democratic “philosophers” like Curtis Yarvin, along with an Internet filling up with doom-laden terms like “the longhouse” or “the cathedral” and, of course, “taking the red pill”. Transhumanism, Applied Rationalism, and Effective Altruism have established themselves in actual institutional centers, in affiliation with many companies in Silicon Valley today — yet all have shown the tell-tale signs of cult-like activity, from sexual grooming scandals to tales of obscene behavior to murky influence on the rich and powerful.

Then there’s the simple fact of mass emotional collapse, as overstimulation from internet addiction and portable devices only worsens. In 2010, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han characterized the primary disease of our time as “neuronal”, manifesting in pathologies like ADHD, depression, and burnout. In his remarkable book, The Burnout Society, Han traces the transformation of Western society from a “disciplinary” paradigm to an “achievement” paradigm. From a society based on coercion and force from above, we’ve shifted to a society in which each person becomes self-exploiting, suffering not from any threat of direct oppression from the Other, but from “an excess of positivity”. Consider all our brief media obsessions over fads like “quieting quitting”, “ghosting”, or the “Great Resignation”. In a world of entrepreneurs, personal brands, and internet avatars, the ruling feeling of the day is the constant threat of an immense narcissistic crash-out, an exhaustion which comes from having to aggressively and constantly be one’s own authentic self — and then to sell it. We’ve never been more stimulated, more overwhelmed by information, or more productive in our work. The result is a deepening sense of total existential exhaustion, not at all dissimilar to the post-Sixties burnout.

It’s impossible to know where any of this is really heading. Yet if we follow some of these analogues — keeping in mind that it’s hardly a perfect one-to-one map, only a sense of the way our massive societal upheavals tend to produce mass exhaustion — we may glimpse some of what’s in store for us. Consider the increasing evidence for the “Dead Internet” theory, the suspicion that maybe even a majority of the internet is, at this point, only dead bots interacting with other dead bots. We’re looking at a pandemic of tiredness, overstimulation, and overwork, and even that is accompanied by a loss of any last vestige of meaning or reality in the digital networks we’ve used to distract ourselves. In the next decade, we’ll likely see a rise in even more obvious cults and spurious new spiritual movements; huge increases in young people “tuning in, and dropping out” from mass communications technologies; the increased transition from mild “digital detoxes” to outright rejection of digital existence; and a rise in the establishment of primitivist communes.

The benefits of this new paradigm could be remarkable: a return to pragmatic grassroots socialist politics; an increase in DIY planting and repair-work; more communal living, perhaps cross-generationally; the return of something like a true counter-culture, or an artistic avant-garde; new, classically humanistic educational institutions, away from our ineffectual universities; even a larger return to sincere interest in the great world religions. If history is any guide, and we really are in for a massive post-utopian burnout at a level never seen before, then these are the very kinds of alternatives and experiments which we’ll have to embrace. Unless we want to live in a world where the destruction wrought by pseudo-utopian projects is simply replayed at the mass technological level, then we’ll be forced to find ways of connecting to each other which don’t rely solely on digital technology or existing institutions. We may indeed be in an escalating mess of mass emotional collapse — a crisis of exhaustion. Yet as Winston Churchill is supposed to have said (in a way which still rings quite true): “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

From this moment emerged a potent modern revolution in evangelical Christianity, led by one of the Summer of Love’s most compelling refugees. Lonnie Frisbee was a gay, Rasputin-like mystic who believed in the transformative power of LSD; he would “party on Saturday night and preach on Sunday morning”. His story is counter to the Hollywood narrative of that summer in San Francisco — but, in its darkness, it is far more in line with reality.

The streets of Haight-Ashbury were certainly filled by girls with daisies in their hair and guys with outsized flares seeking to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” in the words of Timothy Leary, godfather of the hippy movement. But soon enough, the district’s new residents realised that “turning on” to free love gave rise to a widespread culture of rape; “tuning in” saw a spontaneous movement transform into a commercialised spectacle; and “dropping out” found free-spirited flower children sleeping on park benches. As one pamphlet put it, at the time: “Minds & bodies are being maimed as we watch, a scale model of Vietnam.”

Now, a new film has arrived to both illuminate and further obscure the cultural effect of that summer. Jesus Revolution, starring Kelsey Grammer, portrays one of the most important evolutions in modern Christian history: the “Jesus People” movement (also known as the Jesus Movement or Jesus Freaks). Grammer plays Chuck Smith, the buttoned-up pastor of Calvary Chapel, a struggling Pentecostal church in California’s Orange County, who had a chance meeting with the teenage Lonnie Frisbee. A disaffected hippy, Frisbee was hitchhiking down the California coast after spending the Summer of Love tripping on acid and reading the Bible, having converted to Christianity in a San Francisco commune.

Based on the memoir of Greg Laurie — who worshipped under both Frisbee and Smith in the Seventies, and in turn became a prominent evangelical preacher — Jesus Revolution offers Frisbee a far more prominent role in contemporary Christian history than he is usually given. Yet as with other representations of Frisbee’s life, the film also writes him out at a convenient moment, long before his gruesome, lonely death from AIDS in 1993. His sexuality is ignored.

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Frisbee’s legacy is profound, but constantly overlooked — as is the wider movement. Jesus People probably couldn’t have happened at any other time or place than the beaches of Orange County, south of Los Angeles. It was a hotbed of internal migration in the post-war years, as families from the Midwest escaped the farms and factories hollowed out by the Depression. The region’s burgeoning defence industry offered entry into the middle class. Carrying little more than their hopes, faith and conservative values, these new arrivals helped transform the region into the seat of the modern evangelical movement.

These hard-working Americans seem to be at odds with the 19-year-old Frisbee, who attracted young people to Calvary Chapel with devotional music that could have been played on the stages of the future Woodstock. But Smith, according to the film, saw something in him that could bring young people like his daughter back into the fold. They found a new way of doing church, but their union was building on ideas that had started in Pentecostal churches in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, where renegades insisted — in something that was hotly resisted by church leaders of the day — that instead of waiting for the blessings of the Holy Spirit to work their miracles, believers could experience these wonders “on demand”.

Here was a Christianity that could find not only historical justification, but a home in the spirit of the Sixties and its growing consumer culture. Calvary Chapel was a place to feel good as well as feel God — an evangelical version of the Summer of Love. Frisbee’s magnetic appeal was the spark able to bring the masses to the movement. Described by some as a figure akin to the biblical Samson, Frisbee was uniquely blessed with the ability to speak to the moment, but ultimately brought low by temptation. He was, after all, still preaching to a congregation who were evangelical Christians, in both temperament and values; most of them weren’t hippies. His renegade style and personal life were only going to cut it for so long, and he was eventually cast out — of the movement, and the film.

Jesus Revolution moves onto Greg Laurie’s story here, but in real life a far more interesting character stepped up to fill Frisbee’s shoes. John Wimber, a fellow hippy who was in a Sixties rock’n’roll band called the Paramours — which went on to become the Righteous Brothers, of whom he was the manager — was at that time described as a “beer-guzzling, drug-abusing pop musician, who was converted at the age of 29 while chain-smoking his way through a Quaker-led Bible study”.

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Wimber became a central figure at Vineyard, a church affiliated with Calvary Chapel, where he helped mould the energy of Frisbee and the sensibility of Smith into a more far-reaching and coherent Christian revival movement. Today, they’re known as the Charismatic and Neocharismatic movements, or the second and third waves of Pentecostal Christianity, but labels aren’t that important. What matters is the way in which they spread like wildfire through churches in California, and eventually the world.

Wimber’s “power evangelism” — a term first associated with Frisbee, but now largely credited to his heir — is best described by the former rock’n’roll pioneer’s own formulation of doin’ the stuff. “When I worked for the devil, he let me do his stuff,” Wimber said. “But when I came to work for Jesus, they didn’t want to let me do His stuff. To tell you the truth, I joined up to do the stuff!” The stuff is the direct experience of the signs, wonders and miracles of the Holy Spirit promised in the Bible, such as faith healing, prophecy and speaking in tongues. In the old days, you had to go to your preacher for that. The genius of the former hippies was to change that, satisfying the cultural desire to have direct experience with the stuff. As anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann put it: “If God is present in a literal sense, you no longer need to turn to intermediaries to learn what his wishes are. You can ask him yourself.”

This kind of Christianity spoke to cultural icons of the hippy era, up to and including Bob Dylan, who went to Wimber’s Vineyard bible school in 1978, after the singer felt Jesus as a “physical thing” and began to tremble in his hotel room. “The glory of the Lord knocked me down and picked me up,” he later said. But Dylan was a late adopter to what was by then Wimber’s movement, which was drifting a long way from Frisbee’s ideals. The Jesus People movement, which was now Charismatic Christianity, was beginning to look more McDonald’s than McCartney. The direct descendants of this movement can be found in churches such as Hillsong, the Australian megachurch that has recently seen an almighty fall from grace. Earlier this month, it was accused of failing to report $80 million in profit, while its founder, Brian Houston, was alleged to have spent $150,000 on a luxury family holiday in Cancun, as well as many more thousands on “the kind of shopping that would embarrass a Kardashian”. This fully corporatised church would be unrecognisable to even the most disillusioned Haight-Ashbury refugees.

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Frisbee has been written out of not only the Jesus Revolution film, but Wimber’s six published books. A gay party animal, even in 2023, is an unappealing saint for the average believer. In Wimber’s version of the revolution, the person who transformed evangelical Christianity with his New Age power evangelism is only briefly mentioned as “the young man”.

Nevertheless, Frisbee and his Jesus People’s profound effect continues to be felt today. At a time when church attendance is in decline in the United States, those more broadly described as Charismatic attend the most. Theologian Dale M. Coulter recently wrote that the two major features of the Charismatic spiritual tradition are “narrative and journey” — hinting at the way evangelical Christianity has found new relevance since the Sixties. They modernised salvation, created personal relationships (He died for me) and turned the Lord into a mate (Jesus, minus the Christ). Waiting around to be saved by God was no longer a thing, because hippy Jesus became a consumer choice — a massive festival, where you can enter the tent for a guy who looks and sounds just like you. Today, the heirs to Frisbee, Smith and Wimber’s movement are largely doin’ the stuff through a one-click checkout; to survive the capitalist age, evangelism has commercialised.

But there are hints of a spiritual revival. The recent Asbury Revival, which attracted tens of thousands of GenZs to a mass pray-in at Kentucky university, proved that there’s a new generation who are still attracted to this Christian message. Young people are regularly attending services, from Lagos to London and New York City, and they’re joined by modern cultural icons, including Premier League players, rappers, and various Kardashian-Jenners. They hold church in commercial theatres, and attract devoted followers, among them TikTok influencers and hardcore conservatives. All are looking for something they can believe in, and a relationship with God that they can control. Most of these believers won’t even know Lonnie Frisbee’s name, but they certainly feel his legacy. And that is, quite simply, that you can be a Christian in a secular world. You can do the stuff and not have to go without. And as Jesus Revolution shows, a lot of the stuff involves telling a good story that doesn’t entirely reflect historical reality.

Psychedelic trips have played a part in mystical traditions for millennia, but their revival comes at a time when our old religions are endangered. The march of Reason and Evidence has left a gaping void; we are surrounded by a bubbling sea of Unreality. Television, billboards and newspapers first threatened the dam between dreams and waking consciousness; Twitter, Netflix and the smartphone, always there and nudging away, have blasted it asunder.

In place of structural changes, or indeed religious ones, the system defaults to plaster solutions, offering mere jolts of aliveness. The “altered states economy”, now generating as much as $4 trillion worldwide, offers a range of techniques to tap into the Real, or at least muffle the Unreal. There’s alcohol and disposable vape pens, video gaming and high-intensity sports, breathwork, meditation apps — and now, the legal psychedelic drug, perhaps the most significant launchpad to sacred states yet.

Medical authorities in Oregon are set to roll out psychedelic therapy this year, while many cities and states in the US have, to various extents, decriminalised the drugs. Meanwhile, Mexico is tapping into the market for psychedelic experiences still illegal in the US: the Guardian reported yesterday on clinics set up just over the border that offer courses of the powerful psychedelic ibogaine as treatment for trauma.

The faith we once put in transcendent states has been swiftly industrialised. A scan of the current psychedelic market reveals a strange mix of Big Pharma and young start-ups, such as ATAI, a Peter Thiel-funded firm. Its founder, Christian Angermayer, has been accused of manoeuvring to dominate the psychedelic market through zealous patenting strategies. He envisions his trials as perpetuations of mystical traditions from Ancient Greece. More than 2,000 years later, though, “profane illumination” is now under the microscope, dissected, refashioned as a tool. Only when validated in scientific, psychiatric discourse is it taken seriously. The industrial boom has happened in tandem with an enormous amount of research, much of it funded (with likely biasing effects) by profit-driven entities.

Whereas psychedelic culture used to be defined by its naive subjectivism — you have to take it to know what it’s like, man! — a kind of naive objectivism has taken its place. On a scale of one-to-five, the Mystical Experience Questionnaire asks trial participants, how would you “sense that [your psychedelic] experience cannot be described adequately in words”?

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Our grasping search for the Real is heading for more disturbing developments still. As documented by the scholars Maxim Tvorun-Dunn and Tehseen Noorani, efforts are underway to render “psychedelic medicine” continuous with growing suites of “digital therapeutics”. Some firms plan to substitute post-trip in-person therapy for an app. Other companies intend to track and harvest data from clients’ voyages, via wearable devices that “personalise” and “facilitate” the “clinical experience”.

The ketamine market in the United States offers a terrifying glimpse at this future of runaway capital. In some so-called “McKetamine” clinics, users are shuttled through a pricey yet cost-minimised production line of “profane illuminations”, with little after-support — despite serious risks of addiction, psychosis, and permanent visual disturbances. One such company, Peak, thankfully shut down its operations amid a backlash to its flagrant promotional strategy, which included online consultations lasting two minutes and promises to “cure depression forever”.

Such absurdly utopian rhetoric abounds among the proponents of psychedelics, who include many powerful people in the tech world. Certain transhumanist thinkers in Silicon Valley have called for more research into drugs that produce permanent bliss states without side effects; theirs is an “abolitionist” ideology that seeks to eliminate all conscious suffering from the universe. Meanwhile Elon Musk, who hints strongly at a taste for psychedelics like the aforementioned DMT, has expressed hopes of “extend[ing] the light of consciousness to the stars”, in tandem with technology: his Neuralink brain-machine interface is set to commence human trials in 2023.

This language goes beyond aspiration, or even idealism: it’s a simulated religion. Inconveniently, there are dangers in viewing our search for God as a technical problem — one that can be solved through human ingenuity. The current psychedelic landscape is greatly influenced by Carl Jung, whose acolyte Stanislav Grof administered LSD in more than 5,000 sessions in communist Czechoslovakia. Yet Jung was famously suspicious of what he called “the pure gifts of the Gods”, described and promoted by early “psychonauts” such as Osmond and Huxley. More than anything, Jung suggests, we ought to engage with the psyche on its own terms, as a mysterious and subterranean layer of reality that can’t necessarily be gauged in the terms of Reason that govern our everyday lives.

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Similarly, indigenous and mystical traditions have warned the West against conquistador exploration of ecstatic states for centuries. The Eastern Orthodox tradition, for instance, has a rich literature of prelest, a spiritual malaise in which the seeker of private mystical experiences becomes possessed, obsessed, deluded, or corrupted by egotism. It’s hard not to see a grain of truth in the old Christian warning against demons: a warning levied by various Iberian conquerors against peyote and ayahuasca centuries ago, and now being revived by religious communities alerted to the psychedelic trend.

Despite these warnings, there are growing communities of self-declared “psychonauts” heading deep into DMT space for hours before sharing their experiences on online messageboards. And people do often return from that space with entirely different metaphysical paradigms, with users convinced that the entities they saw were very Real. Yet in an era when the idea of evil has lost much of its cultural currency, it is curious that many report encountering entities that are exceptionally malicious — or, indeed, demonic. So wedded are we to the idea of Reason, we might laugh and pat the heads of these omens, or reduce them solely to psychic projections. But here we fall for a transhuman fallacy: that humans are in control of what’s real. No wonder: it’s easy to fall for that fallacy when you’re in an transcendent state, if it’s a state provoked by a drug humans made (and patented).

Part of the problem is the decline in “ecstatic literacy”: we just don’t know how to discuss or understand — or draw non-delusional conclusions — from “profane illumination”. While the proliferation of psychedelic products has changed the game by normalising such extraordinary experiences, we lack the language, the elders, the tradition that helps us make meaning of them.

Indeed, the ancient roots of psychedelic use, which might have guided their explosion, are in grave danger. In Peru, fully onboarded to the ayahuasca tourism trend, the influx of gringos has fuelled a rise in “pseudo-shamans” who adulterate their brews for extra kicks. Peyote and the bufo alvarius frog, whose venom contains the powerful compound 5-MeO-DMT, are now endangered, and the sustainability of ayahuasca reserves is now a “legitimate concern”. The price of ayahuasca has spiked as much as ten-fold. Where once its sale was fiercely guarded, it’s now touted in Coke bottles by impoverished rickshaw drivers who need extra cash.

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The emergence of the psychedelic industrial complex only accelerated the up-rooting that globalisation has been enabling for decades. Filament Health, a firm whose USP is to use “natural psychedelics”, made headlines recently for its creation of “ayahuasca in a pill”: an absurd peak for an industry long-trained in extracting, stripping and distilling the fruits of the natural world. Anthropologists observe that the whole “healing” paradigm predominant in ayahuasca tourism in Peru is an exotic distortion, with “shaman” itself described as a “made-up, Western category”.

“Start your own religion,” Timothy Leary told his followers in the Sixties. Many tried, although their operations would swiftly descend into power-sustained cults. There recently came allegations of a similar cultishness emerging in a corner of Silicon Valley, at the Centre for Applied Rationality and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute; one of the problems cited was frequent drug-enhanced “debugging” rituals. This is further evidence that attempts to wrench the numinous from its roots, then commodify it, are archetypally foolish — or, in the unfashionable language of religion, sacriligeous. While attempts are being made to draw psychedelics into existing traditions like Judaism and Christianity, it’s not clear how these religions can guide us through the epistemic and personal challenges of still relatively little-researched drugs that spur such swift ascents.

Little in life is really reducible to Damascene moments, but a trip at its best can unlodge something: cause us to remember something we forgot. Yet rather than set us free, the release offered by the psychedelic state — in the absence of any real programme or tradition, or “container” in the current language — seems to dissipate without leaving a meaningful trace. Even those who do experience relief from depression through psychedelics, for instance, reliably relapse after a few months.

Perhaps it is worth heeding what acclaimed psychonaut Aldous Huxley said, while lying on his deathbed in November 1963. He requested a dose of 125 micrograms of LSD to ease his passage to the afterlife, and while it’s said that his passage was uniquely peaceful, his final words are telling: “It is never enough. Never enough. Never enough of beauty. Never enough of love. Never enough of life.”