Nominally Jewish, he was by his thirties a spiritual seeker whose path
eventually led him to Gerald Heard, the English philosopher and friend of
Aldous Huxley’s. Stolaroff was so moved by Heard’s description of his
LSD experience with Al Hubbard that in March 1956 he traveled to
Vancouver for a session with the Captain in his apartment.
Sixty-six micrograms of Sandoz LSD launched Stolaroff on a journey
by turns terrifying and ecstatic. Over the course of several hours, he
witnessed the entire history of the planet from its formation through the
development of life on earth and the appearance of humankind,
culminating in the trauma of his own birth. (This seems to have been a
common trajectory of Hubbard-guided trips.) “That was a remarkable
opening for me,” he told an interviewer years later, “a tremendous
opening. I relived a very painful birth experience that had determined
almost all my personality features. But I also experienced the oneness of
mankind, and the reality of God. I knew that from then on . . . I would be
totally committed to this work.
“After that first LSD experience, I said, ‘this is the greatest discovery
man has ever made.’”
Stolaroff shared the news with a small number of his friends and
colleagues at Ampex. They began meeting every month or so to discuss
spiritual questions and the potential of LSD to help individuals—healthy
individuals—realize their full potential. Don Allen, a young Ampex
engineer, and Willis Harman, a professor of electrical engineering at
Stanford, joined the group, and Al Hubbard began coming down to Menlo
Park to guide the members on psychedelic journeys and then train them
to guide others. “As a therapist,” Stolaroff recalled, “he was one of the
best.”
Convinced of the power of LSD to help people transcend their
limitations, Stolaroff tried for a time, with Hubbard’s help, to reshape
Ampex as the world’s first “psychedelic corporation.” Hubbard conducted
a series of weekly workshops at headquarters and administered LSD to
company executives at a site in the Sierra. But the project foundered
when the company’s general manager, who was Jewish, objected to the
images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Last Supper that Hubbard
insisted on bringing into his office. Around the same time, Willis Harman
shifted the focus of his teaching at Stanford, offering a new class on “the
human potential” that ended with a unit on psychedelics. The engineers
frankie
(Frankie)
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