professional life included a stay at the Rockefeller Institute as a visiting investigator. At various times, his research was centered on cancer, mental illness, or drugs that affect behavior. During a ten-year period working for the Lederle Laboratories near Pearl River, New York, de Ropp wrote a book for the general reader in the field of psychoactive substances (many of which are plant-derived): Drugs and the Mind. Avocational interests de Ropp's intense avocational interests, stemming largely from a spontaneous childhood spirituality, were nurtured by the influence of P. D. Ouspensky, whom he met in 1936. "The work" (as the Ouspensky disciplines were termed) was an approach to establishing an integrated human awareness at a higher level — considered to be a true inner freedom. de Ropp went regularly to Lyne Place for "work" weekends from 1936 to 1945 and was particularly attached to Madame Ouspensky as a deeply insightful guide, until 1940. In that year the Oupenskys emigrated from Britain to the United States; after living through war conditions in Britain, de Ropp joined the Ouspenskys there on a New Jersey farm in 1945, the European hostilities being past. However, de Ropp felt the Ouspenskys' milieu had by this point become stagnant and ineffective, and he became disillusioned about the work. "Ouspensky was no longer a teacher," de Ropp opined in his autobiography. After arriving in the U.S., Robert de Ropp, by his own efforts, built two houses, one in Connecticut, another in New York state; he and his second wife, Betty, lived in Rockland County, NY. de Ropp met G. I. Gurdjieff (the Ouspenskys' famous teacher) during Gurdjieff's final visit to New York, in 1948. Years in Sonoma County After working for the Lederle Laboratories for 10 years, de Ropp's attachment to the northeast U.S. waned, and he felt a pull to the West Coast. In 1961 he purchased a small house on several acres, in Glen Ellen (slightly east of Santa Rosa, California), where the climate was mild and soil could be worked to high fertility. In time he became an independent writer and teacher — much concerned about humanity's growing environmental and spiritual crises — and set up a learning community on his land around 1967 The idea behind it was experiential learning at the levels of body, mind, and spirit. de Ropp's family included the two children from his first marriage, and the children he had