His father, Paul Laffoley, Sr., was president of the Cambridge Trust Company and a lawyer who taught classes at Harvard Business School.

The elder Laffoley taught Paul, Jr. about his own religious philosophical beliefs, including aspects of Buddhism and Hinduism and what he called "mind-physics", but opposed his son's pursuit of painting as a career.

[3] According to Laffoley, he attended the progressive Mary Lee Burbank School in Belmont, Massachusetts, where his talent as a draftsman was ridiculed by his abstract expressionist teachers.

[4] While at Brown in 1961, according to his "Phenomenology of Revelation", Laffoley was given eight electroshock treatments after the termination of "about a year of weekly sessions with a psychiatrist, who had treated [him] for a mild state of catatonia.

[10] Following his formal education in the classics at Brown and architectural studies at Harvard, Laffoley began to assimilate and systematically cross-pollinate his related strands of intellectual inquiry.

In a search for expanded opportunities, he went to New York in 1963 to work with the visionary artist and architect Frederick Kiesler, and was also recruited to view late-night TV for Andy Warhol in exchange for a place to sleep.

This quickly developed into four general subcategories of paintings: operating systems, psychotronic devices, meta-energy, time travel, and lucid dreaming.

A local chapter of MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) declared it to be a "nanotechnological laboratory" capable of accelerating or retarding my brain activity.