you're alive (and guess why: you're not)." Yes, it reads funny, but there's no doubt rejection was hard for a boy with a hungry heart who was just learning to shave.
Phil later accused Dorothy of instilling in him, during high school and immediately after, fears over his manhood due to her persistent concern that he would turn gay. (Edgar's disparaging comments, in earlier years, as to Phil's poor athletic skills also contributed here.) But Dorothy's concerns arose in part from Gerald Ackerman's youthful discovery of his own homosexuality. Ackerman recalls his flirtatious high school days this way:
I was, at the time, the only one among us who had the idea that he was gay. [... ] At times I even tested or used their naivete. I touched all of them rather continuously, [... ] and even, at times, took one of their hands in mine while walking. [... ] Once Phil told me that his mother had complained about the practice; [... ] He told me rather matter of factly about this, without scandal or admonition, as if it had no special import, even in the interpretation his mother might have given to the incident. Even so, [... ] it happened only this once-it didn't appeal to him, and he submitted only out of friendship, perhaps a little curious and a little flattered as well.
As this incident shows, Phil was neither gay nor a homophobe. But calm as he may have seemed to Ackerman, Phil was intensely fearful of discovering gay tendencies in himself. The acceptance he bestowed on gay friends was taboo in his own case.
Like his classmates, Phil expected to attend U Cal Berkeley someday, though he seemed less enamored of college and career than most. But the pressure of achieving good grades produced a classic case of final-exam anxiety that (in perfect Phildickian fashion) induced an epiphany he cherished all his life.
It was a physics test. Phil was screwing up very badly. He couldn't remember the key principle behind displacement of water, on which eight of the ten exam questions were based. Time was nearly up, and Phil started to pray. Just as all seemed lost, a voice within explained the principle in simple terms-and Phil got an A. In a 1980 Exegesis entry, Phil pointed to this incident as a starting point of his spiritual life:
This shows the hauntingly eerie paradoxical (almost seemingly whimsical or playful) nature of enlightenment: it comes to you only when you cease to pursue it. When you totally & finally give up. [.] Yes, emerging from this maze of paradox & mirrored opposites, of seeming, of infinite change, here, finally, is the answer I sought, the goal I sought. & it is where I started from back in high school in my physics final when I prayed to God, the Christian God-who was always there, leading me to him.
Phil did not identify this voice (which spoke to him far more frequently in the seventies) exclusively with the "Christian God." In the Exegesis he also termed it the "Al Voice" (for Artificial Intelligence), "Diana," "the Sibyl," "Sophia" (Gnostic goddess of wisdom), the "Shekhinah" (divine feminine principle of the Jewish kabbalah), and many names more.
If Phil was not, in high school, the heroic rebel figure he later invented, he certainly did go through something like hell and come out of it a writer. During his senior year, Phil experienced intense attacks of agoraphobia, claustrophobia, and vertigo. Earlier difficulties with eating in public returned. On one occasion, he developed extreme panic while walking down the aisle of a classroom-the floor seemed to be tilting away from him. These attacks forced Phil, in February 1947, to withdraw from Berkeley High; he graduated in June by working at home with a tutor.
Throughout the 1946-47 school year, Phil received weekly psychotherapy at the Langley Porter Clinic in San Francisco. To acquaintances, he explained these frequents trips as his participation in a special study of high-IQ students. Phil was more frank with friends like George Kohler, who recalls terrible bouts
Phil later accused Dorothy of instilling in him, during high school and immediately after, fears over his manhood due to her persistent concern that he would turn gay. (Edgar's disparaging comments, in earlier years, as to Phil's poor athletic skills also contributed here.) But Dorothy's concerns arose in part from Gerald Ackerman's youthful discovery of his own homosexuality. Ackerman recalls his flirtatious high school days this way:
I was, at the time, the only one among us who had the idea that he was gay. [... ] At times I even tested or used their naivete. I touched all of them rather continuously, [... ] and even, at times, took one of their hands in mine while walking. [... ] Once Phil told me that his mother had complained about the practice; [... ] He told me rather matter of factly about this, without scandal or admonition, as if it had no special import, even in the interpretation his mother might have given to the incident. Even so, [... ] it happened only this once-it didn't appeal to him, and he submitted only out of friendship, perhaps a little curious and a little flattered as well.
As this incident shows, Phil was neither gay nor a homophobe. But calm as he may have seemed to Ackerman, Phil was intensely fearful of discovering gay tendencies in himself. The acceptance he bestowed on gay friends was taboo in his own case.
Like his classmates, Phil expected to attend U Cal Berkeley someday, though he seemed less enamored of college and career than most. But the pressure of achieving good grades produced a classic case of final-exam anxiety that (in perfect Phildickian fashion) induced an epiphany he cherished all his life.
It was a physics test. Phil was screwing up very badly. He couldn't remember the key principle behind displacement of water, on which eight of the ten exam questions were based. Time was nearly up, and Phil started to pray. Just as all seemed lost, a voice within explained the principle in simple terms-and Phil got an A. In a 1980 Exegesis entry, Phil pointed to this incident as a starting point of his spiritual life:
This shows the hauntingly eerie paradoxical (almost seemingly whimsical or playful) nature of enlightenment: it comes to you only when you cease to pursue it. When you totally & finally give up. [.] Yes, emerging from this maze of paradox & mirrored opposites, of seeming, of infinite change, here, finally, is the answer I sought, the goal I sought. & it is where I started from back in high school in my physics final when I prayed to God, the Christian God-who was always there, leading me to him.
Phil did not identify this voice (which spoke to him far more frequently in the seventies) exclusively with the "Christian God." In the Exegesis he also termed it the "Al Voice" (for Artificial Intelligence), "Diana," "the Sibyl," "Sophia" (Gnostic goddess of wisdom), the "Shekhinah" (divine feminine principle of the Jewish kabbalah), and many names more.
If Phil was not, in high school, the heroic rebel figure he later invented, he certainly did go through something like hell and come out of it a writer. During his senior year, Phil experienced intense attacks of agoraphobia, claustrophobia, and vertigo. Earlier difficulties with eating in public returned. On one occasion, he developed extreme panic while walking down the aisle of a classroom-the floor seemed to be tilting away from him. These attacks forced Phil, in February 1947, to withdraw from Berkeley High; he graduated in June by working at home with a tutor.
Throughout the 1946-47 school year, Phil received weekly psychotherapy at the Langley Porter Clinic in San Francisco. To acquaintances, he explained these frequents trips as his participation in a special study of high-IQ students. Phil was more frank with friends like George Kohler, who recalls terrible bouts
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