Ellipsis "making sense of challenging life events"

Manifesto Poem 3 (context and code to poem), first published on Medium.com

A treatment of external events as phantom?—?meta persons sent our way to challenge us, build our resilience and accelerate our growth. I’ve taken the skepticism posited by the 3rd century BCE writer of Ecclesiastes (Kohlet) and spun it into a positivist anthem.

New words I’ve created for this piece include:

Phightos??—?the idea of positive plight and negative plight

Intensic??—?the concept of life happening with sickening speed

Metagenous??—?the senses that while the endogenous (inside) and exogenous (outside) are established, the set of events, encounters and affairs with mysterious outcomes need a third category. This completes my journey into the old ancient texts and my attempt to distill modernist.

The other two manifesto poems are?—?all first published on Medium.com are: Entity (the concept of the self as dual?—?you and the other) and Selfhood (the concept of the self as distinct and gifted).

By Philip Dickenson Peters

An ancient impulse lives within our psyches,

And reminds us that “the interior is a higher organizing force

than the exterior.”

Correspondingly, we hail and acknowledge the wisdom in Morrison’s

Paradise that, “there are more scary things inside that outside.”

Make your myth?—?rule!

Indeed, there is a time for everything under our earthly sun

says the preacher of the Kohleth sounding exhausted with resignation.

So we assert, this is your time?—?our time?—?to strut as Poseidon

And conquer the waves of unpredictable evens assaulting our lives.

Thus, we will become “now” masters,

Remembering events are magnificent meta-persons

Hand-crafted, engraved, double–faced machinations

Delivered to us to test the purported metal embedded within us.

Each phase of our lives?—?each challenge?—?becomes a new and dynamic

Layer of being?—?an accumulating archive for reference not judgment.

This chant for primacy is primordial, anthropological and real.

Let us, together quiet the heart, and hear it afresh,

Remembering sacred process trumps results.

Despite the beauty and agony of our private and personal stories,

Like the consistency of DNA, the cycles of our lives,

And that of human civilization, deliver themes, rhythms and experiences

That seem paradoxical?—?linear, circular and elliptical. See them?—?learn them.

Birth, discovery, growth, maturity, illness, successes,

Failures, breakthroughs, disappointments, children, ceremonies,

Wars, economic life, wealth accumulation, sovereign formation,

Failed states, new discoveries, setbacks and death.

And yes rebirth, samsaric repetitions ever present,

A portfolio of testing and events all canonized into august words

Such as polytheism, monotheism, philosophy, science, being,

Civilization, culture, race, heroes, deities, and demi-gods.

And perhaps a new externality in the making?—?super-gods,

Which descend from our lofty psychic worlds as antidote to the intensic.

Indeed, a new overlord to correct anthropogenic mega shocks, is born.

The cycle of life repeats itself over and over again and continues,

Market failures, super storms, pandemics, unjust wars,

Shanty of shanties, megahoods, supersqualor, good and bad,

Ultimately stratifying itself into the noble

Yet, behemoth, binary expression called?—?Homo Sapiens.

Kate Wong and Nuval Noah Harari have much to say on Sapiens.

Then the ancient prophet rises up in the morning,

And perhaps, through us, rhetorically asks,

“who can know the heart of man?”

“who can know the heart of woman?”

“who can know the hear of a child?”

Who can know?

And in the knowing, can we transmute self

Into a new earthly apotheosis?

Another, plagued with the futility of unsatisfactory resolution,

Over genius plans, throws her hands into thick air,

In ecclesiastical desperation and pronounces:

“Good is not rewarded, wisdom is unattainable,

And our labor achieves nothing noteworthy,

With modernity seemingly still delivering stillborn babies!” she cries.

Both hands coupling her dejected face, she sits in frustration,

Facing the ground, ‘till a sister?—?not an invisible god?—?knees besides her,

In consolation, and the miracle of human presence sees her rising with renewal.

Proverbial wisdom, culled from the anti-chambers

Of ancestors memory-grave and phantom mentors sometimes seem futile,

As we battle the unpropitious hand we’re sometimes dealt.

We’re tempted to become skeptics, with our received wisdom,

Shrinking under deep-depth aquatic tonnage that is modern life,

Thus, momentarily stratifying a cynic’s persona about our

Own life’s future possibilities as they see it with jaundiced eyes.

Rather than standing erect, our souls sometimes buckle

And sit ensconced, temporarily spineless for the moment,

And resigned to accept the fleeting dictates of external faiths.

Lucky for the species, these are moments, a transient architecture,

A temporary episode, on our journey into ourselves,

And beyond ourselves, for the common good,

As we march on toward our day of transcendence,

With muscled feet, sculpted with aesthetic capture.

We then shake ourselves in post-Red Bull affirmation,

Going deep, we summon the energy needed from a quiet internal reservoir.

Rising, we punch these psychic anti-forces within and without,

Around and before us, and temporarily win the day. Mira sleeps.

We assert our hegemony over the dark perceived faces of bold adversaries.

This internal voice, propitiating moral and ethical favor,

Promising mutation of hostilities into beneficent possibilities for us,

Claims goodness on our behalf, and mystically works to our end,

And alas we’re hurled into the light and become pure light,

Burning the poisoned darts of negating events into dust.

Finally Marx’s summation that the assault of nature is real,

Gets a humanist nod, while the gods plan miracles

As litigants over old-world arguments made afresh, that they’re asleep

As humankind is assailed with plight upon plight.

Though not a noonday sun, a spark arises and saves us,

Hinting a theoretical possibility that the day will cycle brighter.

A trailing suggestion of light, evidencing a meek amber intensity

Awakens the slumber within us, and is food enough

To slap the sluggish soul into attention and purposed action.

Sapiens need holy slaps as catalysts, to help us remember

Our ancient sovereignty, buried deep within our psychic cell walls.

Not intemperate post Mount Sinai outbursts, in the third sacred month

Of dust and cold, we must ascend again on eagle’s wings

And snatch our sealed agreements from the Irik’s bill?—?once sacrosanct.

We will lift ourselves up from surrendered knees?—?now,

Unfold from our Buddha-like posture, with no thought,

Open our lungs and capture destiny’s wind.

Awakened, we will now, think as a king, rule as a queen,

Over our purposes. Words akin to vanity, purposeless and meaningless

Dissolve into dust under the heat of our intension.

Hegel and Kant will be reincarnated, to learn anew,

With tears in their eyes, they finally embrace luminescence.

We will give rise to a new epistemology, a new hermeneutics of soul

Shall arise, and stay hostage within us, as transcendent allies.

Now we finally know, all our labor under the sun

Is not in vain, and now we know, our sweat, our thoughts,

Our expectations, and our work, stratify civilization

Thus, progressively leaving a mark, that we walked this planet.

External events?—?a lesser force than the energy of personal will is hegemony,

Thus you and the god of the day shall live and be renewed.

The work we do will be etched in hearts, minds, souls, and spirits,

And the cultural memory, of those who stride across our path,

Walking, growing, they trek our soul-trail, without us fully knowing

The true measure of our power?—?but we do our work.

We must persist, untethered from the demands of uncertainty, we thrive.

From generation to generation, our life’s contribution will be remembered.

Yes, through the ebb and flow, high tide and low tide.

Like Rembrandt, our etchings’ value will soar, and occupy

the hearts of those who saw us and got us,

amidst the sea of distracted observers and islands of

disembodied events honed by the universe that test us daily.

Events, as a meta-person look at us, but not quite seeking us,

she looks through us. She sits with us, and smile as if knowing our true hearts,

During a believable dream, but it is truly distant.

Yet by testing us, project her obsequious pain portfolio on us.

She seemingly walk with us?—?but really craft pleasure for herself.

Walking?—?hand in hand –with invisible intimacy,

She hugs our waist, embrace our shoulders, and kiss us tenderly

On our chafed cheeks, with all enticingly looking seductively well.

But when she leaves us, or we see her for what she is, we sometimes despair,

Unable to manage the quiet sanctuary of non-events, that leave us

Yearning for the manic connectivity of the quantified self.

But then we remember, these are just thoughts,

Our macabre suspicious framing, of constructed dystopias

Surfacing from our subconscious ocean of suspicion.

Day in, day out, we search for a new practiced resilience.

A new consciousness soon returns as protector, and we

Dismiss these dark fleeting vanity shadows.

We will now love the meta world, and its unpredictabilities.

We will see the true heart of circumstance, and in so doing,

Embrace the wider disruptive world as friend.

Anew, we reframe anticipatory possibilities as furtive fields for good,

Lurking within the chambers of our sacred cell walls.

The phantom of outside and inside gets psychologized as one.

We will walk as ancient gods, unafraid of tears and just wars

We will know and see that the world of human events and circumstances

With fresh eyes, and we will protect the vast diversity

Of sentient being, adjacent and afar, as though we know them intimately,

As all-weather friends, despite not yet meeting them eye to eye.

Our world of the possible surpasses the world of the uncertain,

So look out world?—?we will thrive and flourish!

Whether the sun rises in the East, or sinks in the West,

Whether the wind blows in the North, or blows in the South,

Or spins continually in predictable, or unpredictable circuits

We will be here to make our stand against the anti-serendipitous.

We step out into the day, and watch little raindrops

Become vast bodies of waters, flowing from rivers to sea.

We observe the tide rising, the sea expanding, always able,

To ceaseless receive new flows, thus teaching us to also flow,

With the tide of change, making vicissitudes a trusted comrade.

We see life’s lessons in them, and by expanding, releasing, and adjusting

Our spirits, we stay flexible, undeterred, unflustered and unspoilt.

We stay full, resilient and ready, against the onslaught of force majeure,

Outguiling the wiles of Anancy, dark gods, Pan and the guiles of jocular deities.

The simple and predictable norms of nature thrill us, and like,

Akisha’s one-centered meditation, we recycle the negative effects of events

And spin them as the alchemist into good energy.

So we become one with nature, and one with the perceived world of events.

We become a new prototype, a remodeled revolutionary, a reversing

Photo-mechanism?—?analog to digital?—?as souls on fire, we sing and rejoice

With choired voices, libations offered with Kama Sutra ecstasy,

As we face, the assault of the external subtlety of goings on.

We truly see the dark mysteries and falsettos of life,

And draw strength from our observations to march on, undeterred.

We revere the simple, and mutate the complex, into manageable outcomes,

By the mere force of our gentle internal fire-grace, that possesses our being.

As buddachatta giants and Mahatma royalty, we are one with our experiences.

As medicine men and women from the continent of human origins,

We make our psychic stand against disfavored assaults on our worlds.

Every encounter intervenes as paid propitiated agents, in making things better, For good in the end.

We are here, ushered into existence, to make the past better, and we shall! We are here, to make the present whole, and we are doing so,

Moment by moment, second by second, hour-by-hour, day by day.

With our work, we insulate positive futures, against naysayers, so we must do it.

We stand in protestation, as the antithetical superforce

Against the unforeseen, the unanticipated, and the unyielding cynicism

Of the ancient Kohlet prophet who says:

“…That which has been, is that which shall be,

And that which hath been done, is that

which shall be done: and there is no new thing

under the sun.”

No?—?not true.

His episodic limitations have not mutated, neither has it transmigrated

Into our marrow. Health prevails, thus we fight on, seeing with Jaguar’s eyes.

We harness our primal, ancient and ancestral energies as swords,

Spears and daggers, against meta-events presenting themselves

As worthy adversaries?—?imagined and real that seek to define us.

With mind as shield, we meditate, contemplate, and shoo them away,

Into near non-existence. With robust, jostling and pioneering breath-work,

We become meta masters of circumstances, we face them and win.

We shape the future, and create the world we envision and want.

We shall not bow to the circumstantial demands, of forces,

Entities and events perceived as real, whether endogenous, exogenous or metagenous.

We remember another ancient demigod of antiquity who asserts:

“We wrestle, not against flesh and blood, but,

against spiritual wickedness in high places,”

While other eastern masters foretell of the power

Of managing the mundane gift of the “breath”

To neutralize harsh unpropitious adversaries.

So we harvest the wisdom of the ancients, across all fields, lands and time,

And meld them into mutated tungsten?—?a meta resilience for our modernity.

And by doing so, we flatten external assaults, on their backs, as spent beings.

By simply lifting our pinky finger in authority, we nullify the need for raised hands, and pumping fists for now. That time will soon come.

We are the masters at shaping events, thus our fundamental life thesis persists. We remember our life’s maxim, that?—?“the interior is a higher organizing force than the exterior.” We stand as victors?—?thus we resonate in this moment, and the magic of the day is a focus on moments. All life exists in moments?—?thus the ordinary become sacred over and over again.

This is our new golden rule of defense and offence.

We repeat within ourselves, until it becomes our natural state, that,

“The interior is a higher organizing force that the exterior.”

We assert, knowing does not mean, full transformation and transcendence.

We have though, a renewal point, from which to journey

More confidently into the chasm, of life’s abyss, and arise,

Holding life’s sunlight with coupled hands, as the light transforms us, and others photosynthesizing assaults into a perfect good thing for our fortification.

The darkness acts as accelerant and ripens our life as fruit,

Forever mutating our days from battlefields into orchards.

Events, at first asymmetric, now mutates to the symmetric

With wisdom’s eyes, under the tutelage of our light.

As the mighty Kubrick reminds us:

“however vast the darkness, we must supply our own light,”

A mind, a soul, a heart, a spirit, a being?—?that is gifted you,

Courageously transcending it all, with the ancient smile

Of the enlightened one and with the translucent glow, of a cosmic lover

Grander things are at work within us?—?sense that subliminal greatness arising.

No need to borrow the consciousness of others?—?you have yours deep within you.

We rise alas, with certainty knowing?—?you are?—?we are the right hand

Of the Universe. Now we lift that hand leadership?—?with fists pumped!

Rise as the Phoenix?—?soar as Thor?—?with subtleness and strength.

Your time has come?—?no more shadows!