# 17

The Trials

So when the trials and tests are presented, we have but one choice if we are to move beyond mere survival. We must reach into the shadows and pull out the monsters, bring them into the light. We can hope that they will change, transform, but we must never again falter in our vigilance. We must always hold them to account. And we must always test them against principle.

Whether the monsters are ours, or that of our conquerors, we must level them against principle. We must measure and bind them with principle. For principles are not relative. They can be agreed upon, and so guide us beyond into the new that we desire. Principles must be the sentinels that guard the path to the future if we are to overcome that which has bound us in the past, and that which binds us today. A new world is not possible without it.

The breaking of cycles,

The birth of the new,

The emerging Proteus rises up out of the sea only when it can overcome the thick binding sameness of it – its constancy, its viscosity – and elevate above it. Birth is never easy, it requires rupture, and pain, the anxiety and anticipation of it churning and wrenching in the belly.

We must enter into the shadows with principle as our talisman, our guard against the monsters that lurk within the depths. We must root them out, like demons, and force them into a great purging, so that we may clean them out of our souls, and that of our conquerors. We must not relent, we must not give in. We must go into it with courage. We must never surrender.

We can retreat, we can change tack. We can adapt with the flow of events. But we must never back down from monsters, lest they rule over us forever and render us slaves to their will.

New worlds are born out of the violent death of the old. It must be severed from it, yet it must suckle it. Herein the contradiction that is central to it, that the new emerges in intimate embrace with the past.

It rises up from the sea, breaking with it, but always in and of it. And so, we must never cease to take our hunt into the darknesses and the recesses that monsters make their beds in; where they fester and work their wicked magic. We must rudely awaken them from their slumbers. We must shake them out of their comforts and draw them out from the shadows. For only in the cold light of day can they be slain, laid to rest, rendered bare and naked before us.

Our monsters, and theirs, must all be brought out into the open, so that we can make sense of them, before dismantling them. Yes, we must yet still sever their heads, and hold them up in victory. We must still sound our battle cries out loud. But we must return from the sacrificial altar without our monsters; and we must not acquire new ones in the process of freeing ourselves from the old. We must break free of them at every turn; remain vigilant to the shape-shifters amongst them. Oh what perseverance freedom requires; what a marathon freedom is ...

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