Game Theory: Encountering the Unfamiliar (Enemy)

Attack an opponent’s weakness -- and not their strength.
Make the opponent attack your strength -- thinking it is your weakness.
Allow the opponent’s weakness, to nullify and overcome their own strength.

To determine an opponent’s strengths and weaknesses, do not try to change them -- but allow them full play to express themselves and display their extent and capacity.

If an opponent is cruel and ruthless, do not give them lectures on compassion and humility and expect honor from them -- but allow that observation to justify the extraordinary and decisive measures one must take in defeating that opponent.

Right action springs automatically from right understanding, and right perception. Right perception is clearest when the mind is empty of pre-existent thoughts -- and only the senses provide input and information for the right action in that moment. “Winning” and “losing” is a preoccupied mind -- incapable of perceiving fully and clearly -- a mind already lost in its own thoughts and ambitions. There should only be perceiving -- without the self. That is being one with the universe.

The strongest position is having “nothing to lose.” The weakest position is thinking one “can lose everything.” He who loses his self, gains this vital life force.

The more skillful the action, the less is needed. One should train to be skillful -- and not tireless in effort.

In a world in which there is universal participation, there is the possibility that there is one there, who may be the greatest master of that art. Do not reflexively presume that one is of superior ability and understanding. Look for one that might know more than all the others put together. That is the nature of superior understanding -- it subsumes all the others. Vain people, thinking they are the limits of understanding, assume a different understanding to be less -- and not that it is vastly more and beyond their comprehension. They will insist that the greater, must be contained and fit into the lesser -- their limited understanding.

That which is taught -- is only the limits of the teacher’s understanding -- and not the ultimate limits of understanding. The teachers who do not recognize this difference, have little understanding. All they know, is what somebody else taught them; they have never taught themselves anything -- and therefore, are not the masters of what they know. They are only people pretending to know.

The smartest person in the room, doesn’t feel the need to prove it; the stupidest person in the room, thinks that is why everybody is there.