readoldthings

Sun Tzu tells us to  


This harkens back to Sun Tzu's words way back in Chapter 1:


It's occurred to me lately that I talk a lot about self-knowledge. And that's appropriate, given that my main focus in these reflections is on what I've been calling the battle within or the conquest of the soul. But even when we are working solely to change ourselves from within, we often encounter resistance from without. Sometimes this is direct and obvious, as in the case of friends or family who don't wish us to change. Other times, it occurs without any apparent cause. A woman of my acquaintance recently informed me of her desire to lose weight. The very next day, a coworker came to her office and offered her McDonald's for lunch. The coworker had never done that before. This, of course, is why I always say that we shouldn't talk about our plans. Regardless, it's very often the case that as soon as we announce an intention, even to ourselves, some form of resistance appears. 

We should undertake all of our goals with the awareness that we're going to encounter resistance. Resistance isn't a bad thing-- it's by the resistance of heavy weights that we strengthen our muscles; it's by the resistance of beams and pillars that buildings are erected. Let's be aware of it and be prepared to use it to accomplish our goals. 

But whenever we encounter deliberate resistance, in the form of another person blocking us from our goals or attempting to turn us toward some other goal of their own-- whether this person is acting intentionally or not-- we need, to the extent that we can, to understand what the person wants. It's only by doing that that we can "know our enemy," which, along with knowing ourselves-- that is, defining our own goals-- allows us to achieve victory. 

Since I missed yesterday, let's have a Saturday Post.

Sun Tzu says:





An army that followed Sun Tzu's injunctions here would have the following qualities.

It would move quickly, covering great distances. But it would move together as a unit, not strung out across many, many miles, so that if an enemy appeared, it would be able to turn and fight. It would appear suddenly in the enemy's territory, raiding supplies and plundering farms and cities. Its intentions would be unknown and unknowable to its enemy. When it did act, it would act very suddenly, with great preparation leading to overwhelming and immediate success: Its coming would be like lightning from the heavens.

Let's leave aside warfare now, and consider what such a person would be like. If I were such a person, I would have the following qualities:

I would be able to make decisions and act upon them very quickly when I needed to, not hemming and hawing. In order to do this, of course, I would need knowledge of my own purposes and intentions. 

I would not be taken off-guard by sudden eventualities like a global pandemic, my place of employment closing, or a sudden shortage of toilet paper. Instead, I would respond quickly in such a way that turned the situation to my advantage. This would require self-knowledge, plus a great deal of self-possession, and a level of preparation and adaptability. 

When I saw something that would help me in attaining my goals, I would reach out and take it. This would require self-knowledge, plus vigilance in pursuit of opportunities.

When I created something that I wanted in my life-- a good habit, a relationship, a career-path-- I would let nothing move me from it. This would require self-knowledge, plus knowledge of those quirks of human psychology that fool us into seeing a temporary mood of resistance, temptation, or lack of motivation as a permanent condition. 

I would not spend my time talking and bragging about what I wanted to do. Instead, I would keep my plans to myself, and let their achievement be their announcement. 

I was going to say "I'll let you know when I get there." But that just shows you that I'm not there yet. Instead, let me say that when I get there... you'll know.

Sun Tzu next tells us that

In the Great Work of the conquest of our own souls, we need to be familiar with the face of the country we intend to conquer. While we are all unique individuals, different in our own ways, we are all human beings having a human experience. To gain mastery over a human soul, we will be greatly aided if we start with a map.

It happens that maps of the soul are quite common. The world of the mind is much wider and more various than the physical world, and so many, many different types of maps exist. All describe the same territory, but they do so in different ways. In just the same way, a map of a physical country might be a road map, a topographical map, or a detailed ecological map. Each is useful in its own way, but it's very important to understand what type of map you are using. A topographical map won't help you find an intersection, nor will a road map help you avoid a hill.

Here are several maps of the human psyche.




The Tree of Life was originally developed by the Gnostics, and was later appropriated by Jewish Cabalists. Christian occultists picked it up from the Jews during the Renaissance, and it has seen further development since then. The Tree of Life is a map of reality, conceived as ten spheres, which are centers of constructive power, united by 22 paths. There is also a hidden semi-sphere (that's the one without a number on this version of the Tree), two barriers, called the Abyss and the Veil, and an unmanifested background from which the first sphere emanates. In order from ten back to one, the spheres represent the individual's capacity for 10 embodiment, 9 relation, 8 perception, 7 emotion, 6 thought, 5 intention, 4 intuition, 3 intellection, 2 will, and 1 existence.

The exploration and integration of the spheres of the Tree of Life is often the central initiatiatory work in schools of ceremonial magic.

It isn't the only possible map. Here is a very different one from the Chinese Taoist tradition:




This view sees the soul divided into five parts, which also correspond to the Chinese five elements and to the five major organs. A major aim of traditional Chinese spiritual practice is the integration of the five souls, each of which has their own necessary function.

The five soul model is quite effective on its own terms, but it is not the same as the Tree of Life, and trying to use them at the same time doesn't work. It's like trying to use a road map and a topographical map at the same time; you get confused and you don't get anywhere.

Or, to say it a different way, every spiritual path involves three components, which can be called View, Method, and Fruition.

View is the path's understanding of the spiritual world and the human soul.

Method is the path's specific set of practices and disciplines.

Fruition is the results that one can expect from doing the practices and discipline's and keeping to the particular view. The stuff you've heard about "different paths to the same mountaintop" is simply not true; different spiritual paths lead to different mountaintops-- that is to say, they have different results.

That's not to say that they can't be blended and can't inform one another. In fact, different traditions blend and move into and through each other all the time. The Tree of Life is a perfect example. Its origin is probably in the Tetractys, an ancient diagram used by the Neoplatonists:




Take those ten dots and rearrange them, and you have the Tree of Life.

Take the Tree of Life-- or, more likely, some precursor to it-- and rearrange it with Chinese symbology in mind, and you come up with this:



That's the Taijitu. It's functionally identical to the Tree of Life, and it appears in Taoist sources a century before the earliest versions of the Tree appear in Jewish sources.

So some blending of maps is possible-- in the same way that, if you are exploring a city like Pittsburgh or San Francisco for the very first time, a road map combined with a topographical map could actually be extremely useful. The point is not to try to blend two maps until you fully understand them and know what you're doing with them. To give a personal example, the Tree of Life is traditionally blended with astrology, so that the spheres correspond to the planets. I've had this in my mind for a number of years, but I've only just realized that it's prevented me from fully understanding the Tree on its own terms. The key issue was the Eighth sphere, called Hod in the Jewish version of the Tree. Its astrological correspondence is Mercury, but it is not Mercury, and if you try to understand Hod simply as Mercury you miss something important. 

Probably the simplest Soul Map of all is the one given by Plato in the Republic. The soul is like a city, Plato tells us, with three classes of people. There are the rulers, the warriors, and the workers. The rulers correspond to our reason; the warriors to our strength of will; and the workers to our desires. If we subordinate our will to our desires, our reason is overwhelmed. If, on the other hand, we make our will the servant of our reason, we can master our desires and our destiny. 

The point of all of this, though, is that we need to pick a map to work with. And, to shift the metaphor a little bit, from warfare to travel, we need to have a destination in mind. A topographical map won't help you find Fifth Avenue, nor will a road map lead you to a mountaintop. 

One day I will write out a detailed Map of my own, which will probably treat the soul as an old growth forest, with trees and meadows and animals and rivers and soil. Ultimately, I think, that is all of our purpose. While all of us are human and must start with a map of the human soul, all of us are individuals, and must conclude by making a map of our own soul. 

A blessed Alban Eilir to one and all. 

Today, some heavy lifting from Sun Tzu. Or at least, it was heavy lifting for me:



Sun Tzu is concerned here with forced marches; he adds a few other verses about how many of our men we will lose if we force-march 50 li or 30 li. (One li is about a third of a mile.)

What are we to make of this in terms of our own work, the overcoming of our inner enemies and the conquest of our own souls?

Maybe I'm slow, but it took me a few days to figure out what to do with this one. Then the following occurred to me.

Anyone who has done any type of spiritual teaching-- or teaching in anything that requires daily discipline, I imagine-- knows that there are two types of problem students. The first type, by far the more common, is the student who will do no training at all outside of class. If you have class three days a week, this sort of student can still make progress; if one day a week, they may progress, but very slowly; if you have class once a month, they will get nowhere and will drag everybody else down with them. 

And then there's the second type of problem student. This type doesn't do too little work-- they do too much. Way too much. In some fields, the only danger is that this person will neglect the rest of their life. Someone who spends 14 hours practicing the guitar won't hurt themselves very badly, but their diet, health, hygiene, friends, and family are will suffer. Someone who spends as many hours training in martial arts is risking serious injury. And someone who spends that many hours doing spiritual practices-- especially practices which involve the movement of internal energies-- is risking their sanity and even their life.

I know this from experience; I am Problem Student Type 2. 

Some years ago, I got involved in a group dedicated to qigong and Taoist internal alchemy. We would meet every day at 5am at a local park-- a very bad choice of location, as the park also served as an open-air motel for the city's heroin addicts-- and spend an hour practicing meditation, an hour doing qigong, and an hour doing tai chi. This was already too much-- serious Taoist teachers will tell you that 1.5 hours of practice per day is the maximum that anyone not on retreat or living in a monastery should be doing. But I took it even further, because that's my nature. I had a 9 to 5 job then, with the standard 2 fifteen minute breaks and an hour lunch, and I would spend all that time doing more qigong and internal alchemy (neidan 內丹) practices, and then still more after work.

Now, this sort of routine can work-- if you're on retreat, or living as a monk, in a temple, with the special diets and spiritual protections appropriate to the tradition. If you're living an ordinary life in a city, it does not work. An army can make a forced march; an undisciplined multitude cannot. I kept up my routine for several months, and then things started to get really weird. I began to experience "sleep paralysis"-style spirits attack once a week like clockwork, every Wednesday or Thursday. The attacks spread to my girlfriend, every time she would sleep next to me. I became afraid to go to sleep at all, because I kept having nightmares that I was being attacked by ghosts, and I would always wake up in excruciating pain. 

It went on like this for months. My qigong teacher was no help at all; he blamed my Celtic magical practices, insisting that the Druid gods are actually demons. I developed an explosive temper and started lashing out at everything. Then in the middle of all of this, my qigong teacher's own instructor in Chinese medicine, a prominent local acupuncturist known to all of us, was murdered in a grizzly fashion which I won't relate here. Was it a coincidence? Was it related? I didn't know then and I don't know now, but I knew that I was more than a little freaked out. It was around that point that I decided to stop all Taoist energetic practices, and focus only on Western magical work, done in the usual fashion-- about 30 minutes of practice a day. 

And things calmed down. 

Learn a lesson from my mistakes, and don't make them yourself. The battle for our souls is the most important work that we can do in our lives-- that's why Levi called it the Great Work. But we cannot do more than we're ready to do, and spiritual development in particular cannot, must not be forced. 

Sun Tzu continues: 


It's tempting to repeat the points I've been making over the last couple of months at this point. Know your enemy and know yourself, attack where the enemy is weak, the most important battle is within, and so on. Today, though, I'm going to assume that if you've been following along, you already know all that. 

How do we turn the devious into the direct, and how do we turn misfortune into gain?

Here are two very different examples which, I believe, together illustrate the point. 

***

In June of 2014, 1500 members of the Islamic State organization attacked the city of Mosul, in Northern Iraq. Mosul was defended by 30,000 Iraqi soldiers and another 30,000 police. Despite being vastly outnumbered, the Islamic State forces took the city within 4 days. 

A question was raised here recently: Do I always favor an indirect approach to situations? No, not at all. I followed the news of the Islamic State's offensive closely at the time, and their extraordinary success has always stuck with me. We've discussed Pickett's Charge during the Battle of Gettysburg and the fictional battle of Minas Tirith in The Lord of the Rings as examples of frontal assaults not working. Well, the Battle of Mosul is an example of how a frontal assault on a vastly superior force can work very well indeed. 

In order to understand its relevance, we need to remember two things:

First, while Sun Tzu has repeatedly enjoined us to attack the enemy's weak points, he has also counseled us, "When strong, feign weakness; when weak, feign strength." 

Second, there are different types of strength. Physically, the Iraqi Army was much stronger than the Islamic State; but the latter was clearly possessed of strength of will, and spiritual strength. Regarding the latter, "spiritual" doesn't always mean "good." It just means "nonphysical." Whatever desert demon the IS forces were worshipping under the name of "Allah" clearly gave them the strength to overcome their enemies. (You can tell it was a demon by the way it received human sacrifices and abandoned its worshipers to American and Russian bombs and special forces.)

In addition to "If weak, feign strength," then, we should add, "If physically weak, seek spiritual strength."

***

The second example is personal. 

Now, the trouble with using personal examples is that, unless it's an example of failure, it can sound like bragging. So I want to be clear that that's not what I intend here; I've made more mistakes than I can count in my life. But the following is not one of them.

It's now one year since the Covid lockdowns began. Like a lot of people, I lost my job, and my wife did too. We both worked in a field that requires direct contact with other human beings and that was deemed "non-essential" by those whose job it is to determine these things. 

At the time we lived in a very expensive city in California. Neither of us is from there and we never really adapted; we wanted to move back to the East Coast. 

So we decided to take advantage of the situation. In April-- or was it May? Can you remember that long ago time?-- of 2020, we received our government stimulus checks. Between both of us we could have covered a single month's rent in California. Instead, we decided to give our landlord 30 days notice and use the money to rent an RV. We packed our kids and cats into the RV and spent 2 weeks driving across the country. Now we live on the East Coast, as we intended. We pay significantly less rent for much more space; we're closer to our families; and we're able to experience all 4 seasons, instead of just one unending summer. Life is much better, according to our standards-- but it couldn't have happened if not for the disaster of the Covid lockdown. 

Every misfortune can be turned into a gain, if we have the will to look for the opportunity and the courage to pursue it. This includes the ultimate misfortunes, our own deaths and the deaths of those we love. It's not that, as people will sometimes (and rather obnoxiously) say, "Something good comes from everything." It's that, if we are willing, we can find the good in anything. As my favorite passage from Epictetus has it, even at the very last, we can choose not to die screaming, or full of fear, or cursing God. Even the worst catastrophes can be sources of inner strength, if we're willing to accept it as such. 

Today, a very important couple of verses from Sun Tzu:


In actual conflict, the commonest thing in the world is for armies to "fight the last war." This is why the United States military is equipped to kick the crap out of Nazi Germany, but has spent 20 years failing to defeat a tiny force of Aghan tribesmen.

More generally, there is a concept in the social sciences called path dependence. The entry at brittanica.com is good enough for our purposes:

One of the better known examples of path dependence is the QWERTY keyboard. I've heard different versions of the reason for the QWERTY keyboard layout. One has it that jamming was a problem with the first typewriters, and so the QWERTY layout was developed in order to deliberately slow down typists. Another has it that QWERTY was chosen because a traveling salesman can spell the word "TYPEWRITER" using just the type row of keys. In any case, QWERTY is not the most efficient keyboard layout, but it persists because we're used to it. 

Many things are like this.

What Sun Tzu is telling us is to avoid path dependency by not getting locked into a particular way of doing things. Instead, he gives us a general principle: avoid what is strong and attack what is weak. That principle can then be applied to multiple situations. 

In the Great Work of the conquest of our own souls as in warfare, we will succeed if we hold fast to principles but remain as flexible as possible in regard to situations. 

To which principles do we hold fast, though? That's up to each of us to discover for ourselves.

 Though the Enemy be stronger in numbers, we may prevent him from fighting. Scheme so as to discover his plans and the likelihood of their success. Rouse him, and learn the principle of his activity or inactivity. Force him to reveal himself, so as to find out his vulnerable spots. /

Carefully compare the opposing army with your own, so that you may know where strength is superabundant and where it is deficient. 

Today, Sun Tzu's talking about something we've heard quite a bit of-- the need for knowledge. We need to know our enemy, and we need to compare his strength with our own. As always, our primary battle is with the Enemy Within, that is, the sum total of our own passions, bad habits, thought-chains and addictions that keep us from accomplishing our goals. This is the Enemy that we need to know, and his the strengths to understand. 

So far, so familiar; we've said the same thing many times since beginning this series. Today I'd like to talk a bit about how I use these ideas to understand and overcome some of my own internal enemies.

Careful examination of my life reveals the following:

I really like being out of power. 

That doesn't sound very good, does it? 

It's true, though. Something about my mind is very comfortable when it's part of a small and despised minority, struggling against an overwhelming power. When I was a child, my favorite movie was Star Wars (the original one; I was born in 1983) and my favorite book was Lord of the Rings. In Star Wars, of course, a tiny band of rebels struggles against the all-powerful Galactic Empire; in The Lord of the Rings, a tiny band of heroes struggles against the might of the Dark Lord Sauron. Did my fascination with these stories cause my mental disposition, or is it a mere reflection of it? Who knows. Either way, the result is the same. My favorite place to be is in the heroic band of rebels struggling against the empire, and if I should happen to find myself on the imperial side, I will move Heaven and Earth to get back to the rebellion.

I've watched myself repeat this pattern over and over again. I grew up in a rural, very conservative area that is basically run by the Catholic Church. And so by the time I was 18, I was a radical leftist and a pagan. Eventually I moved to California, where everyone I knew was a Democrat and a Buddhist or New Ager or "spiritual but not religious" essential oil yogini. At that point, right on schedule, my political views began to shift hard toward Conservatism, and Catholicism became far more appealing.

These days I live in a more or less red area, but it's easy to maintain my conservative views because of the deranged Woke Left hegemony currently running the country. Once the backlash against Wokesterism propels a new generation of Far Right leaders to power in politics, academia and entertainment-- I expect this to happen by 2030 at the latest-- I guarantee I'll start sounding more and more like the Boomer '60s radicals I currently abhor. 

I know this about myself, and I don't regard it as an especially good quality. It does seem to be a fairly fixed condition, though.

So what do I do about it?

I have a number of different approaches. I was going to write about three of them, but my daughter interrupted me as I began the third paragraph after this one and I honestly have no idea what I was going to tell you; maybe it will come back tomorrow. In the meantime, here are two:

First, when it comes to my beliefs and views, I try to figure out which ones are actually mine, and which ones are reactions against the enthusiasms of the day. The way to do this is to figure out what endures from one of my personal incarnations to the next. A surprising number do. For example, on a religious level, the changing of the seasons is very meaningful to me; there is something about the awakening of life in the Springtime, its climax in Summer, maturity in Autumn and death in the Winter that moves me like very little else does. Religiously, then, I need a cycle of seasonal celebrations. Modern paganism, the Druid Revival, and traditional Roman Catholicism can all meet that need. I love the natural world and need to interact with it spiritually, and it doesn't particularly matter whether the spirit of a forest is called its god or its guardian angel On a personal level, I like making as much of my own stuff at home as I can. I bake bread, brew beer, make medicine, grow herbs, and do most of my cooking from scratch. This is true of me whether I'm justifying it by way of anarchism (Liberate the means of production!) or Conservatism (Burkean "little platoons" and subsidiarity!); therefore it needs no justification. Yesterday I brewed an herbal beer inspired by Stephen Buhner's Sacred and Herbal Healing Beer; it uses molasses as its sugar and is flavored with fir needles from our Christmas tree. It will be excellent regardless of its justification. 

Second, I try to give myself outlets that aren't harmful. At one time, I expressed my love for being in a secret rebel band by living an anarchist lifestyle in an actual secret rebel band. The result was that I didn't have any money, I was frequently in danger, and I was angry all the time. It turns out, though, that I can meet a lot of the same needs that I met through anarchism by simply taking in fictional stories about rebels, bandits, and people facing overwhelming odds. Reading Mario Puzzo's The Godfather puts one in much the same mental frame as spending hours on radical message boards. Even better, I can put some effort into figuring out what I want to be, and use the opposition of some large body to push me in that direction. I am attempting to do this with my spiritual life above all else.

Think about your own recurring life patterns. How can you use them to push yourself in the direction you want to go, rather than being pushed by them in directions you don't want to go?

 Sun Tzu elaborates on the uses of secrecy in the following verses: 


All these dicta can be boiled down into two:

Be where the Enemy is not.

Force the Enemy to be where you want him to be. 

When we think about actual warfare, it's very easy to see how to apply these ideas, both in imaginary and in historical examples. Robert E. Lee's invasion of the North in 1863 was an attempt to force the Union to withdraw their armies from Virginia and defend Harrisburg and Philadelphia. It worked. Union armies followed Lee into Pennsylvania, where they met at Gettysburg. There, the tables were turned. On the third day of the battle, Lee ordered a massive infantry assault on the strongly defended Union position at Cemetery Ridge. This was Pickett's Charge, and its results are well known. The attackers were repulsed with heavy losses, and the North was victorious at Gettysburg.

Invading the North is a good idea; Pickett's Charge is not. 

In ordinary life, this means that we will be more likely to succeed in any given task or goal if we can figure out beforehand where and how we are most likely to meet resistance, and avoiding this. To pick a fairly well known example, if you want a career in education, you will have a much easier time finding a job if you can teach Math or Chemistry than if all you can teach is English. 

We've discussed this sort of thing before, though. What new ideas can we glean from this passage?


In relation to defensive warfare, Sun Tzu discusses "throwing something odd an unaccountable" in the Enemy's way. In a military setting, this can mean bluffs, tricks, or diversions. But what might it mean in daily life? 

For many people, the conquest of their own souls means the overcoming of an addiction. Habitual and involuntary use of porn, alcohol, TV, social media, video games, caffeine, tobacco, gambling, shopping, sugar or hard drugs all stand between the individual and the "total conquest of his faculties and his future." Some people-- those with strongly trained wills-- are able to attack addictions head on, and simply choose to quit them. I knew someone who smoked every day until he was 40, decided to quit, and never had another cigarette. Most of us aren't like that, though. So what can we do?

Here's where the use of diversions comes in. For most people, an addictive behaviors are provoked by fairly specific and regular triggers. You might be used to having a cigarette after lunch, or with your morning coffee. If you want to stop smoking-- that's if, by the way; smoking may be the least fashionable of vices these days, but that doesn't mean it can't be your favorite one-- but as I said, if you want to stop smoking you're going to need to recognize these triggers. They're like forces of the enemy, overcoming your defenses and getting a cigarette into your mouth. Once you see them, though, you can do something about them. Sometimes, all it takes is to create a little time delay. If you feel a craving for a cigarette, don't fight it. Just tell yourself that you can have a cigarette if you still want one in 15 minutes. A lot of the time, you're going to find that you don't anymore. The triggering event has passed, and so has the craving that went with it. 

Of course, you can simply pass your 15 minutes waiting for the moment when you're allowed your cigarette (or your cell phone, your whiskey or whatever it is). Do that and you're probably going to fail. Find something else to do instead, and-- this is critical-- make sure it's something you enjoy. Instead of smoking, spend 15 minutes playing the guitar, reading a book, walking in the woods or enjoying a really cool daydream. Once your time is up-- if you even notice it-- you'll probably find you'd rather keep doing whatever you're doing. 

More Sun Tzu:


I've let the discussion of Spiritual Warfare be for a little while now, but I want to return to it today. 

Most of the readers here also follow John Michael Greer's work, and his most recent blog post is very worth reading in light of everything we've been discussing so far. Without using the same language, JMG is talking directly about the Spiritual Warfare that I've spent a great deal of time discussing, and his approach is similar to mine. Among other things, he counsels disconnecting from electronic media, avoiding people who are obvious vectors for demonic attack, spending more time in nature, and dedicating more time to spiritual pursuits. 

Of course, I agree, and recommend all these approaches. Remember that, in the Spiritual War, our goal is "to live in peace," defined as a life lived under the rule of the Divine and our own higher selves, and free of the influence of the demonic and the lower passions. Following Sun Tzu, we need to create a situation where our opponent-- the demonic influences ravaging the collective American psyche-- does not know where to attack us, and unable to defend against our own movements.

How do we do that?

By disconnecting from the collective, as JMG writes, and by not broadcasting our actions or our movements. There's no reason to start arguments about politics on social media, even if you're really mad about the latest absurdity (today, it's the banning of 6 childrens books by Dr. Seuss. Remember when the Left was against book banning?). The only thing that will happen is that you'll be drawn into the cycle of rage and conflict.

It's critical to remember-- and very easy to forget-- that the Enemy is a two-headed demon. When you strike at one head (the one on the Left, say) you risk falling under the spell of the other head (say, the one on the Right with the letter Q tattooed on its forehead). Focus, instead, on building up the divine presence in your own soul, your home, and your life generally. 

Or as an old martial arts instructor of mine used to say, "The best block is Don't be there." 

Sun Tzu tells us that, 


In order to achieve this, we need to know something about our own will and our own capabilities, and something about the enemy's. Remember Sun Tzu's most famous saying, that we encountered in Chapter 3:


The difficulty is that our enemy, be it the rebellious parts of our own soul; our rivals in work or war or love; our Great Spiritual Enemy, must always remain, to a certain extent, unknown to us. 

So how do you plan for the unknowable? 

Well, by definition, you don't. Above all else, though, flexibility is the key to dealing with unknown situations. 

Imagine two nations go to war with one another. Call them Phlogistonia and Etherland, for some reason. Phlogistonia is one large, open steppe. The Phlogistonians have the best cavalry in the whole world, and their horse simply can't be beaten either by another cavalry force or by infantry in the field. Etherland, on the other hand, is a pathwork land of open fields, lakes, and forested mountains in the east. Etherland have a solid cavalry force, usually sufficient for the border wars they fight with their neighbors, but no match for the Phlogistonians. When the Phlogistonians invade Etherland, the Ethermen don't engage them directly. Instead they evacuate their villages in the lowlands, burn their crops, and head for forested hills in the east. In that country the Phlogistonians are unable to mass their cavalry for an open battle. They're worn down by relentless attacks by Etherland hill tribes. After months of guerrilla warfare, they withdraw their depleted forces to the Ether lowlands, where the Ethermen are able to engage them in a decisive battle.

In this example, the Etherland folk were able to win and win completely because they were able to engage in more than one type of warfare, while the Phlogistonians were not. They may not have known the Phlogistonians were going to invade, and they may not have known how effective Phlogistonian cavalry are, but their flexibility allowed them to adapt to the situation, and impose their will on the enemy.

In our lives, the area where this is most relevant is probably our careers. Having both a range of skill-sets and a range of income streams allows you to adapt to circumstances where being locked into a single field does not. Of course, I'm speaking from experience: the fact that my partner and I both had rather varied work histories is what has allowed us to survive, and really to thrive, even when we both lost our jobs due to the pandemic. 

There is another issue I want to discuss in regard to control of the battlefield, but it will have to wait until tomorrow. See you then!