Power is the strongest of all enemies. And naturally the easiest thing to do is to give in; after all, the man is truly invincible. He commands, he begins by taking calculated risks and ends in making rules, because he is a master!
A man at this stage hardly notices his third enemy closing in on him. And suddenly, without knowing it, he will certainly have lost the battle. His enemy will have turned him into a cruel, capricious man.
He will never lose his clarity or his power, although a man who is defeated by power dies without really knowing how to handle it. Power is only a burden upon his fate. Such a man has no command over himself, and cannot tell when or how to use his power.
If, however, he is only temporarily blinded by power, and then refuses it, it signifies that his battle continues. That means he is still trying to become a man of knowledge. A man is defeated only when he no longer tries, and abandons himself.
In order to overcome power, the man has to challenge it purposefully. He has to come to realize that the power he has seemingly conquered is in reality never his. He must keep himself in line at all times, handling carefully and faithfully all that he has learned. If he can see that clarity and power, without his control over himself, are worse than mistakes, he will reach a point where everything is held in check. He will know then when and how to use his power. And thus he will have defeated his third enemy.
The man will be by then at the end of his journey of learning, and almost without warning he will come upon the last of his enemies: Old age! This enemy is the cruelest of all, the one he won’t be able to defeat completely, but only fight away.
This is the time when a man has no more fears, no more impatient clarity of spirit; a time when all his power is in check, but also the time when he has an unyielding desire to rest. If he gives in totally to his desire to lie down and forget, if he soothes himself in tiredness, he will have lost his last round, and his enemy will reduce him down into a feeble old creature. His desire to retreat will overrule all his clarity, his power and his knowledge.
But if the man sloughs off his tiredness, and lives his fate though, he can then be called a man of knowledge.
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