the key is to learn how things happen

The wise person, learning how things happen, lives according to the principal.

Without this understanding one might dismiss the single principal of how things happen as total nonsense. After all, they say, any principal that does not get you love or money or power must be useless. A silent mind is a dumb mind. Selflessness is no way to get ahead. Virtue is for fools. Kindness is weakness. And so on.

This is a problem: because the wise person's only allegiance is to how things happen, people who do not see how things happen naturally think the wise person's behavior has no basis in reality. Also, the wise person's silence and manner of being are disturbing. Because the wise person's motives are obscure, the wise person is hard to figure out.

The problem comes back to the fact the principal is not a thing and cannot be defined. That does not make sense to some people.

It is not easy to understand a person whose foundation is invisible.