In R.L. Wing’s book the Tao of Power, verse 8, Noncompetitve Values, there are lines that appear in no other translation in the form Mr. Wing has presented.

The lines are:

1. The value in a dwelling    is location.
2. The value in a mind          is depth.
3. The value in    relations    is benevolence.
4. The value in a words         is sincerity.
5. The value in    leadership  is order.
6. The value in    work           is competence.
7. The value in    effort          is timeliness.

Wing, in his commentary on this verse tells us how to achieve these 7 noncompetitive values:

1. To achieve  location          one must know              the whole.
2. To achieve  depth             one must know              its possibility.
3. To achieve  benevolence  one must                        comprehend human nature.
4. To achieve  sincerity        one must know              inner truth.
5. To achieve  order              one must know              the entire structure.
6. To achieve  competence  one must know              the results of a perfectly executed task.
7. To achieve  timeliness     one must                        hold in mind both the past and the fututre.

I am reviewing this verse for the thousandth time and I recognize things which I never did before.  First, number 4, I couldn’t fully grasp what Wing meant by Inner Truth.  Now I completely understand that I can not be sincere in my words unless I understand the truth within myself and the motivation in my words.  It’s about those things that can only be known by me and those things are ingrediants of sincerity, not the words but the meaning.  The words, whether accurate or not, have no value unless they are directly mapped back to the truth within that no one else can know.  When one can accomplish this, one can have words of value because one speaks sincerity from the inner truth known secretly to oneself and revealed to others in simple words.

The other revelation is that of the the principles that lie at the base of Taoist thought and philosophy.  Wu Wei is very much involved in the achievement of timeliness because nonaction is the best course to take when the time is past or time has not yet arrived.  The caution on timeliness is that one must be aware of the Path: everything eventually takes the path of least resistence; Polarity: every ascent has a descent in its future and every descent has an ascent in its future;  The Pattern: each event begins in the dead season of winter when seeds lie dormant, some are planted in the spring and some come to life, some of the living grow and develop in the long harsh summer of life, some of those that live to maturity come to be harvested in the fall and the timeliness of that some can be assessed for that life’s effort at that time.