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The most elementary degree is not to say one thing and think another, claim one thing and want another. For example, what happen quite often: to say, "I want to make progress, and I want to get rid of my defects" and, at the same time, to cherish one's defects in the consciousness and take great care to hide them so that nobody intervenes and sends them off. This indeed is a very common phenomenon. This is already the second degree. The first degree, you see, is when someone claims, for example, to have a very great aspiration and to want the spiritual life and, at the same time, does completely... how to put it?... shamelessly, things which are most contradictory to the spiritual life. This is indeed a degree of sincerity, rather of insincerity, which is most obvious.
And finally, if we go far enough, if we push the description far enough, so long as there is a part of the being which contradicts the central aspiration for the Divine, one is not perfectly sincere. That is to say, a perfect sincerity is something extremely rare. And most commonly, very very frequently, when there are things in one's nature which one does not like, one takes the greatest care to hide them from oneself, one finds favourable explanations or simply makes a little movement, like this (''gesture''). You have noticed that when things move like this you can't see them clearly. Well, where the defect is seated, there is a kind of vibrations which does this, and so your sight is not clear, you no longer see your defects. And this is automatic. Well, all these are insincerities.<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/10-november-1954#p27,p28,p30</ref>
''Sweet Mother, how can we make our submission gladly?''
Sincerity —what we call sincerity, that is to say, a perfect honesty and transparency: that there may be nowhere in the being anything which pretends, hides or wants to pass itself off for what it is not. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/22-february-1956#p39</ref>
 
==Sincerity in Relation to Other Qualities==
 
===Aspiration and Sincerity===