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Sincerity is the key of the divine doors. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/sincerity#p1</ref>
 
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''Q: Sweet Mother, you have written: ‘Sincerity is the key to the divine gates.’ What does that mean?
A: It is a literary image, my child, an imaged, figurative, literary way of expressing the fact that with sincerity one can attain everything, even the Divine. If one wants to open a door, a key is necessary, isn’t it? Well, for the door separating you from the Divine, sincerity works as a key and opens the door and lets you in, that’s all. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/06/5-may-1954#p41</ref>
 
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The measure of the sincerity is the measure of the success.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/12/messages-to-the-mothers-international-school-delhi#p14 </ref>
 
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Besides, if you truly want to follow the path and practise yoga, you must not do it for appreciation or honour, you must do it because it is an imperative need of your being, because you cannot be happy in any other way. Whether people appreciate you or do not appreciate you, it is of absolutely no importance. You may tell yourself beforehand that the further you are from ordinary men, foreign to the ordinary mode of being, the less people will appreciate you, quite naturally, because they will not understand you. And I repeat, it has absolutely no importance.True sincerity consists in advancing on the way [path of yoga] because you cannot do otherwise, to consecrate yourself to the divine life because you cannot do otherwise, to seek to transform your being and come out into the light because you cannot do otherwise, because it is the purpose of your life.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/the-elephant#p22</ref>
 
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In Yoga the one thing that counts in the end is sincerity and with it the patience to persist in the path—many even without this patience go through, for—again I speak from personal experience,—in spite of revolt, impatience, depression, despondency,
fatigue, temporary loss of faith, a force greater than one's outer self, the force of the Spirit, the drive of the soul's need, pushes them through the cloud and the mist to the goal before them. Imperfections can be stumbling blocks and give one a bad fall for the moment, but not a permanent bar. Obscurations due to some resistance in the nature can be more serious causes of delay, but they too do not last for ever.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/31/imperfections-and-periods-of-arrest#p19</ref>
 
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There are many voices, and all are not divine; this may be only a voice of desire. All that keeps one faithful to the Truth and insists on peace, purity, devotion, sincerity, a spiritual change of the nature can be listened to with profit; the rest must be observed with discrimination and not followed blindly. Keep the fire of aspiration burning, but avoid all impatient haste. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/30/inner-voices-and-indications#p1</ref>
 
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If you are not sincere, you will never have any insight into your own life. You must be able to look at yourself and say, "How tiny I am." <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/30-december-1950#p26</ref>
The endeavour is difficult and demands an absolute and steadfast sincerity, but for those who have a strong will, an ardent aspiration and an unshakable sincerity, it is well worth undertaking. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/16/9-december-1971#p1,p2,p3</ref>
 
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In fact, as long as the ego is there, one cannot say that a being is perfectly sincere, even though he is striving to become sincere. One must pass beyond the ego, give oneself up totally to the divine Will, surrender without reserve and without calculation... then one can be perfectly sincere, but not before.
To perceive one's own weaknesses is one result of sincerity.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/sincerity#p19</ref>
 
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There is, besides, a marvellous joy in being sincere. Every act of sincerity carries in itself its own reward: the feeling of purification, of soaring upwards, of liberation one gets when one has rejected even one tiny particle of falsehood.
Sincerity is the safeguard, the protection, the guide, and finally the transforming power. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/19-december-1956#p32</ref>
 
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A sincerity which must become total and absolute, for sincerity alone is your protection on the spiritual path. If you are not sincere, at the very next step you are sure to fall and break your head. All kinds of forces, wills, influences, entities are there, on the look-out for the least little rift in this sincerity and they immediately rush in through that rift and begin to throw you into confusion. <ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/08/1-august-1956#p34</ref>
 
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The things one has to be on guard against in the cosmic consciousness are the play of a magnified ego, the vaster attacks of the hostile forces—for they too are part of the cosmic consciousness—and the attempt of the cosmic Illusion (Ignorance, Avidya) to prevent the growth of the soul into the cosmic Truth. These are things that one has to learn by experience; mental teaching or explanation is quite insufficient. To enter safely into the cosmic consciousness and to pass safely through it, it is necessary to have a strong central unegoistic sincerity and to have the psychic being, with its divination of truth and unfaltering orientation towards the Divine, already in front in the nature.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/30/the-universal-or-cosmic-consciousness#p21</ref>
 
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It is difficult to say that any particular quality makes one fit or the lack of it unfit. One may have strong sex impulses, doubts, revolts and yet succeed in the end, while another may fail. If one has a fundamental sincerity, a will to go through in spite of all things and a readiness to be guided, that is the best security in the sadhana.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/the-call-and-the-capacity#p27</ref>
 
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Sincerity is the basis of all true realisation, it is the means, the path—and it is also the goal. Without it you are sure to make innumerable blunders and you have constantly to redress the harm you have done to yourself and to others.
Whenever there is sincerity, you find that the help, the guidance, the grace are always there to give you the answer and you are not mistaken for long. It is this sincerity in the aspiration for progress, in the will for truth, in the need to be truly pure—pure as it is understood in the spiritual life—it is this sincerity which is the key to all progress. With it you know—and you can.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwm/03/conjugate-verses#p71</ref>
 
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Why do I insist on absolute sincerity?... You have all passed through childhood and you probably remember what you were taught, what you were told when you were young. Parents nearly always tell their children, ‘You must not lie, it is very bad to tell a lie.’ But the unfortunate thing is that they lie in your presence and then you wonder why they want you to do something which they don’t do themselves.
And don’t think that there are people to whom this rule does not apply, for you cannot live in the physical world without having a share in the physical nature, and physical nature is essentially a mixture. You will see, when you become absolutely sincere, that there is nothing in yourself that is absolutely unmixed. But it is only when you look yourself in the face, in the light of your highest consciousness, that whatever you want to eliminate from your nature will disappear. Without this striving for absolute sincerity, the defect, the little shadow, will stay in a corner biding its time to come out.
<ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/15/6-january-1951#p23,p24,p25</ref>
 
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For those who are truly sincere, truly good-willed, all these fits can be changed into a means for progress. Each time that you have an attack of this kind, a sort of storm, you can change the crisis into a new progress, into one more step towards the goal. If precisely you have the necessary sincerity to look straight in the face, within you, at the cause of the fit—the wrong you have done, the wrong you have thought, the wrong you have felt—if you see the weakness, the violence or the vanity (for I forgot to tell you that the vital is much more full of vanity than the mind), if you look at all that full in the face and if you recognise honestly and sincerely that what has happened is due to your fault, then you are able to put a red-hot iron as it were on the affected spot. You can purify the weakness and turn it into a new consciousness. And you find after the storm that you have grown a little more, you have truly made a progress.