4,400
edits
Changes
→Various Ways to Cultivate Sincerity in Yoga
Read Summary of '''[[Sincerity Summary|Sincerity]]'''
|}
=What is Sincerity?=
There are several degrees of sincerity.
The most elementary degree is not to say one thing and think another, claim one thing and want another. For example, what happen happens 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>
<center>~</center>
=Why Sincerity is Important?=
When I say, ‘If you are sincere, you are sure of victory’, I mean true sincerity: to be constantly the true flame that burns like an offering. That intense joy of existing only by the Divine and for the Divine and feeling that without Him nothing exists, that life has no longer any meaning, nothing has any purpose, nothing has any value, nothing has any interest, unless it is this call, this aspiration, this opening to the supreme Truth, to all that we call the Divine (because you must use some word or other), the only reason for the existence of the universe. Remove that and everything disappears. <ref>https://incarnateword.in/cwm/05/25-march-1953#p11,p12,p14,p15</ref>
<center>~</center>'''Bold text'''
''Sweet Mother, how can we make our submission gladly?''
It is perfectly true also that if a man is sincere, he will reach the Divine. But it does not follow that he will reach immediately, easily and without delay. Your error is there, to fix for God a term, five years, six years, and doubt because the effect is not yet there. A man may be centrally sincere and yet there may be many things that have to be changed in him before realisation can begin. His sincerity must enable him to persevere always—for it is a longing for the Divine that nothing can quench, neither delay nor disappointment nor difficulty nor anything else.
<ref>http://incarnateword.in/cwsa/29/patience-and-perseverance#p23</ref>
'''Curated by Prema'''
{|class="wikitable" style= "background-color: #efefff; width: 100%;"