Perhaps, after all, in the great Pantheon of Virtues, the key is Sincerity.

“If you have no Shradda (Sincerity, earnestness), you cannot achieve anything, whatever other qualifications you may have,” Sathya Sai Baba said. “Only the earnest seeker can acquire knowledge of the Divine. However intelligent one may be, without earnestness he will achieve nothing. A man with earnestness can convert a small burning cinder into a huge bonfire.” “If [he] lacks Shraddha he will allow even a blazing fire to go out.”

Why is Shradda so important, I asked my Inner Self…. Because Sincerity is both the flint and the fuel of self-creation, the spark and the sustaining energy. Once initiated, it is a fire, a force, of concentration, and whatever the mind concentrates on strongly enough it creates. Sincerity is powerful because it is pure—it is unalloyed choice, it is unblotted honesty, undiluted by half measures or partial intentions that are always inherently feeble—Sincerity is powerful too because in the face of immensity, it is humble, that is, open to suggestion and expansion.

Have you ever tried anything half way? There’s no energy in it. Ever been half sincere? There’s no force in it.

The human is often a tangle of compromises and false starts, second thoughts and second guesses, where thought, word and deed are sometimes so inconsistent they suggest a tripolar disorder. When thought, word and deed are at odds, Sincerity always suffers. When someone says, “a part of me would like that,” you know some other part wouldn’t, and you also know the other part has diluted the Sincerity. You hear, “Well, I’m half inclined….” Where is Sincerity there?

Sincerity is the guarantee of every virtue, the seal of genuineness. What strange beast would aspiring be without Sincerity? How could insincere receptivity exist? (perhaps someone on a cell phone pretending to listen to you), or how could insincere equanimity exist? (perhaps someone pretending to be calm while seething within). What is insincere openness but close-mindedness? Or insincere willingness but unwillingness? Or insincere gratitude but flattery or deceit? How could real courage be insincere? Or true love be insincere, bogus? Insincere attention to one’s workers or students or children is a variation on indifference, carelessness, even callousness. Sincerity makes every virtue genuine.

Sincerity walks with truth, for it is the answer to your heartfelt questions. It automatically promotes faith in the truth, for the truth it finds. Sincerity is a simple pureness of motive, the honest wish to know more, to be more. Conniving and scheming and cleverness are not in its nature. It is like the innocence of a child sleeping in the arms of its mother, or the undivided earnestness of a youngster learning the craft of his father.

Sincerity and compassion walk together too.   For how can compassion sustain itself without Sincerity? Or, how can real apology or forgiveness occur without Sincerity? Whenever another virtue is divorced from Sincerity, trouble ensues. Sincerity without Truth, for instance, has another name – fanaticism. Love without Truth has one too—abuse.

“The highest discipline,” Baba said, “is to bring about a unity in one’s thought, word and deed.” Then he added, “The coordination of thoughts, words and deeds is the first step in spiritual growth. Lack of correlation between ideas, utterances and actions leads to self-delusion, hypocrisy and spiritual bankruptcy.”

The vile gut of spiritual bankruptcy is ever filled with pretext and pretense, underhandedness and untrustworthiness, crookedness, dishonesty, deceit, and double-dealing…. It bilks and betrays, dupes and distorts, disguises and dissembles, like the eely fraudulence it is… spiritual bankruptcy, insincerity’s final, practiced masterpiece, the complete absence of Shradda and Virtue itself.

Only oneness of thought, word and deed, birthed by Sincerity, fueled by Sincerity and inspired by Love and Truth, can create the holy soul known as a Mahatma, as in Mahatma Gandhi. In fact, that unity is the very definition of the word “mahatma.”   Oneness is the meaning of self-realization, and only Sincerity will ever make it possible.

-David C. Jones