On difficulty, sincerity, and what it means to actually mean it.
“The hostile forces are tolerated in the world only because they put man’s sincerity to the test.”
The Mother
The things we don’t want to hear
The Mother’s teaching says these forces are tolerated. Meaning they exist within a larger order that permits them. Not because that order is indifferent to our suffering, but because without them, something essential would be missing from our development. We talk a lot about resistance. About obstacles. About the people and circumstances that seem to stand between us and the life we’re trying to build. We frame them as problems to be solved, battles to be won, things to be released or transcended or healed away.
What if they are none of those things? What if the difficulty is not in the way, what if it is the way.
What sincerity actually means
Sincerity isn’t just honesty. It’s not about saying what you mean in the moment. It’s about whether what you say you want and what you’re actually willing to do are the same thing.
Most of us are sincere in some parts and deeply divided in others. We want transformation, but we also want comfort
We say we want to change. We say we want to grow, to love differently, to live more freely. And then something hard arrives, something that costs us something , and we find out if we meant it.
The hostile force, whatever form it takes in your life, a relationship that drains you, a situation that won’t resolve, a part of yourself you keep meeting in the dark, it shows you the gap between who you say you are and who you actually are when it matters.
What this means in practice
If this teaching is true, then the question we bring to our hardest moments changes entirely.
It means we stop asking why is this happening to me, or, how do I stop this and start asking what is this showing me about what I actually believe. Where is my sincerity incomplete. What part of me is still negotiating. What have I not yet fully meant.
Because the things that test us most have the sharpest precision to them. They tend to find exactly the place where our commitment was conditional. Where our love had a limit. Where our trust ran out.
And in finding that place, they give us the chance to go further than we have gone before, or the clarity to finally stop pretending we want to.
Either way, is fine, as something true can emerge.