Sincerity Makes Everything Possible

The Radical Power of Loving Things for Their Own Sake

Again and again in my own journey and in witnessing others', I've noticed how sincerity - real, actual sincerity - seems to be the key that unlocks everything else. Without it, even the most sophisticated spiritual practices or psychological insights become just another form of hiding. With it, even simple presence becomes revolutionary.

The understanding I'm sharing here is deeply influenced by David J Temple's CosmoErotic Humanism, particularly its insights about value and ‘anti-value’.

Sincerity changes everything. Not the performative kind where we try to appear authentic, but the real thing - where we love truth because it's truth, beauty because it's beauty, goodness because it's good. When we live with this kind of sincerity, everything becomes possible. Without it, we remain trapped in cycles of manipulation and self-deception, forever searching but never quite touching what we're looking for.

The Heart of Sincerity

Sincerity, at its core, is about how we relate to value. Are we moved by a genuine love of truth, or are we using truth to get something else? Are we touched by beauty itself, or are we collecting experiences to prove something about ourselves? Are we expressing goodness because we love it, or because we want to be seen as good?

These aren't comfortable questions. When we look honestly, we often find that our relationship with value has become instrumental - we use truth, beauty, and goodness as means to other ends. We might meditate to optimize our performance, pursue relationships to avoid loneliness, or act ethically to maintain our self-image. As instrumental thinking spreads through our lives, we lose touch with the direct contact and intimacy that makes life worth living.

The Mimicry of Value

Something in us desperately wants to avoid this intimacy with reality. We might call it ‘anti-value’¹ - a force that works against love while desperately wanting it, that mimics value while missing its essence. It may show up as spiritual materialism, self-improvement addiction, or any number of sophisticated strategies for avoiding direct contact with reality.

This force isn't simply evil - it's more like love in confusion, wanting connection but too afraid to risk it. It creates elaborate systems of justification, ways of relating to life that look like value but maintain separation. We can spend years, even decades, in these sophisticated mimicries, achieving and optimizing and transcending, all while the simple truth of what we really want remains untouched.

The Tell-Tale Signs

How do we know when we're caught in this mimicry? The signs are subtle but unmistakable:

• We freeze in moments of potential intimacy

• Shame lurks beneath our accomplishments

• Our relationships feel oddly mechanical

• We kill our longing for connection before it can fully emerge

• We live in and create worlds where our tender places never get touched

These patterns point to places where sincerity has been compromised, where we've chosen safety over truth, control over love. Often, we don't even realize we're doing it. The mimicry is so sophisticated that we can construct entire spiritual or philosophical frameworks to justify our disconnection.

The Path of Clarification

But here's the hope: sincerity wins in the end. Not through force or strategy, but through a gradual process of clarification. As we begin to admit our confusion, to acknowledge the ways we've twisted value into means rather than ends, something starts to thaw. Our desire begins to clarify itself.

This clarification isn't always comfortable. When we start to love truth for its own sake, it shows us things we've been avoiding. When we open to beauty itself, it breaks our heart. When we align with genuine goodness, it asks everything of us. But in this surrender, we find what we've always been longing for - direct, intimate contact with ourselves, others, and the world.

The Revolution of Sincerity

This is where sincerity becomes revolutionary. In a world built on instrumental relationships - where everything and everyone is seen as means rather than ends - simply loving truth because it's truth becomes a radical act. Being moved by authentic value rather than its mimicry threatens systems of control because it makes us ungovernable by fear and manipulation.

The victory of sincerity isn't about achieving some perfect state of authenticity. It's about our willingness to admit our insincerity, to see and feel deeply the ways we've twisted value into strategy, and to keep turning toward what we really love. Sometimes this looks like breakdown. Sometimes it looks like grace. Always it leads us back to the simple truth that love itself is what we've been looking for all along.

In the end, sincerity wins because reality is fundamentally trustworthy. Beneath all our confusion and compensation, truth, beauty, and goodness are always here, waiting to be loved for their own sake. Our task is simply to keep turning toward them, to keep clarifying our desire, to keep choosing direct contact over sophisticated mimicry.

This is the revolution of sincerity - not a technique to get something, but a fundamental shift in how we relate to value itself. Everything becomes possible not because we've achieved some special state, but because we've finally stopped trying to use love and started letting ourselves be moved by it.

Work with me: I offer one-on-one guidance helping people develop secure attachment with reality through deep unfoldment work. If this resonates, explore working together

1. This concept of 'anti-value' is based on forthcoming work by David J Temple. At the time of this writing, these ideas exist primarily in unpublished materials, with formal publications expected in 2025.