re the spiritual
counterpart of the Commandments, and they have finer degrees, for
more advanced spiritual growth.

33. When transgressions hinder, the weight of the imagination should
be thrown' on the opposite side.

Let us take a simple case, that of a thief, a habitual criminal, who has
drifted into stealing in childhood, before the moral consciousness has
awakened. We may imprison such a thief, and deprive him of all
possibility of further theft, or of using the divine gift of will. Or we
may recognize his disadvantages, and help him gradually to build up
possessions which express his will, and draw forth his self-respect. If
we imagine that, after he has built well, and his possessions have
become dear to him, he himself is robbed, then we can see how he
would come vividly to realize the essence of theft and of honesty, and
would cleave to honest dealings with firm conviction. In some such
way does the great Law teach us. Our sorrows and losses teach us the
pain of the sorrow and loss we inflict on others, and so we cease to
inflict them.

Now as to the more direct application. To conquer a sin, let heart and
mind rest, not on the sin, but on the contrary virtue. Let the sin be
forced out by positive growth in the true direction, not by direct
opposition. Turn away from the sin and go forward courageously,
constructively, creatively, in well-doing. In this way the whole nature
will gradually be drawn up to the higher level, on which the sin does
not even exist. The conquest of a sin is a matter of growth and
evolution, rather than of opposition.

34. Transgressions are injury, falsehood, theft, incontinence, envy;
whether committed, or caused, or assented to, through greed, wrath,
or infatuation; whether faint, or middling, or excessive; bearing
endless, fruit of ignorance and pain. Therefore must the weight be cast
on the other side.

Here are the causes of sin: greed, wrath, infatuation, with their effects,
ignorance and pain. The causes are to be cured by better wisdom, by
a truer understanding of the Self, of Life. For greed cannot endure
before the realization that the whole world belongs to the Self, which
Self we are; nor can we hold wrath against one who is one with the
Self, and therefore with ourselves; nor can infatuation, which is the
seeking for the happiness of the All in some limited part of it, survive
the knowledge that we are heirs of the All. Therefore let thought and
imagination, mind an