Hazrat Inayat Khan offered the following memory of a comment by his murshid, Syed Abu Hashim Madani.  The concept of ‘sin’ is often troublesome, especially to those with a strict religious background.  Hazrat Inayat’s reflection makes the concept clearer, though perhaps still more difficult.

My murshid, Abu Hashim Madani, once said that there is only one virtue and one sin for a soul on the Sufi path: virtue when he is conscious of God, and sin when he is not.

No explanation can fully describe the truth of this except the experience of the contemplative.  When he is conscious of God it is as if a window facing heaven were open, and when he is conscious of the self the experience is the opposite.

For all the tragedy of life is caused by being conscious of the self.  All pain and depression are caused by this. Anything that can take away the thought of the self helps to a certain extent to relieve man from pain; but God-consciousness gives perfect relief.