Consider this quietly, and in depth. Which is the greater fault — wrong belief, or the deluding of conduct? Which should you try to save yourself from first?

Look where effort usually goes. It goes into conduct: what is eaten, how one behaves, which vows are kept, and — more often than anyone will admit — whether others are keeping theirs. But beneath every fault of conduct lies a deeper one, which is not seeing what you are. This is darshanmoha, the deluding of insight, and it is the seed the rest grows from. To labour at the faults of conduct while it stands untouched is to plaster over ash: the surface is smooth, and nothing beneath it has changed. It is also out of order. These things have their sequence, and this is not where it begins.

When the dreadfulness of that first fault has truly appeared to you — through contemplation of the self, with the self as the aim — something follows of itself. Reviewing what other souls do, weighing their auspicious and inauspicious states, giving weight and attention to them: all of it falls away. Not by resolve. It falls away because you are occupied. What purpose is served, for one bent on the soul, by looking at the faults in another's conduct? Set beside the anxiety of removing your own blindness, meddling in what is not yours does not so much as occur to you.

And there is a test in that, which you can apply today. If you are still keeping accounts on other people, the first fault has not yet weighed on you.

So put the whole of your strength here. Bring about the absence of your own wrong belief first. Conduct follows from it, and cannot be set right ahead of it.