Because of the pain which he endures as a result of...

Because of the pain which he endures as a result of committing that sin and for the reason that he seeks to get free from guilt of consciousness, he desires to evade the guilt of perpetrating sin and, in other words, he strives to show himself as not being at fault and endeavors to either forget his sin or lays the blame on other people, or the environment, or the world, or the Devil, or the structure of the society and/or other factors.

In this way, he takes refuge in these defense mechanisms in order to defend himself and once seeking refuge in a defense mechanism becomes firm in man and he justifies every sin and does not hold himself accountable and does not judge fairly in regard to himself and did not condemn himself for his sinful deeds, there is also the danger of committing greater sins for the reason that he with his action has liberated himself from the scourge of sin and on account of that he has no pain and remorse so as to be dreadful of the consequences of sin.

It is here that the ill consequences of justifying sins and also its dangers are greater than the ill consequences of sin itself. Because man has self-love, in addition to wanting to be respectable in the society, he also desires to be proud of himself; he does not want to be ashamed of himself and perceive himself as incomplete. He wants to conceive himself as complete and honorable.

For this reason, he expels from his memory that which is a cause of his incompleteness and decadence; because remembering them gives rise to his feeling low and light and this is opposed to the natural inclination and desire of man. Taking this point into consideration, if in this regard there are no factors which remind man of those imperfections and defects and deviations, a bad end lies in wait for him and he will have to bear irreparable losses.

It is for this reason that in the hadith s in the direction of mentioning factors which remind man of his bad deeds and effort to make up and compensate for them has been chosen as the best way and the scholars of ethics, taking these hadith s into consideration, have mentioned the three stages of ‘preconditioning’, ‘alertness’ and ‘accounting’ for people who plan to undertake edification of character and purification of the soul in such books as “ Mi‘raj al-Sa‘adah ”, “ Jami‘ al-Sa‘adat ” and “ Ihya’ al-‘Ulum ”.