What are the effects of harbouring evil?

You can readily understand how benevolent thoughts confer a real benefit on the recipient—just as you may feel hurt and annoyed when you are the subject of hard words or abuse from any of your acquaintances.

If you have not deserved them, you simply close your power of receiving the insults, so to speak, by assuming an air of indifference, and the shafts of your enemies fall from you without injuring you. 

When your thoughts are directed elsewhere, the injury ceases, though its effects do not. 

It is liable to be repeated, as long as the person from whence it emanated feels any ill-will towards the individual affected by it. 

You can see from this how it is that you can never be happy until you have obtained the forgiveness of those you have injured. 

If the evil thought is undeserved, it does the recipient no harm, for you can close your powers of perception of the injury. 

If he is mistaken, he must suffer the consequences of his mistake until he gets more enlightenment. 

It is your duty, before you allow an evil thought against another to gain admission into your mind, to make sure that it is a just one. 

If you do not, you are the wrong-doer and not the other, and you must suffer the consequences of your wrong-doing. 

The harbouring of evil thoughts is an offence that brings its own punishment, for it prevents the thinker from rising in the spirit world. 

You must first purify yourself from all ill-will towards others, otherwise, you cannot know what it is to love your fellow beings, and without that love in your heart, you cannot rise.