Karma is one way you learn on the physical plane. In karma, you have an extreme experience, and balance it with the opposite ex­treme experi­ence. By learning both sides of an issue, you can come to a new understanding that puts you consciously in the middle. You may go from one extreme to another, back and forth, for several lifetimes before you finally “wake up” and find that balanced place.

Suppose that in one lifetime you are murdered and desire re­venge, so in the next lifetime you murder the one who murdered you. In the lifetime after that one, you become the victim again, and so on. You flip-flop in that way until you wake up and see that you are both the murderer and the murdered. You rec­ognize that both these parts are inside you, and make peace between them. Then you no longer need to repeat the pat­tern. That is inte­gration.

You can choose how and when you repay karmic debts. Suppose that you had a lifetime in which you killed people indiscrimi­nately and caused a great deal of suffering. Generally, if you consciously deliberate on it after the lifetime, you will want to start re­paying those karmic debts during your next lifetime. You may have a painful or early death, or suffer great losses. On the other hand, you may decide that for the maximum growth, it would be better to have an experience of what it is like to be really loved. In that case, the next life may be a relatively easy and comfortable one. You must eventually deal with your karma, but sometimes, repaying karmic debts is put off for centuries or even millennia. That is not usual, though.

Karma is a compelling influence, and if you do not plan and make deliberate choices about how you will repay your karmic debts, you will eventually repay them anyway, but haphazardly. If you are in the vicinity of someone with whom you have a karmic tie, you tend to attract one another. Whether or not you had in­tended to, once you start the wheels of repayment in motion, it is difficult to stop them. However, although what is occurring may appear haphazard, you may actually have chosen it even though you do not consciously remember having done so.

No. It was not designed to do this. Karma, as we define it, is incurred individually. You have to repay your own karma.

There is only mass karma in the sense that many individuals may have incurred karma simultaneously, and may tend to work on it together as well. Jesus’s death was a psychic symbol that has given humanity as lot to think about. Christianity as you know it today is a reaction to that one event, mostly an attempt to avoid dealing with the guilt felt about that event. Christians get to say that it was someone else who was responsible for crucifying the Lord. In such denial is a continuation of the inner crucifixion of the Lord within, which is the essence.

Just as someone can literally stick a knife in another person, he can also stick a vibrational knife in him through the intense projection of hate or another destructive force. It is karmic in either case if it harms the other person.

If through manipulation you produce deep confusion or distur­bance in another person who is not capable of defending himself from it, you have deprived him of choice and therefore have cre­ated karma. This could be called a mind-fuck. If you chose parents who ended up planting some negative belief systems in you, welcome to the human race-that is not a mind-fuck. You chose the parents and you got their belief systems. Parents can mind-fuck their children, but it would have to be a deliberate and serious infraction.

When you are around someone with whom you have strong karmic ties, you can be pulled into a whirlwind of emotion and other forces you do not understand. You can feel quite blind for a while, simply because the intensity of what originally created that karma is triggered in you. The more you maintain an objective, neutral consciousness, the better you are able to handle these forces when they come into your life.

Grace is the neutralization of karma solely in conscious­ness, learning its lessons without physically acting it out. Grace is al­ways possible, but most choose to pay back their karma physi­cally because they are not capable of balancing karma purely in con­sciousness.

Suppose that a person murders someone in cold blood. He is not likely to seek grace. The fact that he committed this act indi­cates that he is deeply enmeshed in the karmic state, and probably has little or no vision beyond it. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that after that lifetime, he seeks grace; he does not want to be killed by the person he murdered in a future lifetime. He would have to undergo an enormous amount of growth to receive grace. He would have to develop sufficient empathy and compas­sion to feel what it was like for the other per­son. Mere remorse is not enough. Realistically, he is probably going to need to be killed by him and perhaps undergo other physical plane experi­ences to awaken in that area and learn the lesson. Grasping it without tangible experience may just be too difficult for him.

Grace is more possible when karma is less extreme and its lessons are within easier reach. Grace is not undertaken unilater­ally. The victim’s essence must agree to it. However, since being repaid a karmic debt can be almost as unpleasant as the karma it­self, this is usually not a problem. While grace is usually achieved from the astral plane after the lifetime is complete, it can also be accomplished from the physical plane when the person who cre­ated the karma experiences major growth.

In between the two extremes of repaying a karmic debt through “an eye for an eye,” and neutralizing it through grace, is what might be called modified grace. Continuing the example above, modified grace might entail the murderer saving the life of his former victim in a future lifetime, perhaps in a doctor/patient relationship in which the doctor received no pay. This is a more enlightened and compassionate way to repay that karma.

Some karmas can also be “worked off” from the astral plane, again by the agreement of both parties. Since karma is fun­damentally an imbalance of energy, repaying it is a matter of doing whatever it takes to rebalance it. Occasionally, an essence who is otherwise complete with the physical plane attempts to work off a remaining karmic debt from the astral plane rather than reincar­nating. If he is not successful, he will need to reincar­nate in order to repay the debt.

Sometimes a person knows that he has a lot of karma to repay, and that doing so will probably not be very pleasant. It is under­standable that he would feel some dread, but he can use the dread to help himself prepare to handle the karma better. If he braces against the karma, in anticipation of pain, he will have more pain-resisting something increases its impact when it hits, whereas embracing it softens its impact. If he is going to repay the debt anyway, it makes sense to embrace rather than resist it.