The Karma Technique

The Karma Technique
Alternate the following instructions:

Tell me something
you have done that you think you should not have done.

Tell me something
you have failed to do that you think you should have.

Clearing Manual
Volume 2
SECTION 19
THE KARMA TECHNIQUE


The whole approach of sahaja or natural yoga resolves karma at its root.  The very act of surrender to whatever may be Divine, Perfect, Absolute, God - whatever that may be - if one just surrenders to that, then in the instant that is an actual fact, all your karma is gone.  This is the only way karma is resolved at its root.  However, there are other ways to help an individual deal with karma so that he can make more progress in life.  These ways are the subject of this section.

What is karma?  As used in the West it means 'that which you get for doing something bad.'  But more properly it should be understood as either those good things that are going to happen to you, or the bad things that are going to happen to you, for the bad things or good things you did in the past, either recent, distant or very distant past.

The word in Sanskrit, though, means 'action.'  It's not like there is somebody up in the sky watching your every move and keeping a record of it in a book.  It's not like he keeps track and adds them all up and cancels out the good ones and the bad ones and whichever is the highest he says,  "Now you've got to pay for this,  and then he calls up Central and says, "Now, you send out somebody to give this person their karma."  This is a simplistic way of looking at it, but it's not in principle an error.  The someone in the sky is you, and you watch everything that you do.  And if you do something that you consider to be wrong, then you will pay for it.  Or if you do anything that you consider to be right, then you figure you've got your reward coming.  In other words,  you will see to it that you learn the lesson that you need to learn by suffering whatever you need to suffer until you've learned that lesson, at which point you will be free of that karma.  Or, if you have done good things, then when you've lived it up and gotten all the good things that you feel you're supposed to get, and you feel you're back to equal, the good things stop.

Mankind keeps alternating between these good things and these bad things.  This is a curious way to proceed.

In this talk I am not going to stress what to do with karma if you are doing sahaja or natural yoga.  If you surrender you are liberated from both your good and your bad karma. In other words,  even  if action does  happen,  when you surrender you no longer consider it good or bad.  It's just something that's happening.   So there's not good or bad karma any more; there's just karma, action.  Here I am going to talk about a wilful way of making some progress in the face of karma.  This is more realistic and practical for the vast majority of people, particularly ones who will come to you  for  sessions.   Clearing  sessions  are  a  wilful technique.

In the realm of wilfulness, you don't need to worry about the good karma.  When you've done good things, you've helped people, you've worked hard, then you're going to get your reward.  It will take care of itself.  But what about the bad stuff?  I'm not going to try to show you here how to free yourself from bad karma except on a psychological basis.  A person does something he feels is wrong, and he feels guilty.  As a clearer, how can you make some headway at getting the person over the feelings of guilt by using a wilful clearing approach?

The realm of wilfulness begins when one leaves the realm of innocence and you start thinking,  "I shouldn't have done that," and you feel guilty for having done it.  "Shame on me.  Why do I keep doing things like that?  I must be bad." So the guilt extends from the action back towards your own convictions about who and what it is you are.  People come to me every once in a while and say, "Is it possible that there could be someone born who is inherently bad?"  Of course they don't say who they're thinking of   But the answer is no, this is not the case.  There is no devil. There is no Satan as a being,  a person,  an individual entity.  Yes, there are those things that people consider to be  bad,  or  evil  even,  and  there  is  ignorance  and unconsciousness in the world that leads to things that people consider to be bad acts.  But there is no devil.  In fact there is not even a bad side of you.  You are not bad. But telling you this doesn't seem to spring you loose instantly from all your guilt:  "Oh, I crashed into somebody and  I'm  ashamed  of  myself  for  being  so  careless  and unconscious that I crashed into somebody else.  Yes, I know all the theory that God does everything, and that I am good and pure and that I'm inherently Divine, but it doesn't mean anything to me.  I still feel sick to my gut that I ran into that guy."

What are you going to do with people like this?  Let's investigate the subject.  The guilt feeling comes from the sense that, "I did it and I should not have done it."  Or, "I failed to to something when I should have, and so someone was hurt as a consequence."  When this happens, a person will tend to conclude, "The only solution to this is for me not to do anything."  This is mankind's constant solution. "I won't say anything.  I just won't say anything more.  No, you go ahead without me, I don't feel like going tonight. Never mind about me."  In the extreme cases a person will not even turn on the T.V., because it might burn up.  When it gets to that point, a person is really in trouble.  But most people usually just stay at home and watch television.


Why do people do this?  Why do they hold back?  People hold back because they care.  They love other people.  They are ethical.  It makes a difference to them whether they hurt other people or not.  This is part of one' s inherent nature to feel this way.  You are truly good.  And because you are inherently good, when you keep finding yourself injuring others, intentionally or unintentionally, by either an act of commission or an act of omission, you pull back.  You close down, you shut up, you get behind your shell.  You quit reaching out so much, and you just reach out in the ways that in the past you found didn't hurt other people. And so your personal power is throttled way back, held in and closed up.  And of course that leads to tension.  Your energy has no place to express  itself.   This  leads to frustration, disappointment and lack of fulfilment in life. And you walk around with a guilty conscience.

Now, most people are in a half and half situation.  They're partly beat up in this way and they're partly not.  They can do some things, they can reach out somewhat, and so it's not a total disaster, it's just a partial disaster.

This is karma at work.  When a person finds himself hurting others, he pulls back because he is basically and inherently an ethical being.  You will hear kids say, "I didn't mean to."  A kid runs around, does this and that and he loses his father's hammer.  And he says, "Well, I didn't mean to.  I don't know where it is."  And he didn't mean to, and he doesn't know where the hammer is, but he still feels bad. The reason he still feels bad is because he blames himself, he thinks he should have kept track of where the hammer was. He feels that he's the one that lost it.

These incidents keep building up in a person.  It starts to bother the person more and more.  More things go wrong, still more things go wrong, and it starts to become too much.  The person starts to go to pieces:  "Oh, I can't do anything, I can't go anywhere."  Then he gets into a new syndrome, a new mechanism, of trying to lessen his bad act. In other words, he feels he has to defend himself, and to do so he will employ this mechanism of putting the other person down, or whatever thing it is that's been injured.  He'll start to make less of it, so that what he's done doesn't seem so bad.  He will say, "Yes, I broke the toy, but it was all wrecked up anyway."  So it wasn't such a bad thing.  Or, "The guy came up to me and he bumped into me first, so I hit him back."  In other words, "He made me do it, I didn't do it.  So therefore there is less on me.  I am not the cause." Or,  "Yes,  I did something wrong but it doesn't matter because that person is no good anyway."

I remember during World War II that the Japanese people were not Japanese people.  The Japanese people were vermin.  They weren't people.  The only good Jap was a dead Jap.  This was spoken not only in conversation but stated openly and widely in  newspapers,  on  the  radio  and  on  television.   The commentators,  the new reporters,  and even the political heads of state, including the President, called the Japanese rodents, sub-humans to be shot for the dastardly deed they had done by attacking us at Pearl Harbour.  Now, Pearl Harbour was a bad deed which was uncalled for, but what I'm trying to illustrate here is the mechanism.  Here we were, fighting back and shooting other conscious, living, caring beings who had families.  Here we were killing them with our rifles, our machine guns, etc.  But we said, "They're just animals and it doesn't matter," because we would feel too guilty if we were  to  admit  to  killing conscious,  caring,  loving beings.  So we lessened the magnitude of our bad act when we couldn't stand it.  It is true that we felt we had to fight in our own defence, but even then, if we really felt fully justified, why would we have to make less of the other beings that we were injuring?  Because we did make less of them, it shows that in our heart of hearts we did not feel fully justified.

When the guilt piles up too deep and it bothers people too much, but they still feel they must do the bad act anyway, then there is a tendency to  start  lessening,  in their subjective estimation, the magnitude of the bad act so it doesn't seem so bad to them.  They do this by saying that the other people, person or thing is no good.  This is what makes people critical.

College students who get bank loans from the Bank of America and then fail to make the payment because they bought dope instead, tend to conclude that the Bank of America is no good.  It's a lousy, stupid Italian bank, probably run by the Mafia or at least by crooked politicians, they feel. And the best thing to do, therefore, is to burn it down. Now, there is injustice involved on both sides, but that's not what I'm trying to illustrate.  I'm trying to illustrate how the  establishment,  in this  case,  becomes  bad when someone   inadvertently   or   advertently   injures   the establishment individuals, and feels that he has broken his commitment.  Suddenly the other thing is no good anymore. "Burn the bank down!"  Then the record will be gone.

In Berkeley there is a Bank of America branch that was constantly  being  vandalized.   The  windows  were  broken regularly and there were  practically wars on Telegraph Avenue.  The bank Presidents, feeling that they had done bad acts themselves in their business would say, "Those dirty pot smoking hippies have got to pay!"  And so they put down these awful animal people.  "They're not even people, they shouldn't be treated as people."  So it happens both ways. I'm just trying to illustrate the principle of what makes people critical and negative, and even insult the Divinity which everyone and everything is.

You cannot see God and truth in everything and everyone if you  are  lying  and cheating and  injuring,  because  this mechanism automatically goes into effect.  People don't even know what has happened to them.  They don't think, "I've done something really bad, so therefore I've got to decide that this other individual which is really good is really a nothing."   That's  not  a  conscious  thought.   It's  an automatic, subconscious mechanism that I'm bringing to your consciousness.

There are several things that can be done about this whole business of doing bad acts, feeling guilty, and putting down the world.  One thing is to start to speak the truth.  This mechanism, this technique has been known for thousands of years.   The Catholic Church has used it for about 1600 years.  It's called confession.  If you confess what you think you have done, then you will get better.

Why do you get better?  The reason is that you have not only done a bad act, you also didn't say who did it.  You hid who did it.   "I don't know who ate all the marmalade in the refrigerator."  Most of the time you don't even say,  "I don't know," you just don't say anything at all.  It starts with little things like that.  And why don't you confess in the first place?  Because if you do, someone is going to say,  "Oh,  you' re  going to  get  it  for  that.   No more marmalade for you for the next month."  You think, "But I like marmalade, so I'm not going to say who did it."  When people  put  consequences  on your confessions,  you  learn quickly not to confess.  To the degree you are attached to having things the way you want them to be, you will tend to not confess what you have done.

A mistake can happen here in using the confession technique. If you make people confess to things that they don't feel were wrong, the technique doesn't work.  In fact, they feel like they are lying.  "Confess that you did it."  The person says, "Yes, I did keep the car out until 12 o'clock, but I don't think it's wrong."  "You're going to pay for it.  You did it and it's wrong."  Someone else, in other words, is laying a trip on you about what is wrong, and this defeats the technique of confession.

What heals you is speaking the truth.  If you said, "Yes, I did it," it takes the shell off of you so you can come out again, at least partly.  It feels so good when it's finally told.  "At least I don't have to hide it anymore and feel guilty for hiding.   I did it, O.K."  You are easier to control if you allow people to impose on you a code by which to live.  Then they can try to get you to confess to things that you don't think you did.  If you break the code, you're supposed to feel bad about it so they try to make you confess what you did in violation of their code.  If they can convince you enough of this, you'll really be guilty and you are easier to control.

The Christian church, during the first 300 odd years of it's existence, was one of the most noble and pure religious organizations that ever existed.  But right after that they discovered this mechanism of how to control people through guilt.  If you make them feel guilty by the standards that the hierarchy of the organization sets up,  then you can make them hold back.  Then you make them confess to things that they  don't  feel  guilty  about,  by  their  own  inherent standard.   They confess to violations of your code that you've laid on them.  Now they have two things:  they feel guilty for what they have done which they feel bad about, and they feel bad for having lied about things they didn't feel guilty about.  And the whole thing becomes a farce. Hence  the  very  powerful  and  successful  mechanism  of confession lost most of its strength.

Confession also lost a lot of its strength because people were punished when they did confess.  The justification for punishment is that if someone feels that he's done something bad and you punish him,  then his karma is paid.  Well, if the person really felt that he had done something wrong, and if he felt by doing the penance he learned the lesson of his incorrect action, then that mechanism will work, and he wouldn't feel guilty anymore.  But if he broke a code that someone else has set up that he doesn't agree is a violation of good and honest and proper action, and then he is made to confess and is then punished, do you know what he will want? Revenge, that's what he will want.

So,  it's  awesomely  difficult  to  perform  a  successful confessional activity in the face of an external code of behaviour combined with punishment when one does confess.

If you remove these two aspects, you have a successful system.  And this was what was used in the early church. Just, "I did it.  I'm guilty."  If you confess to what you think that you did wrong, and no-one puts the slightest consequence on it, you think, "Hey, I can open up.  I can confess.  I can tell it all!"

There was a movement started in England, in Oxford, sometime back,  called  the  Oxford  Movement,  later  called  Moral Rearmament.  They used this technique of confession without penance and without an external code.   It had tremendous success   It spread all over the Western world.  It faded because the leaders happened to be fascists, but they had millions of followers and they did a lot of people a lot of good by using this one principle:   they got people to confess and tell the truth about what they had done and they put no punishment on it.  They said,  "O.K. you've told. Just don't do it anymore."  Nor did they say that they should confess to things that they didn't feel guilty about. They said, "Just write down a list of things that you feel guilty about, and we'll read them in front of the group." And when it was done, the people felt cleansed.  Most of their guilt lifted.

Confession is a wilful technique and it has a certain amount of success to it.   Unfortunately,  it also has a limitation.  Confession can only be carried so far because of an underlying principle.

Any time that you use your will, you are out of the realm of the absolute.  In the absolute, there is only one.  But when you get into using your will, you're using your will against something, and so you have duality.  Therefore you can have directionality, you have going from here to there, up and down, hot and cold, good and bad.  And when you push so far in one direction of a dualism or dichotomy, it's hard to push any further.  In other words, when the swing of the pendulum has gotten so far one way, to push any further is very difficult, and it naturally wants to swing back to the other side.  When you start piling up apples, higher and higher, the higher you go the harder it is to get them to stay up there.  They tend to want to fall down, from the up to the down.  The same thing is true of confession.  When you confess to something you have done, it's all going in one direction.  "I did this, I did that, I did this, I did that, and that and this and that.  I can't think of anything else;" and you run down.

There are a couple of ways to help solve this.  One is to have a dyad situation in which you confess for a while and then the other person confesses to you, and this reverses the direction.  Your partner confesses to you and therefore you have to be there and keep your mouth shut and not put any consequences on it, not even ridicule or look askance when your partner says something.

Ridicule is one of the worst things you can do when someone confesses.  One time I had a person who had done something that she felt ashamed of by her own standards.   I had trained some clearers to do this confessional technique and I trained them not to put any consequences of any kind on the other person when the other person confessed, because if you do say something about what the other person did, that person it likely to shut up.  Finally this woman struck a barrier in her confessions and she wouldn't say what it was. The clearer I had trained was saying, "Come on, come on, tell me."  "No, no.  I can't."  "Come on."  And she went on this way for hours, and they ran out of time and had to go at it the next day.  In the meantime I said, "Don't let it go.  Keep at it until you find out what it is."  So the clearer continued and the person resisted:  "Oh no, I can't tell,  I mustn't tell.  You'll never love me again.    It sounded like she must have murdered someone.  Finally she got the clearer to promise that he would not tell the police, that he would not tell anybody, except me, what this was that she had done, and she finally confessed.  She said, "I played hookey from Sunday School."

The clearer laughed at her for such a stupid thing.  And that was it, she wouldn't talk to that clearer any more. "He ridiculed me," she said.  He laughed at her and she shut up tight as a drum, because she felt ashamed of it.  By her standards, it was the worse thing she had ever done.  And by the confessor putting a consequence and punishing the person for that, it put a stop on it.

So, if people are listening to each other confess in a dyad, which is an excellent wilful technique, you have to have a rule that the partner won't say anything or do anything about what you've said, and vice versa.  As a listening partner you don't say anything.  You just sit, watch and listen.  Afterwards you can both go get a milk shake, and get your reward instead of punishment.  It works very well, but you have to follow that rule.

There is another way to deal with this mechanism of flows going from one side to another and the tendency for it to go too far.  In a clearing session, if you get the clearee to confess and confess and confess, eventually the person runs down and says, "I can't think of anything else."  Even after you dig around, the person will say, "My mind goes blank." What you should do then is to ask the person what he has withheld.  Instead of just asking what he has done, ask him what he has held back, which is the opposite of a doing action.  That reverses the direction of the flow and out comes a whole other view:  "Well, I never told anybody that I took the 50 cents out of my older brother's pocket.  I withheld that."  You see, he didn't consider the action itself as a bad act, he was fixed on the idea that he never told anybody that he did that.  So, by asking the clearee first what he has done and then by asking him what he has withheld, this keeps the duality problem balanced, and he can go on by the hour answering the questions.

Confession is a powerful tool, especially when done under the conditions that I have described.  It does not remove karma.  It does not destroy karma, but it makes a person feel a lot better and a lot less guilty.  People who are really jammed up and very negative are the type of people who benefit most from this technique.  "The dumb world.  I hate  everybody.   Stupid  things.   Everything  is  wrong, especially you."  In the case of the clearee or the person being critical of you then you know he feels guilty about something he has done to you or has withheld from you.  If you're smart you will ask him what it is, and when he tells you, if you're even smarter, you won't do or say anything about it, you'll just let it go.  This will encourage him so much that he'll tell you the rest of the things he's cheated you out of which he never told you about, and also the things he did that were not directly done to you, but the truth of them was withheld from you.  "Well, I went with your girlfriend, I never told you that."  This wasn't an act towards you in itself, as far as he is concerned, it is the withholding of the information from you that he felt bad about.

People  withhold  and  ultimately  withhold  themselves. Confession opens the flow and the person feels much better. They are not liberated from their karma by confession.  The Jams and the Catholics felt,  "Well, it's not enough to confess, you must be punished."   In fact,  the whole of society at large punished people when they finally forced confessions out of them about what they had done.   The mistake  is  that  people  feel  it  is  their  personal responsibility to see to it that you pay for your karma. This is their mistake.  It is not any human's job to take care of someone' s karma.  One always takes care of one' s own karma.  When the punishment is to be metered out, it is done by the individual himself.  You need not worry.  And if he feels truly liberated in his heart, then there is no karma. But if deep down, underneath it all, he still feels like it was a bad thing, he will punish himself.  You might say, "I don't see these people being punished, these dictators who kill  and  torture  thousands  of  people  to  get  in  that position, and here they are living in the lap of luxury. You tell me there is justice in this world?  There is none. We must get these people and meter out justice to them ourselves."  You have too short a view of it.

Maybe this dictator was tortured by somebody else in the past for 500 years, one lifetime after another.  And now he is getting his torturers back for what they did to him.  He lived  a  miserable  and  deprived  life,  lifetime  after lifetime, and now he's living it up for one.  Or maybe he did  all  kinds  of  wonderful,  marvellous  social  acts, compulsively, for 500,000 lifetimes, and he's finally done enough and nobody has given him anything good so he's going to collect it himself.  He's going to be dictator and live it up.  It usually doesn't take long as a dictator to use up all your good karma.  Most of them end up in a pretty difficult way.

One must not look at the short-term when you are looking at justice.  I am satisfied, through thorough testing of this principle, that it is accurate, absolutely, to the slightest brush stroke.  Justice is absolute, total and complete.  It is a quality of God, and therefore it is absolute.  But for a human to try to take care of justice, this is impossible.   Therefore,  when  someone  confesses,  put  no consequence, no punishment, no standard on him.  Someone might do something and not feel guilty at all about it, yet if you had done it you would feel horrible.  If you say, "That doesn't bother you?  Well, it should," you have made an error.

People are marvellous justifiers and there are all kinds of justifying mechanisms.  One is to make the other person less and insignificant.  Even though you feel in your heart that you have done something bad, you try to blame somebody else or the circumstances for making you do it.  "I couldn't help it.  I had to do it.  What else could I do, I had to keep my job?  I had to make a living, to protect myself."  That may superficially give you a clear conscience, but then your ulcer gets worse.  Why does your ulcer get worse?  Because in your subconscious you feel guilty.  You feel in your ultimate consciousness that, "Even though I was justified in doing it, I still shouldn't have hurt him.  I shouldn't have taken revenge, I shouldn't have hit back.  I should not have done this, I should have turned the other cheek as Jesus told me to, and I didn't do it.  I didn't live up to my own high standards."  So, subconsciously you punish yourself.

Just knowing about karma and long-term justice and all these mechanisms is very useful for the Western world, because until about 80 years ago, we didn't even know about this. It's been very liberating to the West.  In fact, you find that karma is an ordinary word, even used on television. But then people start saying, "Well, if it's all karma, then I don't have to do anything."  If you are not going to be responsible, you can't leave the responsibility blank, you have to give it over to that which is the truth.  You have to turn over the responsibility to Truth.  If you turn it over  to  your  imagination or the devil,  you will  have trouble.

If you are having trouble at work and are critical all the time, you can apply these principles by doing this:  you take all the things that you think you have done that were bad, put them down on a piece of paper and send them to the board of directors that hired you.  Then you won't feel critical and bad anymore.  They may fire you, but you won't feel bad anymore, and it'll be settled one way or the other. Or they may say, "We knew that was the problem all the time anyway.  Glad you told us.  No, it's all right, go ahead and do it right.  We have confidence in you now, because you have spoken the truth."

People are very forgiving when they are given the truth. And when they are given unreal nonsense, they will not let you off the hook.  If confessing doesn't work for you, you haven't told the whole truth.

For those people who are guilt-ridden,  always defending themselves, negative, insulting and always irritated, the thing that they need and that they will respond to is this karma technique.  Nothing else will produce results on them. You can try sahaja yoga, you can try asanas, you can try Gestalt therapy, you can try anything you want.  I've tried them.   I  spent  from 1950  to  1973  testing methods  and techniques on a large number of those people, and the only technique that would change these types of people is this one I have described here which would finally get them to see what they have done.

The worst cases are the ones who, when you ask, "What have you done?" they say, "I haven't done anything to anybody." "You mean you've never done anything to anybody?"  "No, not to anybody.  Don't ask me such dumb questions."  They've got themselves so justified mentally that they don't even dare to think of the subject that they've done something to somebody   else,   because   if   they   do   they'll   feel overwhelmingly guilty.  So you become the enemy of their mind.  You say, "What have you done to someone?"  "What? That's not what's the matter with me.  I want to be able to levitate things.  Teach me how to do that."

People who don't respond to other methods and means are in their hearts guilt-ridden to the core.  The first step of liberation is to get them to confess.  As the clearer you ask them, "Tell me something you have done to someone," and you don't take no for an answer.  They'll say, "Well, I don't know.  There must have been something.  I've given people a hard time."  They will be vague and general at the beginning.  You have to tie them down.  "Well, what did you do to give them a hard time?"  "I don't know."  You see, they can't even think about it.   By turning the whole business into a grey fuzz, they never have to think about it.  Therefore, they are never able to confess without your help.

As a clearer, you have to tie the person down so he is specific in his confessions.  "Name one thing that you did to one person.   "I don't know   I can't think of anybody." You could suggest one.  There is one person you can never miss on, and that's his mother.  When he first tries to think of something he did to his mother, he'll say, "She was mean to me.  She kicked me, she never loved me," and all these things will start coming out.  These are not answers to your question.  These are not responses.  You have to be very patient and very persistent and not give up until you get him to confess one thing that he has done to his mother. "Well, one time I said, "Mother, you do dumb things.'"  O.K. You've finally got a response.  And he'll feel a little better.  He'll eventually say, "Hey, this is not such a bad technique."   You might have worked  three  hours  on one confession, but you turned him around from this caustic, bitter individual into someone who has confessed to saying one slight little thing he did to his mother.

Sometimes a person will answer in such a way that you can't see what it is that he has actually done to his mother.  He doesn't look at what happened over there, he only says what he did.  He says, "Well, I said 'Mother, you do dumb things sometimes.'"  You should follow this up.  "What did this do to your mother when you said this?"  "I don't know what it did to her."  He doesn't want to look at that.  "What effect do you think this had on her when you said it?"  He will probably start off again at this point:  "Oh, she's such a fool.   She never felt anything in her life."  These are avoidances, justifications.  "Well, what do you think, by your own judgement, that did?"  "Well, you know, she cried." Here comes a real statement out of that person:  "it made her cry and it really bothered me."  And tears start to course down his cheeks and it transforms his life, in one moment.  It will turn such a person around from the way he was being into a person who really did care all the time. You've transformed him from a critical person into a crying person, but he feels much better about the whole situation.

From this, tension begins to relax.  The person's ongoing guilt begins to ease up and he stops punishing himself so badly with migraine headaches, etc.  As soon as he can begin to see what he feels he did to his mother, then he begins to say, "You know, mother wasn't so bad after all.  You know, she did a lot of things for me."

After the person has got such a big confession out, then you don't want to go on and ask him again what he has done to his mother.  You say,  "What have you withheld from your mother?"  "Well, you know, I never told her I loved her.  I loved her  all  this  time.   I  hated her  guts  too,  but underneath I really loved her.  And I never told her that."

This is a very powerful, simplistic approach to resolving the unchanging and critical case, that kind of person who won't let himself improve.  Such people batter their heads against the most complex and clever techniques, but they won't get better because they, in their hearts, don't feel they deserve it.  So you have confession and then they can grow.   This  is  the  karma  technique,  the  confession technique.  Call it what you want.  You can even use it on yourself.  If you've tried everything and nothing works for you, and yet you never did anything bad to anyone in your whole life, you're who I'm talking about.

This technique is a God-send, but for a stubborn type of person who feels he never did anything to anybody, it takes a very clever clearer to get him started.  Once started and he's got the idea, he'll say, "Hey, this is the greatest technique that I ever came across.  I slept soundly for the first time in my life."  Then almost anybody can work with him, in any technique, after he has confessed for a while about his mother, father, brothers and sisters, girlfriend, boyfriend, teachers, husband, wife, the boss, the employees, the government and all these things.  As a clearer, do a thorough job.

As a clearer you have to watch one thing especially.  When the person is almost ready to tell you something and he is just on the brink, all you have to do is say, "Tell me."  If you don't tell him to tell you, and it came right up in the person's consciousness but he didn't tell you, he will feel that he got away with not saying it, and he will turn critical of you.  He will turn critical of you because he just did something bad to you.  Here you are helping him, giving your time and effort, your love and your contact, your persistence,  your training,  you knowledge and your skills to help him confess, and something was right on the brink and he held it back.  So now he has done something bad to you and he has withheld from you.  Immediately he will say something like, "You sure you know what you're doing?  I thought we were getting somewhere.  This is dumb."  They will complain about the technique, and especially about you, about what a fool you are.  Or they'll think it privately to themselves, and just clam up.  "I don't know.  I don't think there's anything else.   I think we've gotten everything. No, we don't need to go on with this.  I'm not going to pay for this session either."  And you feel crushed to pieces. You think, "I'll never do any sort of work like this again. People are awful."  You will feel badly too, because you failed to get the person to say what it was.  You know it in your heart and he knows it in his heart, always.

When the technique is going properly, when the confession is going right, it's glory all the way.  You have a beautiful, marvellous, growing situation.  It's something that I have found extremely powerful,  and it will unstick the most difficult-to-improve person.   If all else fails, do this confessional approach as I have explained it.

In the end karma only dissolves through surrender to Truth. What I told you here is a helpful wilful approach, because when a person is buried under a mountain of guilt he needs a wilful approach, with someone there to help him.  Otherwise he won't let himself be forgiven.  Everyone must forgive himself in his own heart, because your heart is God.

THE Karma Technique
Key Data
1.    Because you are inherently good in your true nature, you will tend to pull back in life whenever you find yourself injuring another. Conversely, you will tend to let go and open up in life when you find yourself treating others in a way consistent with your true nature.
2.    Guilt is the result of having the sense of, "I did it and shouldn't have," or, "I didn't do it and I should have."
3.    Justifying one's actions or regarding others as being less than what they are, are two mechanisms one uses for trying to avoid guilt.
4.    Confession without consequences will reduce guilt feelings and release mental tension.
5.    In the Karma Technique, alternately instruct the clearee:
"Tell me something you have done that you think you should not have done," and,
"Tell me something you have failed to do that you think you should have."
After any breakthrough confession, ask:
"What have you withheld from (person, group or others)?" before continuing.
6.    The act of surrender to the Divine is what finally removes one's karma.