Karma, memory, and desire are just the software of the soul. It’s conditioning that the soul undergoes in order to create experience. And it’s a cycle. In most people, the cycle is a conditioned response. They do the same things over and over again. Karma, that way, is limiting to creativity. But, once you become aware and you can shift your internal reference point, not to the person you believe yourself to be, but as the silent witness of karma, memory, and desire, you can manifest a different reality because you are, in fact, the actor, the protagonist, the antagonist, the director, the choreographer, and all the other characters in the drama that you call life.

In terms of bad karma, can anyone except the individual person themselves expiate that bad Karma, or does it have to be the person themselves?

There’s no person in the deeper reality, so the question is not relevant. Karma is experiences that make for evolution or experiences that retard evolution. Even if the karma is “bad,” it serves a purpose. But, the whole point of karma is to recognise that the whole experience of being an individual self is the bondage of karma.

When you’re “in” yourself you’re in this bondage, and you have to realise it to get yourself out. No one else can do it for you?

Right. But you can get to a certain place any moment where there is no karma. And that is transcendence. Karma is only in space time and causality. Your real self resides non-locally. — Beliefnet.com