The teaching's promise is that a person can balance the karma of many lifetimes in this one and make the ascension at the end of it, rather than returning. The violet flame is the stated instrument — invoked to transmute the record of past actions — and the ethic that goes with it is exacting about not making new debts. This gives the practice its urgency and also its pressure: members in the 1980s were making decisions about work, money and geography on the basis that the account had to be settled in the years available.