@_Barry. I’ve been pondering your question about which country doesn’t have so much collective karma to heal. Good question. And Nighthawk999’s response - that only enlightened beings like Buddha or Christ don’t have karma to deal with. But countries without a lot of bad karma, is that a thing?
Let’s look at it this way: Seems like we all have some bad karma, but some may have more than others. If you’ve spent lifetimes ripping others off and living primarily from a selfish ego then one would accumulate a lot of negative karma, as opposed to someone who lived from a sense of caring and compassion for others. We might also observe that some family lines have a lot more negative karma than others. For instance a mafia family vs a family that operated more from a sense of love and compassion for others. I’m sure most of us know families with many generations of various kinds of abuse, addictions (as a way to self-medicate the trauma) and various bad behaviors that get passed down the line. Other families are more into loving, helping and serving. None are perfect, of course, we all have our shit to deal with, but some seem better than others. Now apply that at the collective level to whole nations and cultures. Do some nations and cultures have more of history of bad behavior and misuse of power? I would argue that some are worse than others. The Western European nations, for various reasons were some of the first nations to develop things like guns and large sailing ships that could travel large distances across oceans. With this kind of power comes the temptation to abuse this power. They were able to conquer and colonize many parts of the world. When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean Islands, he and his men were soon enslaving the Native people. But they were hard to subjugate so before long slaves were being brought in from Africa. Bad karma. Similar kinds of histories are found throughout many parts of the world where European colonialism went. And America has been a big part of this. And sure, we’ve done some good things as well, but also many, many horrible things in my opinion. Bruce Cockburn expresses it well in this song:
It’s a stolen land and it’s all we got
It’s a stolen land and we’ll never forget
It’s a stolen land and there’s no going back
It’s a stolen land and were not through yet.
So yeah, we have the karma of stolen land, we have the karma of slavery, we have the karma of stealing land from Mexico (Mexican-American War), we have the karma of taking other lands from the Spanish (the Spanish American War), not to mention Vietnam, the Iraq War (sold to us with a lie of “weapons of mass destruction”) and numerous other things. Not that we haven’t also done good things as Americans, we have. But like many countries, we also need to look at our bad karma and deal with that. And I come from a family where some of it’s branches go back to early Colonial times in America. For instance one branch of my family were large landholders in Maryland during the 1600’s. So they probably had slaves. I also have some Native ancestry. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some African blood in there somewhere. But contrast American and Western Colonial karma with a country like Bhutan, a Nation with generations of practicing Dharma. Not that they are perfect, no one is. But I would argue that some countries do indeed have more bad karma to deal with than others.
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