Karma is not merely applicable to the individual alone but also to groups, such as communities, towns, countries, and even continents. One cannot get away in some particular or other from the rest of humanity. All are interconnected. One may delude himself, as nearly all people do, into thinking that he can live his own life and let others go hang, but sooner or later experience reveals his error. All are ultimately one big family. This is what reflection on experience teaches. When one reflects on Truth, he shall eventually learn that, as the Overself, all are one entity--like the arms and legs of a single body. The upshot of this is that he has to consider the welfare of others equally with his own, not merely because karma is at work to teach the individual, but also because it is at work to teach humanity en masse the final and highest lesson of its unity. When this idea is applied to the recent war, one sees that the latter was partly (only partly) the result of the indifference of richer peoples to poorer ones, of well-governed nations to badly governed ones, of the isolationist feeling that one's country is all right and if others are not, then that is unfortunate but their own affair. In short, there is no true prosperity and happiness for any country whilst one of its neighbours is poor and miserable; each one is his brother's keeper.
-- Notebooks Category 9: From Birth to Rebirth > Chapter 3 : Laws and Patterns of Experience > # 395
