Are Solomon’s Ecclesiastes Relevant For You Today? Yes, More Than You Think! Chapter 2

Solomon goes all out in a “calculated dissipation”, having all kinds of pleasures to find out if there was a good thing for humans to occupy themselves all the days of their lives”.

He grew his riches in sickening abundance, he had every experience he could dream of, he grew in political power, glory and he had multitudes of talented people working for him, not to mention women beyond measure.

He did all these things for himself. In this chapter he sounds quite self-centered, with the word “me” showing up many times.

He then took time to consider everything, and he came to the conclusion that “everything was worthless, a vexation of spirit and without profit”.

It takes a while to wrap the brain around this, in the same way that we struggle to assimilate that people who win the lottery are no happier a couple weeks later than they were before the big win.

We are so heavily conditioned to believe the lie that our happiness and satisfaction comes from external factors, but we could have known that it doesn’t for millennia.

Now we even have the scientific evidence to prove that this is true…

…But are we living our lives in accordance to this truth?

In any case, Solomon recognized that wisdom and foolishness were like LIGHT and darkness. Solomon didn’t know about ego, ID and what Freud called “super ego”, — which is now more known as our consciousness. He would have dug all that if the knowledge of it had existed then.

He says that the wise man has his eyes in his head, (I disagree), and that the foolish is blind.

I think that the foolish use their head quite a lot, and the wise use divine Intelligence to which they know they are connected; such Intelligence is decidedly not rooted in the head. But Solomon didn’t meet Carl Jung; he would have loved him.

“In the end, I am going to have the same experience as the fools”, he thought. “What the heck have I worked so hard for, then? This is dumb”, he seems to have reflected. “We are all going to die the same and be forgotten the same”, he said.

“Therefore I hated life because the work that was done was aggravating and annoying to me because everything is futile and worthless and not spiritually satisfying”

“I also hated all my work that I had done and I started to feel hopeless…”

Solomon’s agitation grows as he realizes that it was all “messed up” that someone would work with integrity and then he would have to pass his possessions on to a fool who never worked to earn any of it; he was very upset about this.

“Our days are nothing but pain and work is irritating; even at night you can’t rest; it’s all messed up”… and then he ends this way:

“No better thing is there for mankind than to eat and to drink and that his soul be contended and glad in his work”. This is at a shallow level and does not address the deeper needs of the spirit. He is still not finding the connection within himself to The Source and the real riches.

The last verse can be misleading.

If you decide to live your life in alignment with the highest energies, then knowledge, joy and even wisdom will come to your life as a result of that alignment, but if we are fools and pay no attention to the way we are going, then we end up without understanding, joy or wisdom.

This verse seems to suggest that he thought that riches are a part of this deal, but we can see that a lot of people who do not align to the highest energies can get a lot of “success” in their pockets. (Perhaps not in their lives, but in their bank accounts).

The measure for joy is not the riches, but the alignment that we have with our true and authentic Being, the Intelligence to which we all belong.

Look for Chapter 3 coming up…!

Would you like to explore new ideas about old things?

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— We are caught between two eras. Join me as we discuss provocative topics. I’d love to see you there!

Viviana Rose — Copyrighted material 2018