“There is an evil that I have seen under the sun, and it is
prevalent among men. A man whom God gives riches and property and honor, and
his soul lacks nothing of all he desires, and God gives him no power to eat of
it, but a strange man eats it; this is vanity and a grievous malady.” (Ecclesiastes 6:1-2)
King Solomon reminds us
that evil is only the reference that God created for us to choose goodness, in
order to exercise free will and remain free, for goodness is our freedom.
Evil
continues to be prevalent as long as we live in the duality from which we have
to make choices all the time.
Thus we approach life with
the ethical principle that orders goodness when we are before positive and
negative, true and false, constructive and destructive, useful and useless,
delightful and awful, sweet and bitter, joy and sadness, et al.
We have said that goodness
is the origin, cause, reason and purpose of God’s creation. It is what we
pursue and find in all that God gives us as possessions, “property, riches and
honor”, and from which we don’t lack nothing, except for the “strange” or alien
thought, desire, coveting or lust triggered by ego’s fantasies and illusions
that are just the vanities that become the maladies of our attachments,
obsessions and addictions.
“Should a man beget one hundred [children] and live many
years, and he will have much throughout the days of his years, but his soul
will not be sated from all the good, neither did he have burial. I said that
the stillborn is better than he. For he comes in vanity and goes in darkness,
and in darkness his name is covered.”
(6:3-4)
In our vanities, no matter
the plenitude and fulfillment that we may acquire in this world as something
supposedly good, without real goodness we will never be sated.
Whatever we make
ourselves believe as good, coming from materialistic desires, we still live in
the darkness of the vanities that become our “name” as who we are and what we
pursue.
“Moreover, he did not see the sun nor did he know [it]; this
one has more gratification than that one. And if he had lived a thousand years
twice and experienced no pleasure, do not all go to one place? All of a person’s
toil is for his mouth, and is the appetite not yet sated?”
(6:5-7)
These verses make us aware
of the repetitive patterns of the vanities that are the vexation of our soul,
trapped in their cycles and returning to the same place. What we say usually
reflects our desires, for which we toil and their futility is the reason of our
non-satisfaction.
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