Ecclesiastes 2

Staging Vanity: A Soul’s Search for Meaning

Ecclesiastes 2 reads like the inner diary of a consciousness experimenting with its own powers. The speaker, the I who narrates, is not a historical monarch but the human mind posing as monarch over its interior kingdom. What unfolds in the chapter is a psychological drama: an intentional, staged series of experiments in which various states of mind are adopted, cultivated, and observed to reveal their creative capacity and their limits. Read as inner theatre, each object and action—wine, houses, gardens, singers, silver, labour—becomes a state of consciousness or a mode of imagination, and the narrative becomes a record of what it costs to identify with those modes and what remains when they are relinquished.

The opening sentence, “I said in mine heart, Go to now, I will prove thee with mirth,” names the experiment. The heart—inner attention—volunteers to test what pleasure can do. Mirth and laughter are stages of the psyche: the playful, sensual self that seeks buoyancy and escape. To “acquaint my heart with wisdom and to lay hold on folly” is to deliberately inhabit opposing states to measure their consequences. This is an imaginative laboratory where the self becomes its own subject and object. Each indulgence described—wine, laughter, mirth—are not mere behaviours but conscious identities assumed to see what world they produce.

Building houses and planting vineyards are metaphors for constructing identity and cultivating desire. A house is a conceptual environment, the image you live inside; a vineyard is the deliberate tending of passions and their fruits. Pools of water to irrigate the wood suggest emotional reserves tended to feed those inner projects. Servants and maidens are habits and automatisms that serve the ruling imagination; silver and gold are the values and beliefs that give the self its apparent stability. Singers and musical instruments are the inner voices and harmonics—the aesthetic states that color consciousness. By saying, “I made me great works,” the narrator admits to employing imagination as artisan: reality is shaped, rooms carved out in mind, gardens made to sustain the chosen life.

Yet the repeated verdict—“vanity and vexation of spirit; there is no profit under the sun”—is not a condemnation of pleasure per se but an insight into the ephemeral quality of identity built solely from surface states. “Under the sun” functions as a term for daytime consciousness, the literal, sensory field where things appear and disappear. Any structure erected only in this sunlit arena is subject to decay and forgetfulness. The experimenter discovers that the outer achievement of the imagination, when only supported by transient feelings and sensory input, yields no lasting satisfaction. The inner observer—still the same I—finds that even wisdom, which “excelleth folly,” shares the fate of forgetfulness: both wise and fool pass into the same oblivion when their work is inherited by another who may be either wise or foolish. This is the psychology of identification: the ego’s accomplishments are fleeting because they are anchored to temporality and to other minds’ valuations.

The chapter turns inward to distinguish kinds of imagining. There is the shallow imagination that fashions pleasures and possessions; and there is a deeper faculty that begets wisdom, joy, and rest of heart. “Then I turned myself to behold wisdom, and madness, and folly,” signals a meta-awareness—an observer observing modes of the mind. Wisdom, here, is a state that sees beyond the immediate fruits of action; it recognizes pattern and consequence. Still, the narrator notes that wisdom too can be experienced as vanity when considered only as an asset to be left as legacy. The painful recognition is that the usual forms of success are subject to the same law: what is given into the hands of others loses its power unless it is rooted in the creative source of consciousness itself.

The repeated motif of remembrance and legacy—“there is no remembrance of the wise more than of the fool”—is the ego’s fear articulating itself. It fears annihilation through forgetfulness, and so it labors to fashion memorials: buildings, works, wealth. These outward memorials, however, are only materializations of a particular imagination. When the chapter says, “I hated life; because the work that is wrought under the sun is grievous unto me,” it is the awakened center within rejecting the mind’s habit of pouring its creative force into transient shells. The drama is that the self must learn to reallocate creative attention from these shells into the sentient center that alone endures.

Two different creative modes are contrasted in the brief counsel: the mode of anxious accumulation and the mode of present enjoyment that acknowledges its source as “from the hand of God.” “There is nothing better for a man, than that he should eat and drink, and that he should make his soul enjoy good in his labour. This also I saw, that it was from the hand of God.” Here the text shifts from striving to surrender. To “eat and drink” is not mere indulgence but a conscious inhabiting of a state—allowing the inner experience of satisfaction to be accepted as a gift rather than a trophy to be displayed. When enjoyment is recognized as arising from the creative ground—when the imagination rests in its creator-nature—its fruit is not vanity even though it may be transient in the outer world. This is the subtle psychological difference between clinging and receiving: one exhausts the self by projecting value outward; the other centers the self in the inner source so that outward forms are free to shift.

The chapter’s inventory of riches—gold, silver, men and women singers, delights of the sons of men—becomes an inventory of inner resources. Each item corresponds to an imaginal faculty: the capacity to organize (servants), to sing (aesthetic imagination), to gather value (treasure). The narrator’s admission that he “withheld not my heart from any joy” demonstrates a full experimental embrace. Yet when he inspects the completed work and pronounces it vanity, the conclusion is not nihilistic but diagnostic. It shows the mind learning the law: imagination creates reality, but the result depends on which center of consciousness you identify with. If you identify with the façade, the work is vanity; if you identify with the creative center that animates the façade, the work becomes an expression of being.

The repeated “for all his days are sorrows” and “his heart taketh not rest in the night” articulate the existential cost of identification with the transitory. The sleepless heart is the mind that invests its being in avoiding loss: it creates legacies to ward off oblivion. But the chapter counsels another way: contentment that “comes from the hand of God.” Psychologically, this is the shift from doing to being—from manufacturing satisfaction to allowing oneself to be the source of satisfaction. The creative power here is imagination not as a tool for accumulation but as the artist of inner states. When imagination is reoriented to dwell in the desired state and to feel its reality, it issues in outer correspondences without the frantic labour the ego assumes is necessary.

The account also teaches an operative method: deliberate assumption of states to test their outcomes. “I said in mine heart” is a psychic decree; the heart’s willingness to act as laboratory means that imagination is not accidental but volitional. Each experiment—pleasure, building, wisdom—serves to reveal the mechanics: what you inhabit, you become; what you command in your imagination shapes the patterns of your outward life. Yet the final insight reframes success: if the center commanding is the transient ego, its creations will be subject to the sun’s dissolution; if the center commanding is the deeper, abiding creative consciousness, then even passing forms serve as vehicles for inner joy.

Finally, the chapter draws the essential psychological distinction: to labor for legacy is to court vexation; to accept the present enjoyment that rises from the imaginative ground is to align with the creative source. The paradox is that deliberate enjoying—when oriented to the inner hand that gives—does not diminish effort but sanctifies it. The narrator’s experiment has shown that imagination creates reality; it has also shown that only when imagination rests as the silent, abiding center does it produce durable peace. Thus Ecclesiastes 2 is not an exhortation to ascetic denial nor to unbridled indulgence, but a map of interior alchemy: test the states, see their outcomes, and finally surrender identification to the creative center so that imagination can create not merely ephemeral gain but lasting inner profit.