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Ecclesiastes 10:20 · World English Bible

Ecclesiastes 10:20 Meaning Don’t Curse the King

Don’t curse the king, no, not in your thoughts; and don’t curse the rich in your bedroom: for a bird of the sky may carry your voice, and that which has wings may tell the matter.

What does Ecclesiastes 10:20 mean?

The king is the ruling awareness in a person, and the rich man is the one already established in fullness. To curse either even in thought is to condemn your own higher state in the very place where states are set.

From the Manifestation reading below.

Ecclesiastes 10:20 through 1 lens

The same verse, read by one tradition.

MANIFESTATION

Manifestation

The king is the ruling awareness in a person, and the rich man is the one already established in fullness. To curse either even in thought is to condemn your own higher state in the very place where states are set. The bedchamber is the inward, private room of imagining, where a person supposes he is unseen and unheard. Nothing there stays hidden.

The bird of the air that carries the voice is the law by which every inner movement travels outward and returns as event. A thought spoken to no one is still sown, and it reaps. The winged thing that tells the matter works quietly. Whatever a person entertains in secret is reported back to him in the facts of his life. His unspoken moods become the conditions he meets.

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Live Ecclesiastes 10:20 today

  1. When you are alone in the car and a silent complaint starts up about your boss or someone doing better than you, let the sentence finish and then quietly take it back, the way you would unsend a text.
  2. Next time you are with someone you secretly resent, drop the private commentary running behind your eyes and speak to the version of them you would want to meet.
  3. In a tense meeting or a group chat going sideways, keep your inside voice as clean as your outside voice, because the mood you carry out of that room is the room you walk into next.

What have I been saying about someone when I thought no one could hear?

The same truth in other traditions

Dhammapada 1

Everything begins in the mind. What you think in private is the seed, and the life you walk through later is the harvest of those seeds.

Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius

The soul takes the color of its own thoughts. Dye it with resentment in secret and you will live inside a resentful world.

Zen

There is no hidden room. A single ripple of ill will moves the whole pond, and the water tells on you without a word being said.

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