From Futility to Happiness_ Sisyphus as Everyman (19) torrent

From Futility to Happiness: Sisyphus as Everyman

Kenneth Wapnick, Ph.D.

The Greek mythic figure of Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to a life of pushing a rock up a mountain only to have it fall back down to the bottom, there to begin his labors again. His life of futility mirrors our life in the body and the hopelessness inherent in pursuing any meaning in the world. The first part of this book addresses this view as presented in A Course in Miracles, summarized in the idea that we can never be truly happy in this world because it is not our home. The second part discusses the transition from futility to happiness in the context of the Course’s offering of another way of looking at our seeming fate, reflecting Albert Camus’ important essay on Sisyphus, which he ended by stating, “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Through a change of mind brought about by changing our inner teacher from the ego to the Jesus, our lives of futility are transformed into opportunities of unlearning the ego’s thought system. A purposeless life of inherent meaninglessness thus metamorphoses into a meaningful classroom that leads us to the Heaven we never truly left.