Maurice Nicoll on Useful Suffering

This realization that one is not one′s mechanicalness, not one′s False Personality, not one′s Imaginary ′I′, not one′s negative attitudes, not one′s laid down associations, is always accompanied by a feeling of pain, or, as Mr. Ouspensky once said, a sour feeling, and he said on one occasion that very few people could bear this pain or sour feeling about themselves and so preferred to fall back into what they had always been. At the same time I would add that this painful or sour feeling is also accompanied by a feeling of freedom, a feeling of wonder that one has always been a slave to all this machinery which one has imagined to be one′s real self.

(Maurice Nicoll - Pyschological Commentaries, vol.3 page 891)