Conscious vs. Mechanical Suffering

This Work is Esoteric Christianity. People imagine they have something to sacrifice. There is only one thing they have to sacrifice and that is their suffering. A man or woman in this Work must eventually begin to know what Conscious Suffering is compared with Mechanical Suffering.

Notice carefully what we have to give up. The sacrifice the Work seeks is that of our habitual, mechanical suffering. Of course, people will at this point justify themselves and say they have no such suffering, or that what suffering they have is logical and reasonable. Oh, this self-justifying that you all go in for. A man, a woman, the Work teaches, must sacrifice their suffering. Mechanical suffering leads nowhere. A man, a woman, cannot awaken if they retain this dreadful weight, their mechanical suffering, and nourish it, by a continual process of justifying it.

Maurice Nicoll, “Commentary on Suffering" in Psychological Commentaries on the Teaching of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky (Vol. 4, p. 1240)