Deputy Steward

The Work teaches that we are not a unity of being, but a multiplicity.  We can verify this in our own experience through self-observation. A primary point in the Work is to divide oneself into two: an observing side and an observed side and to observe oneself from the angle of Work ideas and, thereby awaken from the mechanicality of the multiplicity, a movement toward unity of being. Deputy Steward is the name given to the experience and process of inner coherence with various I’s or aspects of the self that can work and understand. When there is a greater sense of the Work coming alive in oneself and consistently coming to meet life situations in a new way through the Work, one can know that the energy and processes of Deputy Steward are active.

“(1) If a man takes himself as one, no struggle can develop within him. If no struggle develops within him, he cannot change. Why is this so?

“(2) If a man supposes there is only one thing that acts, thinks and feels in him – that is, one ‘I’ – then he cannot understand that there should be one thing that commands and another that obeys. …

“(3) If a man is so hypnotized and therefore so asleep as to think he is one, he cannot receive the ideas of the Work. …

“(4) If a man thinks he is one and a unity, and that it is always the same self that acts and thinks and does, how can he observe himself? He cannot … In such a case, a man often believes that observation means observation of something outside himself – of buses, streets, people, scenery, etc. But self-observation is not done via the external senses which show only what is not oneself – i.e., the outer world.

“(5) Unless the Work is established in a man by means of Observing I, nothing can change in him. Observing I is more interior than life as sense. …

“(6) The establishing of Observing I is to make something more interior in a man, so that it can observe what is more exterior in him (exterior not in the sense of outer exterior life, but in him, in his personality, in Johnson, if his name is Johnson). …

“(7) After a long time in the Work the inner system, which starts from willing self-observation – that is, from a willing Observing I – begins to act and control the mechanical man. It does this by means of collecting round it all ‘I’s in personality which wish to and can work. This stage is Deputy-Steward. …. If Deputy-Steward, in spite of endless failures, becomes strong enough, ‘Steward’ draws near. ‘Steward’ belongs to something above man.

– Maurice Nicoll, Commentaries, “Man is Not A Unity But Multiple,” Vol. 1, pp. 36-37