Iian McGilcrhist often mentions that how we attend is a moral act. If we bring a perception that assesses this world as particles drifting randomly (or arranged in only one way, the way we have re-visioned into a map) and identifies the creatures of this landscape as little more than stimulus response machines (including the people we love) or as subjects to be molded into an image, then we will perish in fire and or ice.

I find myself challenged in many dramas with this “rational” self-assured, overly optimistic if often bullying persona. I will use the pronoun he, because often it is he who will tell me that they are committed to modeling for others how to live from a structure that must be applied on top of the other and reinforced, brutally if necessary. It is their duty to instruct those who have not yet been assimilated into the rules of the bureaucracy or it is their right to convey the knowledge that they, special they, have acquired, from sources sometimes murky or absurdly precise.

Does it seem like they want to focus on something outside? Referring to a source that is bigger than us? I don’t mean a God necessarily, but a force that is grand. A School, a degree, a plaque, a position, a position paper, a book, a sponsor, a legacy. Well, yes, because these are largely professionals with whom I work and as a group they lack an inside and thus insight. They focus on what they have achieved and what they have and what others think of them. They are the protagonist in their mythology which goes beyond our little human stage. We watch their chest pump up.

The persona tells us that others need to be informed how to be a productive, even a masculine leader such as they. Whatever that means. It is their duty. Their moms or their daddy’s told them that. They were golden children because they were so good at putting into language the party line. That might seem laughable on the surface, But this is a very serious face, a rigid posture. A barely contained sneer. Maybe we hear that their uniqueness wasn’t reinforced in their family, perhaps the opposite. Or they tell us a religion taught them this. Or it is the result of a medical residency and the mentors who preached compartmentalization with the fervor of religion. It comes from an authoritarian-leaning out-of-control ego that they find mirrored in the social networks and the blatantly delusional rapid-fire breaking news and updates.

I don’t ask them where it comes from. I don’t care. I am not wanting to trace the contagion back to the origin and they are too readily able and eager to proselytize with a story that half the group may resonate with and want to help defend. I already feel the horror of certain witnesses because I am not fully entertained by the antics, nor impressed by their mask that they don at work, nor the evangelical power that they want to wield. They have all been Apollo, a god that cannot be questioned. Of course, they are in the treatment facility, so there is that evidence that might be helpful.

Some of the people in this Heart-drama group know they have fallen. Some have embraced their new position as Saturn, the fallen Titan, filled with misery and blame and recrimination. That is just the other half of the coin, as we say. Just another face of the Persona. I understand that some will form a projective identification with the wounded and overthrown god and think me an ass.

How we attend is a moral act. Beyond that, it can be a spiritual understanding if we attend to what is True and Beautiful. Maybe in this drama today after an hour of prodding at the various ego personalities, this man might come home to something beyond the mythology. My job is to hold out that possibility, to refuse to let that go no matter how irritated the Persona becomes, to shift limberly as if this was some form of martial arts, to locate the people in their lives who might sway them back to the planet they were born on, to remind them of the creatures that have loved them and couldn’t give a rat’s ass Who They Are or what they do or what their colleagues think of them. .