The Sacred Deaths of Attention
The Attention Crisis
You check your phone. Again. Not because you need to, but because something in you can’t bear the weight of the present moment. This isn’t a failure of willpower or a symptom of digital addiction. It’s something far more ancient and profound: the human terror of existence expressing itself through modern technology.
We’re told we have an attention crisis. Self-help gurus prescribe mindfulness apps. Productivity experts offer time-blocking systems. Neuroscientists explain dopamine loops. But what if our scattered attention isn’t a bug to be fixed but a spiritual symptom—a sign that we’re using consciousness itself to flee from fundamental truths?
Three distinct wisdom traditions offer a startling convergence on this question. Ernest Becker’s psychology reveals how the fear of death drives all human behavior into elaborate distraction projects. Greg Goode’s direct path philosophy shows that what we call “attention” is actually awareness investigating itself. And Sufi mysticism teaches that the heart—the true center of consciousness—can distinguish between sacred attention that embraces reality and profane attention that flees from it.
Together, they map three deaths that attention must undergo to become truly alive.
Sacred and Profane: The Two Faces of Attention
Before we can understand these deaths, we need a compass. The mystics have always known what modern psychology is just discovering: not all attention is created equal. There exists a fundamental split between two modes of consciousness, as different as sleep and waking.
Sacred attention moves toward reality as it actually is—impermanent, uncontrollable, shot through with mystery. It doesn’t require religious belief. It simply means the willingness to stay present with what’s true, even when truth includes pain, uncertainty, and mortality. When you sit with a dying parent, holding their hand without trying to fix or flee—that’s sacred attention.
Profane attention, despite its name, isn’t evil. It’s human. It’s the attention that manages, controls, and constructs elaborate alternate realities to avoid what’s unbearable about existence. It’s checking Instagram during a funeral. It’s obsessing over your career legacy while your actual life passes by. It’s the thousand ways we tranquilize ourselves with the trivial—what Becker called our “immortality projects.”
The distinction isn’t moral but functional. Sacred attention increases your capacity to be with reality. Profane attention helps you avoid it. And here’s the troubling truth: most of what passes for normal life in the modern world is an intricate system of profane attention, so normalized we can’t even see it.
Your smartphone isn’t the problem. Your scattered focus isn’t the disease. They’re symptoms of a consciousness that has never learned to die properly.
The First Death: Confronting Physical Mortality
“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else,” wrote Ernest Becker in his Pulitzer Prize-winning work. But Becker saw what others missed: this terror doesn’t make us cower. It makes us create. Entire civilizations, he argued, are elaborate defense mechanisms against death awareness.
Consider your daily routine. The career you’re building—is it about contributing something meaningful today, or constructing a legacy to outlive you? Even our children, Becker observed, become unwitting conscripts in our war against mortality, pressed into service as genetic immortality projects.
The profane response to death isn’t just fear—it’s frantic activity. We throw ourselves into what Becker called “heroic” cultural projects: the startup that will change the world, the artistic masterpiece that will endure. Or, failing grand heroics, we simply stay busy. We fill every moment with tasks, entertainment, consumption—anything to avoid the silence where death whispers.
When a father teaches his young daughter about death—not as a distant abstraction but as the reality that makes each moment precious—he’s helping her develop what the Sufis call the heart’s eye: the capacity to see life and death as partners in a dance, not enemies in a war.
This is sacred attention to mortality: neither morbid fixation nor anxious avoidance, but clear seeing. It recognizes what Becker himself finally understood—that the denial of death makes us neurotic, while the full awareness of death makes us present.
The diagnostic question becomes simple: Is my attention right now fleeing death or embracing the life that death makes possible?
When you’re working late on another presentation that will be forgotten in a week, when you’re pushing your child toward achievements that serve your ego more than their growth—these are death-denial disguised as living. But when you’re fully present in your work because you know your time is limited, when you watch your child play and feel the bittersweetness of their growing up—this is attention that has died its first death and been reborn.
The Second Death: The Collapse of the Separate Self
Greg Goode’s “Standing as Awareness” presents a more radical proposition: you don’t have attention—you ARE attention. What you call “yourself” is simply awareness that has mistaken itself for the objects it perceives.
This isn’t Eastern mysticism imported to the West. It’s an invitation to investigate your direct experience right now. Try to find the one who is aware. Look for the observer behind your observations. Search for the thinker of your thoughts. What you discover, if you look honestly, is that there is no separate watcher. Notice how every time you think you’ve found the observer, that’s just another thought being observed—an infinite regression that reveals the observer cannot be found because you ARE the observing itself. There is simply watching happening. No isolated self having experiences—just experience experiencing itself.
The profane response to this recognition is to quickly rebuild the familiar walls. We rush back to our stories about who we are: our titles, our roles, our carefully maintained self-images. A mother micromanages her teenager’s life because letting go would mean confronting the emptiness where her “good parent” identity lives.
But sacred attention moves toward this ego death, not away. When you work not to be someone but to express something, when you love another person instead of your idea of them, when you parent a child without needing them to validate your worth—this is attention that has undergone the second death.
You’re in a meeting and notice yourself performing competence rather than being present. You catch it. For a moment, you stop being “the professional” and simply become awareness aware of voices, faces, ideas flowing. The anxiety of maintaining your image dissolves. You contribute when moved to, stay quiet when not. You’re not trying to be anything. You’re simply aware.
The diagnostic question: Am I attending FROM awareness or TO objects I’m trying to possess, control, or become?
This death is harder than the first because it takes away the very one who would do the dying. Yet it’s also easier because it reveals you were never that separate self anyway. You are the awareness in which all experience arises and passes—including the experience of being “you.”
The Third Death: Annihilation in the Divine
The Sufis speak of fanā—the annihilation of the ego in divine presence. But this isn’t reserved for mystics in mountain caves. It’s available in your next breath, if you know how to look.
Ibn Arabi taught that the heart has two eyes: reason and imagination. With reason’s eye, we see the world’s multiplicity, its logical structures, its separate things. With imagination’s eye, we see unity, flow, the sacred aliveness in all things. But to see with both eyes at once—this is the beginning of mystical perception.
The practice called muraqaba, often translated as meditation, literally means “watchfulness” or “vigilance.” But watching for what? For the Divine presence that is never absent, only ignored. “Worship God as if you see Him,” taught the Prophet Muhammad, “and if you do not see Him, know that He sees you.”
This isn’t about believing in God or any deity. It’s about recognizing that attention itself is sacred—that consciousness is not yours but moves through you like breath. The Sufis have a saying: “God is closer to you than your jugular vein.” Closer than close—because the divine is the very awareness reading these words right now.
Sacred attention at this level isn’t trying to get anywhere or become anything. It recognizes what the Sufis call the secret: you are not the drop trying to merge with the ocean. You are the ocean pretending to be a drop.
In daily life, this looks surprisingly ordinary. You’re washing dishes and suddenly the boundary between washer and washed dissolves—there’s just washing happening, aware and present.
The diagnostic question becomes: Is this attention coming from love or fear?
The Paradox of Seeking
Here’s the final joke: This entire essay has been unnecessary. You already are what you seek. Your attention, scattered or focused, sacred or profane, is always only awareness aware of itself. The deaths have already occurred—you simply haven’t noticed.
Yet noticing changes everything. Not the facts but the felt experience of being alive. The same life that was a prison of anxiety becomes a dance of consciousness with itself. The same death that terrorized becomes a teacher. The same ordinary moments reveal themselves as sacred.
The German mystic Meister Eckhart (14th century) said, “God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk.” The walk is our profane attention, endlessly seeking what we already are. Coming home is as simple as recognizing where attention rises from and returns to.
This isn’t about becoming a spiritual person. It’s about recognizing that consciousness itself is spiritual, whether it’s watching Netflix or sitting in meditation, arguing with your spouse or experiencing cosmic unity. The sacred isn’t separate from the profane—it includes and transcends it.
These recognitions aren’t distant achievements but immediate possibilities. For the first death, each morning before checking your phone, spend thirty seconds aware that you will die—not someday, but in a specific number of heartbeats that grows smaller with each beat. For the second, ask yourself: “Who is aware right now?” Don’t think—look directly. For the third, practice dhikr—remembrance of what you truly are.
So where is your attention right now? Not what is it focused on, but what is its quality? Is it running from or toward? Is it maintaining or dissolving? Is it fearing or loving?
The answer won’t be found in thought but in direct looking. And in that looking, you might discover what the mystics have always known: attention itself is the sacred. You don’t need to fix it, direct it, or improve it. You simply need to recognize what it has always been—the divine aware of itself, playing the cosmic game of forgetting and remembering, losing and finding, dying and being reborn.
The three deaths aren’t achievements to unlock but recognitions to embody. They’re available now, in this breath, in this moment of reading, in your next glance at your phone or your child or the sky. The question isn’t whether you’ll place your attention somewhere—you will. The question is whether that placement will be conscious or unconscious, sacred or profane, alive or asleep.
The choice, like the attention itself, is always and already yours.