Attention: The Currency of Awakening

SSamael taught that attention is the currency of the inner work. Everything you give your attention to grows in you. Everything you withhold attention from withers. This is a quiet law, and most people break it every day without knowing.

The modern world is built to steal your attention. Screens designed by clever engineers compete for it. Anxieties manufactured by old habits absorb it. Conversations, half-listened to, drain it. By the end of an average day, attention has been spent on a thousand small things, and almost nothing has been spent on the inner work, which is why the inner work feels so distant. Not because it is far. Because attention has not been pointed at it.

There is a particular kind of attention that the work requires. Samael called it divided attention. It means giving part of your awareness to what you are doing, and part of your awareness to the one who is doing it. Most people give one hundred percent of their attention to the task and zero percent to themselves. The teaching is to split it: seventy percent on the task, thirty percent on yourself doing the task. The task still gets done, often better. But now there is someone home while it is being done.

This sounds easy and is not. The mind hates dividing its attention. It wants to plunge fully into the activity or to plunge fully into the daydream. The discipline is to keep a thin line of attention pointed back at yourself even while you are absorbed in something else. Walking down the street, you feel the feet walking. Speaking to a colleague, you feel your own breath. Reading these words, you notice yourself reading.

Today's practice is to feel yourself doing one ordinary activity. Pick something simple: brushing teeth, washing dishes, walking from one room to another. While you do the thing, also feel that you are the one doing it. The doubling of attention is the work. Practice it once today and you will see how much you have been giving away.