THE ATTENTION REVOLUTION: UNLOCKING THE POWER OF THE FOCUSED MIND

There is an old story about a student who asked a meditation master for the secret of meditation. By way of answer, the master bent down and wrote the symbol for 'Attention' in the dust. Surely there must be more to it than that responded the student, to which the master again wrote the symbol for 'Attention'. Puzzled the student pressed him a third time, at which the master yet again wrote the symbol for 'Attention'. Attention, Attention, Attention. Just that. Placing the mind fully in what one is doing, whether it be the activity of daily life or the rhythmic coming and going of the breath in meditation. Instead of being pulled this way and that by surrounding distractions or by mental chatter, the mind attends to a single point of focus, thus training itself to enter into ever deeper levels of clarity and awareness.

In recent years Western psychology has woken up to the value of Attention, and courses are springing up like a rash, often under the title 'mindfulness' (which is presumably thought to be culturally more neutral than 'meditation'). It seems strange that anyone should need to 'learn' how to be mindful or to pay attention, but the truth is that for the vast majority of us the mind is out of control. One exercise I have frequently used to prompt my undergraduate and postgraduate students to recognise this fact is to ask them to stop thinking for one minute. It is rare indeed that any of them can do it. We are 'taught', it seems, how to think as part of our long years of education, but never how to not-think. Yet not-thinking is the natural state of the mind, the state that underlies all other states, the state that allows us to understand more fully who and what we are.

In his Preface to this splendid book, Alan Wallace sums it all up for us – 'The untrained mind oscillates between agitation and dullness, between restlessness and boredom'. He also reminds us that whereas the West has tried to study this untrained mind 'by means of objective third-person inquiry, contemplatives for millennia have explored [it] by means of subjective, first-person inquiry', in other words by meditation. When we compare the insights into the workings of the mind yielded by the two methods we find that the latter has yielded a vastly richer harvest than the former, and that to its other advantages we can add the fact that it is a method we can each try for ourselves. Indeed, the very fact that it is subjective first-person inquiry actively invites us to do so. We can only learn meditation by meditating.

However, we need a guide to show us the meditative path and to help us work with the problems and difficulties we are likely to find on our travels. And we could not wish for a wiser, more compassionate and more experienced guide than Alan Wallace, a Westerner who has extensive experience of working with eminent Eastern meditation teachers including his Holiness the Dalai Lama, for whom he has also served extensively as interpreter. Many readers will know his previous books such as Choosing Reality, The Bridge of Quiescence, and Buddhism and Science, and for beginners and more advanced meditators alike I cannot recommend this new addition to his list of publications too highly. In it Alan tells us that the methods of enhancing attention through meditation practice are known as shamatha. Through shamatha one can learn to sustain attention effortlessly 'for hours on end'. He also tells us that sadly many of the meditative traditions imported into the West 'put very little emphasis upon developing [shamatha]'. This is even the case within Tibetan Buddhism, where 'very few devote themselves to sustained shamatha practice [and] hardly anyone heeds the counsel of the great meditators of Tibet's past who claim that the achievement of shamatha is necessary for all advanced forms of meditation to be fully effective'. In other words, shamatha is the foundation of meditation. Without it the mind remains a prey to all its customary concerns and distractions.

Reference to the 'developing' of shamatha implies there are stages involved, and the nature of these are in Alan's view best set out by the leading 8th Century Madhyamika teacher Kamalashila, whose defeat of the followers of Ch'an (Chinese Zen) in debate led to the acceptance of the Madhyamika (the Middle Way) as the authoritative Buddhist teaching in Tibet. Kamalashila identified ten such stages, namely:

directed attention, continuous attention, resurgent attention, close attention, tamed attention, pacified attention, fully pacified attention, single-pointed attention, attentional balance, and finally shamatha.

The two obstacles to development at each stage are mental agitation (mental hyperactivity) and dullness (attentional deficit). In other words the chattering monkey mind and the lax lethargic mind. At each of the stages the meditator encounters both of these obstacles in increasingly subtle forms, and must root them out if he is to progress further.

Alan then goes through each stage, patiently and clearly explaining how this rooting out takes place – in fact essentially explaining how to practice. If I had space I would attempt to summarise these explanations in the necessary detail, but as I do not I will do something much better, and recommend everyone, meditators and non-meditators alike, to read and re-read this book. If you do so, Alan will explain in his own words how directional attention is developed by focusing the mind (even if only for a few seconds) on the movement of the abdomen with each breath, how continuous attention is developed by counting the breath in order to narrow the point of focus, how resurgent attention is developed by shifting this focus to the more subtle sensations of the breath at the nostrils, and so on. Together with these explanations Alan also gives guidance on how to use meditation to develop loving kindness, compassion, mindfulness in everyday life, and lucid dreaming.

The book is a joy to read. Having practised (and struggled with) meditation for many years and written about it on a number of occasions myself I find that Alan answers many of the questions and confusions I still carry with me. There is little more to say. Buy the book, enjoy it and – if you will – allow yourself to be changed by it.