It often seems as if half the population has a problem with paying attention. Apart from the different types of attention deficit disorder, a former Apple and Microsoft executive called Linda Stone has identified another problem: continuous partial attention.
We have all been multitasking since before our ancestors came down from the trees, but now people's attention is constantly being distracted by an array of new inputs: email, text messaging, instant messaging and a hundred other things. Just think of the way in which many television programs now have multiple items on the screen at once. Many of us are suffering from information overload, and it would be very valuable to be able to improve our ability to focus our attention without putting ADHD medicines in the water supply.
This is a very interesting book by an interesting individual. B. Alan Wallace spent fourteen years as a Buddhist monk and was ordained by the Dalai Lama. He is also the founder and president of the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. He is the author of several other books, including the superb book Contemplative Science.
In this book he describes the ten stages of Shamatha meditation, a technique for developing extraordinary levels of attention and focus. As Alan Wallace describes it in the preface to the book, "Shamatha is a path of attentional development that culminates in an attention that can be sustained for hours on end."
Alan is a committed meditator who has spent the eight hours a day necessary to perfect the method. There are obviously not that many people who could - or would want to - dedicate that amount of time to the practice. But there is still plenty of value to the individual who can only dedicate a few minutes a day to the practice. As with most forms of mental or physical development, the returns that you get from this kind of meditation are strongly related to how much effort you can put in.
The ten stages are:
Directed attention
Continuous attention
Resurgent attention
Close attention
Tamed attention
Pacified attention
Fully pacified attention
Single-pointed attention
Attentional balance
Shamatha
Some books about meditation are a little dry and focused almost exclusively on the mind. Alan has done something very nice with this book: in between his explanation of the ten stages, he has inserted what he calls "interludes;" short ancillary practices that complement the training in attention. The first four of these interludes are designed to cultivate one of the four qualities of the heart: compassion, loving-kindness, empathetic joy and equanimity.
This is a book that you can easily read in a few hours, but you could spend years putting it into practice. As many of us have discovered, applying the basic techniques for just a few minutes a day can be very helpful. If you want to get all the way to the final stage it would require a great deal of time and effort, and ideally also a personal teacher.
The type of focus and attention that is developed by these methods was originally intended to focus inwards and to control and still the mind, but the techniques can be equally useful for focusing on things outside of you.
Alan Wallace has done us a great service by recording and explaining this method, and the book is well worth reading if you have any interest in trying to improve your own ability to focus and to pay attention.
Richard G. Petty, MD, author of
Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life
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Top reviews from other countries
Eduardo SB
De los mejores libros y autores.
Reviewed in Mexico on December 28, 2018Ashleigh Coombs
Required reading with reflection
Reviewed in Australia on December 30, 2019
Dr. M. Treacy
I own hundreds of books on the topic of meditation (I do research in the area) and this is one of the top two or three that I ha
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 21, 2015