Book Review: The Attention Revolution by Alan Wallace

This book is essentially an updated meditation manual with commentary interspersed between each stage of the practice. Wallace manages to bring an ancient tradition of cultivating concentration to bear on our current cultural crises of attention. He points out that attention is a skill, not a fixed attribute, which has tremendous potential to change one's life.

I've experienced the lack of attention skills in others pretty clearly, especially nowadays with phone technology sweeping over the world. I've noticed it in myself as well though in the past I would have prided myself on having pretty good attention skills. So my own experience has shown me how attention can grow and shrink as we go through life. No matter what level one is at, it's clear that having the ability to direct one's mind at any point has practical applications internally and externally.

Why not just practice something that requires attention to get better at like playing an instrument or something? People enjoy intense levels of concentration when they are engaged in their craft but once they are finished, it's back to the standard monkey mind, bouncing back and forth between different thoughts and associations. What if we could be awake to the world in every moment? How much fuller could we live? My thoughts as a parkour practitioner make me think of the moments during a jump which requires a sustained bout of focus or even balancing on a rail. I've noticed that I become fastidiously aware of every step I take on the rail and monitor my balance quite precisely. When I jump off of the rail, however, I go back to a dullness of mind with regards to that level of focus. Another extreme example I can think of is wing suit flying. Those people must be so connected to the present moment because every little movement is important and any mistake could spell death for them. These high levels of focus are apparently possible to induce by training the attention on its own. I find myself wanting this both for the reason of being more awake in life, experiencing it more fully, but also as a preliminary to further, deeper investigation of my own mind.

Anyways, the layout of the book describes each stage of the meditation practice in fine detail. For each stage of concentration, there is a supplementary meditation practice designed to nurture positive states of mind like compassion, lovingkindness, vicarious joy, etc. Peppered in the later chapters are practices involving lucid dreaming. Apparently it is possible to be so awake in life that one can continue on even into the dream world. I love this analogy of the waking world the the dream world. Becoming lucid in a dream is akin to becoming lucid in the real world to "waking up" in a sense rather than slogging through one's life as if in a dream.

As each stage progresses we extend the amount of time we can attend to our meditation object and start to refine it more and more. The process is supposed to take months, even years for some people though. It all depends on how much time a person can spend refining the attention. To actually get to the highest stage of meditation requires months of going on retreat along with consistent practice. I think this is the part of the book that will lose a lot of readers because it puts a much larger demand on their time as most people who get into meditation are just trying to find a way to relax. It all begins with simply developing momentary attention, and culminates in the ability to maintain a more refined version of that attention for up to 4 hours at a time. It's fascinating that the actual purpose of meditation goes far beyond mere relaxation techniques. Relaxation is just the tip of the iceberg.

At the very least, refining one's attention has the effect of suppressing emotions, negative thought, etc. Though they may hang out beneath the surface, we can get the jump on our negative states as they arise, using the attention skill to let those fall away into the background. At some point along the path of concentration, one can diverge, moving toward vipassana (aka insight) meditation, rooting out out our mental afflictions, instead of just suppressing them. Seems like goal worth striving toward.

Toward the end of the book, I became somewhat dismayed because Wallace starts talking about the "mind powers." literally 99% of the book is practical advice and insightful commentary. So it is striking to see a discussion of telepathy, telekinesis and teleportation tacked on, it stands in stark contrast to everything else. As with all of the other wackier claims, unsubstantiated by sufficient evidence, I will leave such possibilities to their own devices until they become more apparent otherwise.

Regardless of the bizarre ending, most of the manual stands alone a highly technical meditation manual. It's quite nice to be able look at each stage of the meditation and have a particular sign to look out for to know where I've gotten to.

Some lateral moves

Been thinking lately about the different styles of movement emerging. A lot of people may be inclined to think that the level for parkour has been raised to an impossibly high degree. At least that was one of my first thoughts seeing someone land a double flyaway precision in a recent competition. Where does one go from there at that point? Well obviously triple flyaway is the next logical progression.

All kidding aside I've had to make certain concessions with my training regarding my current strength levels and the risks I'm willing to take now. I've found that instead of making the vertical move upwards to ever higher strength/speed/power I'm forced to make some lateral moves instead, to fill out the map a bit more. 

The main concept here is to derive attributes from the current practice, and build those up to a high degree. The main example I can think of is training barefoot. It's not required and it greatly reduces ones degree of freedom. In fact, it feels like learning parkour all over again especially for those who only ever trained parkour with shoes. New techniques, levels of strength, awareness, and balance naturally appear when one takes up this kind of training. This lateral move can then feed back into some of the more standard vertical progressions almost incidentally, as a happy side effect. Just as a side note, I've gotten back into training barefoot more due to seeing a few different videos of some high level practitioners working at it. I felt immediately drawn to it partly because of the stark contrast between this more connected way of training to more popular movements/competitions that have been showing up in my feed.

I guess the point of even getting into this concept is to suggest movement possibilities that feel meaningful still amidst a the power/strength sport mentality. I don't mean to suggest that the other way is wrong, bad or "diluting" the sport. I'm a movement pluralist in this regard, let any and all forms arise. I will just get into a few more here and then just name off more as I remember/discover.

Disadvantaged leverage in calisthenics is a pretty obvious and often used tactic which can replace the more vertical move progression of just adding weight.

In a similar vein, training movements in a handstand, or even with the hands behind the back. This "subtraction" method creates new movements and exposes weaknesses pretty quickly. For a more concrete example I am thinking of the box jump movement. Instead of just jumping up higher and higher, you do it with your hands behind your back, and build your way back up with that restriction.

Endurance routes. One can create a line that requires a medium to high degree of power/strength and just cycle through it with an endurance mindset as opposed to just doing bigger, more powerful jumps.

More to come. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not covering any new ground since parkour has always had these ancillary practices, but it's useful to start categorizing and distinguishing between  the vertical/lateral moves we are making. It's important, in my opinion, to show the other ways we can go and still have a meaningful practice.