Quick Answer
Wallace lays out the classical ten-stage map of shamatha and treats it as a serious training programme rather than a metaphor. The most valuable thing in it is not the map. It is the analysis of laxity and excitation and the distinction between mindfulness and introspection, which will improve almost anyone's practice inside a week. The most honest thing in it is his admission that reaching the end of the map requires a year you probably do not have.
Key Takeaways
- Subtle laxity is the real enemy. It feels like good concentration and it is not, and almost nothing else in English explains it this clearly.
- Mindfulness and introspection are two different faculties. Conflating them is why most people's attention practice plateaus.
- The nine stages come from texts, not from observation. Wallace is transmitting a map, not reporting a study.
- The Shamatha Project measured real effects on attention, and measured nothing resembling the traditional attainment.
- Shamatha is not the goal in Buddhism. It is the instrument, and reading the book as a self-improvement programme misses what it is for.
🕑 15 min read
What This Book Is
The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind was published by Wisdom Publications in 2006. It is a manual for one specific practice, organised around a traditional developmental sequence, and it does not attempt to survey Buddhist meditation generally.
The structure is simple. There are ten stages. Each gets a chapter. Each chapter says what the stage consists of, what it feels like from inside, which obstacles are characteristic of it, and what the practitioner should be doing there. Interleaved are guided instructions for three practices and a set of essays on why any of this matters.
The claim behind the whole thing is that attention is a trainable faculty in the way a muscle is trainable, that a detailed technology for training it exists and has existed for well over a millennium, and that the modern world has almost entirely lost sight of it while complaining constantly about distraction.
On the terms: shamatha is Sanskrit, samatha is the Pali form, and the Tibetan is zhi gnas. English translations include calm abiding, meditative quiescence and serenity. They all refer to the same thing. This article uses shamatha because that is the form Wallace uses.
Who Wrote It
B. Alan Wallace is an unusual figure and his biography is relevant to how the book reads.
He trained in the Tibetan tradition in India in the 1970s and was ordained as a monk by the Dalai Lama. He spent years in study and in retreat, and served as an interpreter, which means he has spent a great deal of time rendering technical Tibetan Buddhist material into precise English. He later returned to lay life, took a degree in physics and the philosophy of science, and a doctorate at Stanford. He founded the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies and has been closely involved in the long-running dialogues between contemplative practitioners and scientists.
What that combination produces is a writer who handles the traditional material with technical accuracy, does not water it down for a general audience, and is genuinely interested in whether it can be tested. It also produces a writer with strong commitments about consciousness that are more contestable than the practice instructions, and readers should keep the two apart.
What Shamatha Actually Means
The word gets used loosely in Western meditation circles to mean any calming practice. The classical definition is much narrower and much more demanding.
Shamatha, properly attained, is a state in which attention rests on its object effortlessly, without any degree of laxity or excitation, for very extended periods, accompanied by a physical and mental pliancy that the tradition describes as a distinct bodily event. It is not a good session. It is a permanent change in the mind's capacity, and once attained it is available on demand.
The tradition also holds that shamatha is not itself liberating. It is preparation. A mind that can rest stably is a mind that can then be turned to insight practice with an instrument capable of holding still long enough to see something. The comparison usually offered is a lamp in a windless room, and the point of the lamp is to look at things by.
This distinction is treated properly in our comparison of samatha and vipassana, and it is the thing most often lost when these practices are marketed as stress reduction.
The Nine Stages
The sequence Wallace lays out comes from Indian sources, principally Asanga and Kamalashila, and passed into the Tibetan graduated-path literature where it became standard.
The first stage is simply being able to place attention on the object at all. The second is holding it for a short continuous period. The third is noticing quickly when it has wandered and bringing it back. The fourth is no longer losing the object entirely, though attention still degrades. The fifth and sixth concern subtler forms of the same problem, where the practitioner has to work with resistance and with residual agitation. The seventh is a stage where the faults still arise but are dealt with almost immediately. The eighth requires effort only at the start of a session, after which attention holds. The ninth is effortless: attention stays without any intervention at all.
Shamatha itself follows the ninth stage and is marked by the arising of pliancy.
Mapped onto these are two further traditional schemes: six powers that carry the practitioner from one stage to the next, running from learning and reflection through mindfulness and introspection to enthusiasm and familiarity, and four modes of engagement describing how much effort attention requires at each point.
Wallace presents all of this clearly and without inflation. What he does not do, and this matters, is establish that practitioners actually pass through these stages in this order. The map is inherited. It may be an accurate description of a real developmental path, or it may be a scholastic systematisation that later generations were taught to fit their experience into. There is no way to tell from the book, and Wallace does not raise the question.
Laxity and Excitation
Here is the part worth the price of the book, and it is useful to anyone practising anything.
Two faults obstruct attention. Excitation is agitation: the mind is pulled off the object by something it finds attractive. Everybody recognises this one, because it announces itself.
Laxity is the other, and it is the interesting one. In laxity the mind is still on the object, but the grip is slack and the clarity has faded. The tradition grades it. Coarse laxity is obvious dullness, verging on sleep. Medium laxity is a soft, foggy, comfortable state where the object is present but blurred. Subtle laxity is the dangerous one: the object is stable, the session is quiet, nothing is wrong, and the vividness has quietly drained out of it.
Subtle laxity feels like success. This is Wallace's central practical point and it is correct. A meditator can sit for years in a calm, stable, slightly dim state, report to a teacher that concentration is going well, and be making no progress at all, because stability without vividness is only half the requirement. The tradition insists on both: the object must be held steadily and it must be held brightly.
Test yourself for subtle laxity: in the middle of a quiet session, when things feel settled, ask how sharp the object actually is right now. Not whether attention is on it, whether the detail is crisp. Most people, honestly checked, find the detail has softened considerably without their noticing. If so, the remedy is not more relaxation. It is to lift the intensity slightly and brighten the object, which will feel counterintuitive because the session felt pleasant.
The Two Faculties
Against the two faults, the tradition sets two faculties, and Wallace's insistence on distinguishing them is the second thing this book gets very right.
Mindfulness, in the classical sense, is the faculty of holding the object without forgetting it. Note that this is not the modern usage. In contemporary English, mindfulness has come to mean open, non-judgemental awareness of whatever is present. In the technical Buddhist usage Wallace is working with, it means remembering, sustained retention of a chosen object.
Introspection is separate. It is the monitoring faculty that periodically checks the state of the process: is attention still on the object, has excitation entered, has clarity dropped. It is quality control rather than the work itself, and the tradition warns that if introspection is applied too frequently or too heavily it becomes an interruption in its own right.
Most people practising alone conflate these, and the result is either an attention that holds its object but never notices when it has degraded, or a nervous monitoring that never settles into the object at all. Separating them is a technical adjustment that produces an immediate difference, and it is the reason to recommend this book to people who have been practising for years without a teacher.
The Three Practices
Wallace teaches three techniques in a progression.
Mindfulness of breathing is the entry practice, presented in a specific form: attention on the sensations of breathing at the abdomen or at the nostrils, with the breath left entirely unregulated. The instruction not to interfere with the breath is emphasised more than in most presentations.
Settling the mind in its natural state is the second, and it is the one people find strange. Instead of a physical object, attention rests in the space of the mind and observes mental events, thoughts, images, impulses, as they arise and pass, without engaging, following, suppressing or evaluating any of them. The object is the domain of mental phenomena itself.
Awareness of awareness is the third. Attention rests on consciousness itself, with no other object, which the tradition calls shamatha without a sign. This is where the practice touches the Dzogchen material Wallace has written about elsewhere, and it is the least teachable in prose.
The progression is coherent and the instructions are precise. Anyone comparing this with the wider field of Buddhist techniques will notice that Wallace is unusually specific about what to do with the eyes, the posture and the degree of effort, which is characteristic of the Tibetan literature.
The Substrate Consciousness
Here the book makes a claim that goes well beyond attention training, and readers should notice where the ground shifts.
Wallace holds that at the attainment of shamatha the practitioner comes to rest in what he calls the substrate consciousness, a level of awareness underlying ordinary waking mind, which he connects to concepts from Indian Buddhist psychology. He treats this as a discoverable feature of consciousness rather than as a doctrinal proposition, and he has argued elsewhere that contemplative training could function as a genuine research instrument for investigating it.
This is a substantial metaphysical claim presented alongside practical instructions in a way that can make the two look equally established. They are not. The instructions about laxity are refined technical advice with a long track record. The substrate consciousness is a theoretical entity whose existence is asserted within a tradition, and no independent evidence for it is offered here.
Wallace is not being deceptive; he believes the training is the evidence. It is nonetheless a claim of a different order from the rest of the book, and it is worth reading those passages with a different attitude from the practice chapters.
How Long It Actually Takes
To Wallace's real credit, the book does not fudge this.
The traditional estimate he reports is that reaching shamatha requires something on the order of several months to a year of full-time retreat: many hours of formal practice a day, in a quiet setting, with minimal distraction, with dietary and behavioural conditions supporting it, and preferably with a teacher available.
He states plainly that a daily hour, fitted around a job and a family, will not produce shamatha, and that pretending otherwise would be dishonest. He does not offer a shortcut and does not suggest that intention or attitude can substitute for hours.
That candour is admirable and it creates the book's central practical problem. Almost every reader will be operating permanently within the first three stages. The book devotes a chapter to each of ten stages, which means most of it describes territory the reader will never enter, and the material addressing the territory they are actually in is correspondingly thin.
On intensive practice. Long retreats are not risk-free. There is a growing research literature on meditation-related difficulties, including anxiety, depersonalisation, sleep disruption and the destabilisation of existing psychiatric conditions, and intensive concentration practice is more strongly implicated than gentle daily practice. Anyone with a history of psychosis, bipolar disorder, severe anxiety, dissociation or trauma should speak to a qualified clinician before undertaking intensive retreat, and should tell the retreat teacher. This article is a book review, not medical or psychological advice.
What the Research Measured
Wallace taught a three-month intensive shamatha retreat that became the setting for a longitudinal study led by Clifford Saron at the University of California, Davis, generally known as the Shamatha Project.
It was carefully designed by the standards of the field: two cohorts, a wait-list control, a battery of behavioural, physiological and psychological measures, and follow-up over time. Findings began appearing from 2010 and included improvements in sustained attention and in visual discrimination, alongside reported changes in psychological functioning and in some biological markers.
What it establishes is worth stating precisely. Three months of intensive attention training in self-selected, motivated, already-experienced meditators produced measurable improvement in laboratory measures of attention, which is a real and non-trivial result and one of the better-designed studies in an area with a lot of weak ones.
What it does not establish is anything about the traditional attainment. Participants were not blinded and could not be. The comparison is against a wait-list rather than an active control, so expectancy is uncontrolled. And no participant was reported as having attained shamatha in the classical sense, which is the outcome the book's map is oriented toward. The study is evidence that the training does something. It is not evidence that the map is true.
What the Book Does Badly
Three things, stated fairly.
It presents an inherited textual map with a confidence the evidence does not carry. Whether practitioners actually traverse nine discrete stages in sequence is an empirical question and it has not been answered. Presenting the stages as a factual developmental ladder, complete with descriptions of what each one feels like, encourages readers to fit their experience to the scheme rather than to report it.
It gives a stage map to solitary readers, which is a known hazard. Stage maps invite self-grading, self-grading invites either discouragement or inflation, and both damage practice. Traditionally this material was transmitted by a teacher who could tell a student where they actually were, which is precisely the correction a book cannot provide.
And it is thin exactly where most of its readers live. A book about the first three stages, written at this level of technical precision, would help more people more.
The Argument Inside Buddhism
One thing the book does not tell you is that its premise is contested within Buddhism itself.
Wallace works from a position in which substantial concentration is developed first and insight practice follows. There is a well-established alternative, sometimes called the dry insight approach and prominent in parts of the Theravada tradition, which holds that a much lower degree of concentration, sufficient to sustain moment-to-moment observation, is enough for insight practice to proceed, and that pursuing deep absorption first is a long detour.
Both positions have canonical support, long lineages and accomplished practitioners. The disagreement is real and technical, it concerns how much stillness insight actually requires, and a reader who takes this book as the Buddhist position on the matter has been given one side of a live argument.
Anyone weighing the two should read alongside it a good account of the vipassana approach and, for a third temperament entirely, the Zen comparison.
Who Should Read It
Read it if you have been practising for a year or more, have hit a plateau you cannot name, and suspect something in your technique is subtly wrong. The chapters on laxity and on introspection are very likely to identify it.
Read it if you want to understand what the tradition actually means by concentration, as opposed to what mindfulness has come to mean in general usage. The two have drifted a long way apart and this book will show you the gap.
Read it if you are considering a long retreat, because it will tell you honestly what such a thing involves and what it is aimed at.
Do not read it as a first meditation book. Do not read it if you are prone to measuring yourself, because a numbered ladder is the worst possible instrument for a person with that habit. And do not read it expecting the modern attention-span conversation, because Wallace's diagnosis of distraction is a thousand years older than the phone in your pocket and he is not much interested in the phone.
The most transferable idea here is the separation of holding from checking. When you are absorbed in anything, work, conversation, music, a craft, two different operations are running: the one that keeps you engaged with the thing, and the one that occasionally asks whether the engagement is still any good. Most people run only the first and wonder why hours pass without much happening, or run only the second and never settle. The classical instruction is to hold with mindfulness and check with introspection, lightly and at intervals, and to know which one you are doing. That is a thousand-year-old piece of quality control and it applies well outside the cushion.
Ten stages, two faults, and an honest account of what the last one costs.
Affiliate disclosure: Thalira earns a small commission on purchases made through the link above, at no additional cost to you. We recommend books we have read and think are worth your time, and we say plainly when we think parts of them are weak.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Attention Revolution about?
It presents the classical Buddhist map of shamatha, or meditative quiescence, as ten stages: nine progressive stages of attention plus shamatha itself. Each chapter describes one stage, what it feels like, what obstacles arise there and what to do about them. It is a manual organised around a traditional developmental sequence.
Who is B. Alan Wallace?
A scholar and teacher who trained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, was ordained by the Dalai Lama in the 1970s, later returned to lay life, took a doctorate at Stanford, and founded the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. He has served as an interpreter for the Dalai Lama and has been closely involved in the dialogue between contemplative practice and science.
What does shamatha mean?
Usually translated as calm abiding or meditative quiescence. In the classical definition it is a state of sustained, effortless, single-pointed attention accompanied by physical and mental pliancy, in which the mind can rest on an object without laxity or excitation for extended periods. It is a stabilised faculty rather than a pleasant mood.
Where do the nine stages come from?
From Indian Buddhist sources, principally Asanga and Kamalashila, transmitted into the Tibetan graduated-path literature. Wallace is presenting an inherited textual map rather than one derived from observing modern practitioners, which is worth holding in mind while reading it.
What are laxity and excitation?
The two faults that obstruct attention. Excitation is agitation, when the mind is pulled away by something attractive. Laxity is sinking, when attention is nominally on the object but slack, dim and losing clarity. Each has coarse, medium and subtle grades, and subtle laxity is the one that fools experienced meditators into thinking they are concentrating well.
What are the two remedies?
Mindfulness, which holds the object without forgetting it, and introspection, which is the quality-control faculty that periodically checks whether attention is still on the object and whether laxity or excitation has crept in. The distinction between them is the single most useful piece of technique in the book.
What practices does the book teach?
Three, in a progression. Mindfulness of breathing as the entry practice, settling the mind in its natural state, which means observing mental events without engaging them, and awareness of awareness, in which attention rests on consciousness itself without any other object.
How long does it take to reach shamatha?
The traditional estimate that Wallace reports is several months to about a year of full-time retreat, practising many hours a day with minimal distraction. He is candid that this is essentially unavailable to people with jobs and families, and that a daily practice of an hour will not produce it.
What was the Shamatha Project?
A longitudinal study led by Clifford Saron of the University of California, Davis, which followed participants through a three-month intensive shamatha retreat that Wallace taught. It used a wait-list control design, and published findings from 2010 onward reported measurable improvements in sustained attention and visual discrimination.
Did the study confirm the traditional claims?
No, and it was not designed to. It measured attentional performance and related outcomes in self-selected experienced meditators without blinding. Nothing in it established shamatha as the tradition defines it, and no participant was reported as having attained it.
Is shamatha enough on its own?
Not in Buddhist terms. Shamatha is a tool that makes insight practice possible, and by itself it is held to produce a very stable mind rather than liberation. Wallace says so explicitly. There is also a long-running argument inside Buddhism about how much concentration insight practice actually requires.
Who should not read it?
Anyone starting meditation from scratch, who would be better served by a simpler book. Anyone likely to use a stage map to grade themselves, since that reliably makes practice worse. And anyone considering intensive retreat without discussing it with a qualified teacher and, where relevant, a clinician.
Check the brightness, not the stillness
Tomorrow, in the quietest part of your practice, when everything has settled and it feels like it is going well, ask one question: how vivid is the object right now, actually. Not present, vivid. Most people find it has gone soft and did not notice, because softness is comfortable and comfort reads as progress. Correcting that one thing is worth more than another year of sitting, and it is the reason a book about a mountain nobody will climb is still worth owning.
Sources & References
- Wallace, B. A. (2006). The Attention Revolution: Unlocking the Power of the Focused Mind. Wisdom Publications.
- Wallace, B. A. Stilling the Mind and Minding Closely, the companion practice volumes.
- Asanga. Sravakabhumi, one of the Indian sources of the nine-stage scheme.
- Kamalashila. Bhavanakrama, the stages of meditation.
- Saron, C. et al. The Shamatha Project, University of California, Davis; findings published from 2010 including work on sustained attention and visual discrimination.
- Research literature on meditation-related adverse effects and the conditions under which they arise.
- Theravada sources on the dry insight approach, representing the alternative position on how much concentration insight requires.