Ray Pawlett

Faster

If you ever want to try looking at the world from a different viewpoint, the writings of Carlos Casteneda might be a good place to take a look. In his books he describes an apprenticeship with a South American Shaman, or holy man, called Don Juan.

Don Juan talks a lot about being more aware of the world that we live in. It’s fascinating stuff! One of his ideas is the need to build up our ‘internal speed’ so that we can perceive more of this wonderful world that we live in.

Just imagine that you are driving at full tilt along a straight road. Then you drive back down the same road at a much slower speed. You realise that there were many branches and junctions that you didn’t see when you were going too fast. Your internal speed was insufficient when you were going too fast to perceive that there were junctions in the road.

A few years ago, I was driving by a hospital in Cambridge. A guy came driving out of the hospital. He hadn’t seen me and nearly drove into me. Without an emergency stop from me, there would certainly have been an accident. He didn’t notice – just drove on.

A part of me was just about to lean on my car horn and shout at him to ‘watch where you are going’. Then my internal speed kicked in. I realised that there were choices. I thought to myself that he could have just had an awful diagnosis or been watching someone die. Anyway, who would it serve to get wound up by his bad driving? If he didn’t notice me when he nearly hit me then he probably wouldn’t now.

If my ‘internal speed’ was not high enough, I would not have even thought about possibilities because I would not have seen them. I would have just gone straight into being angry with the guy and been upset as a result of it. So I let it go and felt all the better for it.

Perhaps a more scientific way of speaking would be to say that if your nervous system is going at full tilt, then you will miss a lot. So, in order to increase our internal speed and perceive more in our worlds, we need to slow down our nervous systems.

Things like meditation, Tai Chi, Qigong, being in nature and many others have been tried and tested over millennia and have been shown to do exactly that. This is a part of the psychological wellbeing that these arts and lifestyles create.

When we find this wellbeing, our perception of the world improves and we realise that we have choices rather than falling headlong from one ‘event’ to the other. We feel better in ourselves and more present in the moment.

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