The World As It Is

A friend suggested that, for the first Familiar of the year, I should summarise in simple terms the way of looking at the world which I call STA. No digressions about obscure poetry, no anecdotes about cats (sorry!), something brisk, clear and not too long. So, with apologies that I will be repeating some of what I’ve written before, here goes.

We all know what this is. Obviously, it’s our world, the globe we inhabit spinning prettily in space. And yet, when we listen to The World at One, The World This Weekend, read Le Monde, Die Welt or The Boston Globe or watch Global News, this is not the world we encounter. What we get instead are politicians, warlords, murderers, celebrities – noisy, pushy people eager for attention. We’re told a great deal about the economy, fame, and wars between nations, but however closely we zoom in on that image of the round, blue thing, we find no economy, no fame, no nations. Why are we so pre-occupied with things that have no physical reality?

STA is a world-view, quite literally. It begins with the round, blue thing because it is the basic reality without which there could be no noisy people or economy. And if we look at any part of it – those trees across the road, that hill, that bird – and try to see it as it is, setting aside our social or cultural preconceptions, we see something very different from the media version.

STA makes only two assumptions, which I hope we can all agree on: that the world is not an illusion, and that evolution is true, meaning that all living beings are related, descended from a common ancestor. If we accept these, and actually take them seriously, we are suddenly faced with some startling new ideas. New to us that is, but otherwise literally as old as the hills. These are the starting-points of STA, claims which seem at the same time outlandish and irrefutably logical:

1. Nature is real and the basis of our lives.
2. We are wholly involved in it and not separate in any way.
3. We generally ignore this affinity with nature, focussing on our own inventions (e.g., shopping, politics, football, TV etc) but …
4. ... a rewarding sense of belonging is available to us if we accept it.
5. Nature unceasingly creates new, unique individuals.
6. Nature is perfect, by definition; its only purpose being to do whatever it does (though this, of course, may not suit our personal interests).
7. As each thing is unique, all things must be equal; individuality-with-interdependence is the basis of relationships in nature.

This needs time to digest. The name STA comes from an old Latin quote: STA et considera miracula – Stand still and consider the wondrous things. Although it has wide-ranging, multiple implications, at its most basic STA is simply this plea to look squarely at the world and think about what it is.

While you’re pausing to do that...

This is a good opportunity to announce for the first time the publication in May of my new book Your Lowly Hedgehog Knows (The Cyrus Press, £12) which explores many of the wonder-filled ramifications of a STA way of looking. Copies can be pre-ordered here

And now back to the essay...

Once we realise that many ideas we have cherished, particularly regarding our own human separateness and superiority are delusions, we need to recalibrate our thoughts. This ‘paradigm shift’ affects everything we think and do, personally and politically, from the way we look at this tree (or this person) in front of us to our attitudes to race, identity, property, money, meat-eating, pretty much every issue. Pass them through the sieve of those starting-points and see what you’re left with. This is all so simple it’s hard to believe that it can be so radical, but once you remember that a mountain – even a molehill, certainly a mole – has a deeper reality than The Bank of England or the United States of America, which are only made-up things, you carry a passport to a wonderfully strange but unshakably solid world.

I have tentatively worked out four basic principles of behaviour, which I’ve called our ‘Natural Duties’ – awareness, love, creativity and haecceity (or ‘thisness’) – and elaborated on the website and in the Substack essay A Universal Ethics?, but these are only my ideas. Neither they nor the seven starting-points above are dogmas. You mustn’t take my word for it (or anyone else’s) – I have no authority. Everything’s up for grabs. You just need to stand still and consider. What do I mean by that? By ‘standing still’, I don’t mean not moving your feet – walking is an excellent way of ‘standing still’ – but stilling our minds, not jumping the gun, waiting to encounter reality before you decide what we think about it. By ‘considering’, I mean more than intellection, but engaging with our whole body – senses, instincts, imagination, emotion. We’re more than chauffeurs to our minds.

As a living organism (which I presume you are) you’re already fully qualified. We need not wait for philosophers or physicists or poets or priests, let alone politicians, to tell us how to respond to the world any more than a sealion or a sycamore waits for instruction. The astonishing world of culture we have made can enrich but never supersedes physical reality. If there is a heaven it does not invalidate this earth. This is not simplistic; it is merely simple, an unconvoluted understanding of what we need which is entirely ignored by the ‘world’s’ media. However much we complicate our lives, the physical basis is unchanged. Stay in reality.

So, there are no exams to pass, you need study nothing but whatever is in front of you, bringing the full youness of you into contact with the ‘thereness and suchness’ as Randall Jarrell calls it, of whatever you experience. Being is anterior to knowing. STA is not a cult, there are no initiation ceremonies, no membership forms, no fees to pay. It’s just a way of looking and thinking, meeting each creature ‘soul to soul’ rather than through the names and categories we’ve invented to describe them.

Seeing the world in daylight rather than artificially lit by prejudices and conventions can be exhilarating and subtly transformative. It brings us the reassurance of thoughts rooted in a deeper, older order than ideologies and institutions; the sensory and mental alertness impelled by an ever-shifting world of uniquenesses; the agency which bids me act on my own experience without awaiting ‘authority’ from peer pressure or the media; the sense of our affinity and belonging in a seamless creation.

STA is a very plain idea, but that does not mean that its consequences are straightforward. Each moment and circumstance is unique. Every living thing is equal and is kin, yet we must kill some of them to survive. In an infinitely complex world, it informs but cannot prescribe our actions, which remain our own responsibility. It is a beginning, not a resolution. That is the glorious burden of self-conscious existence – we are forced to be alert, and alive to the world. As Simone Weil assures us, ‘Through focussed attention the gift of truth is open to everyone.’

See this living creature on my lap, feel her heft, her warmth, the pulsations of her breathing and purring. She is related to me, like all living things, unique and equal to me in a world without a hierarchy. Although we have evolved different techniques for getting by, our needs are much the same: food, water, shelter, warmth, air, and when we’re not pursuing these, we sleep or amuse ourselves with play – she, chasing a dressing-gown cord, I, drinking wine and watching telly. We’ve each learnt to make the best of the great forces of gravity and scientific ‘laws’ which bear down equally upon us. Above all, we each carry in us the same irreducible, uncompromised reality, unlike so many of my concerns.

People think I live on my own, but neither I nor anyone else does. None could exist without the whole network of other living things. Time passes – living things are created in their billions every second, older ones make way for them; everything changes which keeps everything new and exhilarating. Stand still and consider all these wondrous things, so much wilder, more exciting and involving than anything we were brought up to believe, because our role is participant not audience, living something real, not watching something faked.

STA has no agenda, no goal other than to accommodate our thinking to reality. Looking at that picture of the Earth and seeing the scale of what we’re involved in, the alternative – manipulating the planet to suit my personal ambitions – seems absurdly presumptuous.

In her great book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard tells of a young woman who regained her sight after a lifetime blind. Once she got over the shock of light, “the more she directed her gaze upon everything around her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Oh God! How beautiful!’”

How easy it is to forget, and yet what else should our reaction be to reality, either here close at hand or in that amazing photo of our planet? Stand still and consider the wondrous things.

Looking at that picture again reminded me somehow of John of Gaunt’s famous speech in Richard II and prompted me to write what follows. Feel free to ignore it. Poor Shakespeare! – I imagine him on some astral plain, either rolling around laughing or ranting about the decline of English verse, depending on whether he’s in an All’s Well or King Lear kind of mood. My only excuse is that all of us should be singing hymns to the Earth, wondering at the real things with ‘gratification and astonishment’.

This sapphire pendant shining in the dark,
This burnished jewel, this rock, this sure foundation,
This trusty ark freighted with life
That voyages alone through silent space,
This womb that nurtures and sends forth one breed
Of infinite variety, giraffes,
Oaks, elephants, bacteria,
All living things her fruitful progeny;
This nub of hope, this fertile orb, this earth,
Whose iridescent beauty sings of life,
This blessed plot, this precious, precious land,
Where even death breeds life not nothingness
And shames the glitt’ring nullity of stars,
The lifelessness of comets, empty pomp
Of black holes, dwarfs and giants whose deadness
Only serves as foil to this rich world.
This planet, meaning’s only home,
This glistening dewdrop in a desert waste,
Whose diverse elements transmute themselves
To feed each other, plant and animal
United in this ring of alchemy,
This hearth where all that lives can find asylum,
This sanctuary stone, this treasure-house,
This everything, this home.

The Familiar, published by The Cyrus Press. Text by Gareth Howell-Jones

sta-website.com sta-serial.com gareth@sta-website.com @sta.et.considera