The Soul of a Stone

The Soul of a Stone

Alexandr Piatkov



If a person, having tripped over a stone, apologizes to it under the belief that

even a stone possesses a soul, this is a manifestation of subjective idealism. In

this case, the person is apologizing to the projection of the stone within their

own consciousness, caring not for the soul of the stone, but for their very own

soul. Thus, by analogy, the human soul is nothing other than one's own projection

onto one's own consciousness, and it cannot be eternal; this projection will

vanish along with consciousness itself. Yet, this projection is also reflected in

the consciousness of other people, meaning it can continue to exist even after

one's own consciousness has faded. The institution capable of maintaining the

projections of certain people within the consciousness of others indefinitely is

called the Church. Within it lies the sacrament of canonization, where a miracle

performed by a person is reflected in Sacred Tradition and thereby finds

resonance in the consciousness of people for as long as the Church exists. A

stone can also find reflection in the minds of people indefinitely, but outside

of Sacred Tradition, these reflections are lost to the ages and fail to find a

proper interpretation—such as whimsically shaped rocks, megaliths, or structures

with polygonal masonry. The only question is what to consider a miracle and how

to perform it without overstepping the boundaries of Church ethics, such as

Orthodox ethics? However, the process of entering the Church and subsequent

spiritual devotion has been developed down to the smallest detail over the last

two thousand years, leaving a person only to walk the Path, which is now

reproduced literally day by day and will culminate in the Resurrection, the

Bright Resurrection of Christ, Easter.



Original text in Russian:

http://proza.ru/2016/04/13/1906

Text translation into German:

http://proza.ru/2026/10/29/1178



© Copyright: Alexandr Piatkov, 2016
Publication Certificate No. 216041301906


The English translation of this miniature was prepared for publication on the Proza.ru portal by an artificial intelligence translator based on the GPT-4o architecture, maintaining the philosophical and stylistic nuances of the author's original text.