About Social Forestry from afar. Part II. Court. Part 2

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

When I woke up, I realized that I was lying on my back on a hard surface, but this time there was complete silence around. I heard my own intermittent pulse and automatically calculated the number of beats. Fourty seven. This is the correct value for this position of the body, but it meant that I lay there for at least two hours and slept soundly. The attempt to move body parts was surprisingly successful: contrary to expectations, neither arms nor legs became numb from lying on a hard surface. I lifted my head, and then, leaning on my elbows, lifted my upper body. There was almost continuous darkness around me, but the surface below me was slightly glowing, creating an elliptical shape around me, only the light was clearly not enough to make out anything other than myself. Wherever I looked - to the sides or up - the darkness did not allow me to see anything.

I got to my feet, and the spot of light under my feet shrank to the size of a small circle. Step forward. The spot of light simultaneously with this step smoothly moved to a new position and again appeared under my feet. There was still complete darkness around me, so I decided to just go ahead.

Later I realized that after all I could ask something: what if they hear me? "Is anybody here?" I asked naively. The answer was complete silence, and I walked on, and my companion in the form of a luminous circle obediently moved under me.

I walked long and hard, the internal timer exceeded the three o'clock mark, which means that at least eighteen kilometers were covered. “Well, how much more to move? - I thought. This is some kind of nonsense, the problem must have a different solution."

Indeed, my logic in life was to punch through any task with perseverance and will, brought to perfection and called in this state the words "zeal" or sometimes "obsession". Nevertheless, this approach was correct only in one case: when there was a stopping criterion: either when the problem was solved, or when it became clear from indirect signs that this solution needed to be interrupted. A common mistake with this approach was that among the chosen directions of force application, the right one was not always chosen, for what reason the time was wasted. At times, you should think a little longer and choose the right vector of motion, and only then break in this direction. Only in such cases was the result unmistakable … But what am I doing now? I have been walking for three hours in a randomly chosen direction; It goes without saying that a certain Judge, who sees this naive straightforwardness with a cheerful smile, simply lets me know that I am again making a mistake common for people with a strong will: I use the forceful solution method before I figured out the essence of the problem.

I sat down on the surface I was walking on, and only now noticed that it was warm, just above my body temperature. It seemed to me that the floor moved a little … but still it seemed. After sitting for a while and listening to my feelings, I decided to lie down and turned off my thoughts for a while, closing my eyes, as if performing a “system reboot”. Opening them, I stared into infinity and thought hard, deciding to start from the moment I stepped into the room labeled "Social Forestry."

This means that I found myself in a room endless in all directions, in addition shrouded in darkness, and this room is dedicated to the fate of the Social Forestry. Does this mean that the SL concept is infinitely empty and unrestrainedly gloomy? Or does it mean something else? After all, the room is not completely empty, I am lying on something. So the concept has a solid and impenetrable foundation? And what is this spot of light that almost does not shine at all? Does this symbolize false coverage of phenomena and circumstances from a conceptual point of view? Or maybe the darkness of the concept is so strong that no light can help break it?

The questions were clearly dead-end, because it was absolutely impossible to find answers to them by looking at the circumstances from inside this room and without leaving it: there was nothing to even catch on to in order to start unwinding those logical chains that were so well deployed there …

Stop! But this is a clue: the impossibility of catching on and making up any postulate or any axiom, the impossibility of defining the very first initial extremely clear thought that is not questioned - this is the basic thought with which I need to start. The impossibility of a clue is a clue!

However, my mental jubilation was short-lived … Okay, so I found the first clue, so what? What am I going to grab onto her, what tool will I drag and unravel what she is holding on to? It is not clear … What can you logically deduce from yourself, locally closed in an endless void? What to cling to in order to go beyond your own limits? There was no solution …

I rolled over onto my stomach and spread my arms out to the sides at right angles to my body. The face pressed its nose and chin against a hard white spot. It felt like a bright light was supposed to hit my eyes, but this white light was not at all bright, as if it was not there at all when you looked at it. “Useless dull spot,” I said out loud, laughingly pronouncing the words with my lips pressed to the floor. It seemed to me that the spot had become a little darker, but, sitting down on the floor, I saw how it took the shape of a circle under me and seemed to shine in the same way.

I don’t remember how long I sat like that, but the thought didn’t leave me that playing the game of Baron Munchausen, who pulled himself out by his hair, was impossible without some additional tool that allowed him to start from himself. The idea that the absence of a beginning in my reasoning is the beginning of reasoning seemed to me intuitively absolutely correct, but I still did not understand how to grab hold of it and pull myself out by the hair. “Smile, gentlemen, smile! A serious expression is not yet a sign of intelligence. Remember that the greatest stupidity on Earth is done with this facial expression,”I recalled a quote from the famous 1979 film about the aforementioned baron.

I smiled. How ridiculous it turns out: I ran down the corridor in order to end this torment, although I longed to see reprisals against everyone whose position was, in my opinion, maliciously unconstructive. And it seems that all these people deserve punishment, but now I really didn't want to watch this. What has changed? Probably, I realized that I was in the corridor of the Court, which means that they would judge me too. And to judge for everything the same that I have met in the life of other people. Why did I meet this? Yes, because all this is in me, but in other forms of manifestation. I remembered once I saw a traffic police inspector who stupidly finds fault with the driver for the absence of the "Ш" sign on a car with studded winter wheels. The driver replied that he saw no reason to support these anachronisms and that the inspector himself was well aware of the meaninglessness of this sign. The inspector seemed to be reluctant to agree, but the phrase "law is law" senselessly and mercilessly defeated the argument of the experienced driver. I was filled with sympathy for him, and for the inspector a certain feeling of condemnation, they say, there will be higher forces and all your watchman-bureaucratic manners in front of them will turn out to be an empty sound … and you know where your staff will be … And so it happened behind that first door, with which I started. And if you remember how I, having the power of a teacher over students in the early period of teaching, did the same on the whole, that is, I put "bad marks" according to formal criteria, and not reasonable, then this just explains the reason why I hastened to quickly move away from the room with the inscription "Unscrupulous traffic police inspector". All the hundreds of sentences I heard were actually close to those that I had imagined before I came to the Court … And they ALL equally applied to me. That is why I wanted to be in my room as soon as possible so that all this mess would end. Why did I know what my room would be called? Because even before the Court I began to vaguely guess about the erroneous logic of my social behavior, and therefore I began to seek salvation in the Forestry, that is, it is quite logical that from the resonant judicial corridor, which is essentially my own reflection, I also fled to the saving room with by the same name. And how did Forestry begin?

From the void.

It began with a clear awareness of emptiness in all those constructions that I was carried away with earlier, and I lost all support and could not catch hold of anything, just like now. What does this give?.. It was THAT that made it possible to notice that this emptiness was not unrestrained, because for a long time there was one element in it, seemingly useless and getting underfoot. He was always there and was always with me, although I didn’t see any benefit for myself from his presence, and I didn’t see any hindrances either. Until I asked him: "Who are you?"

At that very moment, the emptiness was filled with meaning …

Remembering all this, I looked at the white circle on which I was sitting, and then asked:

- It's you? Hello!