Analysis is a process wherein the observer examines the observed. Any analysis presupposes an object to be analyzed. Science is the modern master of analysis, ever so worried about probing into the depths of physicality to unearth theories that spell out the workings of the clock. Embedded in this research mode is a vision of a clockmaker who gazes and grabs and dismantles and studies the curious clock. The clockmaker reinforces the clock’s distance as an object of analysis, and proclaims his separation from it.
This vision, this mode of existence, almost all of us share.
If analysis is as I have described it, is it not true that analysis breeds division? Is it not the case that separation is an inherent, inevitable characteristic of analysis? And is analysis not a synonym of thought?
When I think about how badly I want to stop feeling anxious, I retain a sense of self that is separate from the anxiety that I am observing. The anxiety becomes a phenomenon "out there," which I can try to push aside and fight against, my victory being the beginning of a freeing psychological evolution for which I so deeply yearn.
But there is no victory or defeat. There is no psychological evolution. There are only thought and silence. Thought needs a subject and an object of thinking. It begs for fragments. It dwells in contradictions and succeeds in splintering the whole into past and future.
In silence the observer is the observed. The coin has two sides no more, for it was one all along. There is no division in stillness; no conflict, no between, no analysis. The dam of confusion disintegrates.
And the river flows free
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