Whereas psychoanalysis takes the therapeutic relationship and cultivates it through the power of the therapist’s analytic attitude, meditation takes actual qualities of mind and cultivates them internally so that the person’s powers of observation are increased. With these increased contemplative powers, the meditator is then able to scan and to hold what can best be described as the building blocks of self-experience, the basic cravings that give rise to the sense of self. In so doing, one’s deeply ingrained sense of self is profoundly and irrevocably transformed.
