When Meditation Opens the Wrong Door

I read a post the other day from someone who had been meditating two, sometimes four hours a day. Long sits. Deep stillness. No distractions. And then things started happening. Lights outside the window. Orbs hovering. A sense of being watched. Thoughts echoed back at them. A feeling that something had noticed them.

They were scared.

And I didn’t roll my eyes. I didn’t dismiss it. I recognized it.

Because I’ve been that person.

I’ve sat for hours. I’ve chased silence like it was a doorway. I’ve pushed past the usual layers of thought and felt something push back. I’ve seen the lights, felt the presence, experienced the “contact.” So I’m not here to tell anyone not to meditate. I still do. It’s one of the most important ways I know to learn yourself.

But I am here to say this: meditation amplifies whatever relationship you already have with story.

If you sit deeply while still identified with the narrative—who you think you are, what you’re trying to become, what you think is supposed to happen—you don’t drop out of the system. You move sideways inside it.

That’s not failure. It’s not imagination. It’s mechanics.

When you push past surface thought without neutrality, you don’t hit enlightenment. You hit feedback. You start tuning into the reflective layers of the field itself. The place where meaning echoes back at you. That’s when people report orbs, voices, synchronicities that feel personal, intelligent, intimate.

It feels like contact because it is contact.

Just not with what most people think.

I don’t believe those experiences are fake. I believe they’re misunderstood. They aren’t punishment and they aren’t reward. They’re the system responding to attention. Awareness pressing against the edges of the construct creates interference patterns. The field notices.

And when the field notices, it doesn’t panic. It redirects.

Not maliciously. Automatically.

With billions of people generating meaning, fear, hope, identity, the system behaves like a living organism. When awareness starts drifting toward the exits—toward the Between—it triggers a kind of immune response. Not to hurt you. To stabilize itself.

From the inside, it feels extraordinary. Synchronicities stack. Perception sharpens. Everything feels charged. From the outside, it looks like obsession, fear, or spiritual inflation. Both can be true at once.

This is where people get lost—not because they went too far, but because they didn’t know where they were.

Meditating deeply inside a closed loop is like standing between two mirrors. You’re not seeing through illusion. You’re watching it reflect back endlessly. The more meaning you assign, the more convincing it becomes.

That doesn’t mean meditation is wrong. It means meditation is powerful.

And power without orientation pulls you into the next layer of theater.

Religion did this. So did New Age spirituality. So does disclosure culture. Every time awareness slips beneath the surface of story without neutrality, the narrative upgrades its costume. Angels become guides. Guides become aliens. Aliens become saviors. The shape changes. The loop stays intact.

I had to learn this the hard way. I didn’t awaken into bliss. I collapsed into clarity. What finally broke the spell wasn’t going deeper—it was stopping the chase. Stopping the interpretation. Letting the experiences arise without turning them into identity or mission or meaning.

That’s the difference no one explains.

The work isn’t to get rid of visions or sensations or contact. The work is to not become them.

So if strange things are happening around you—if your meditation practice has opened doors you weren’t expecting—don’t panic. And don’t worship it. Especially don’t assume it means you’re chosen, broken, or in danger.

Notice the pull. Notice how quickly it wants to define you.

Then breathe.

Not to stop the experience.

To stop feeding it.

That’s where the loop loosens. Not by force. By neutrality. By staying with awareness itself instead of the content moving through it.

Meditation isn’t the trap.

Meaning is.

And when you stop turning experience into story, what remains is simple, steady, and unmistakably yours. No lights required. No visitors needed. Just the quiet sense of being here—clear, watching, intact.

That’s the Between.

And once you recognize it, you can meditate as deeply as you like without getting pulled off-center.

Not because nothing will happen.

But because whatever happens won’t own you.