You're Not Meditating—You're Being Conditioned
by Daniel J Schwarzhoff

Artwork by Kristen Schwarzhoff / See
Most people have no idea what they're actually doing when they sit down to “meditate.” They think they're finding peace. They think they're awakening. But they're not.
They're being conditioned—neurologically, emotionally, spiritually, to accept someone else's philosophy as their own. Usually without even realizing it.
Most popular techniques are built on repetition. A mantra, breath pattern, a phrase or a sound. You repeat it. You breathe into it. You're told you'll “transcend,” or feeling something. What actually happens? You drift into a mild trance.
Your surface thoughts dull, your body settles, and now you feel calm. The bait worked. The hook is in. But what else got in while your guard was down?
This is where it turns. In that dulled, calmed state, softened and open, your mind starts absorbing the underlying beliefs baked into the method, without questioning them.
You think you're just relaxing, but you're being imprinted. Non-duality, pantheism, and dharmic detachment are all belief systems that dissolve identity and cut you off from God and conscience. And you never consented to it. You thought it was just “meditation.” Or “mindfulness.”
Even the so-called scientific methods are suspect. Thought-labeling, body-scanning, breath-tracking—they wear the lab coats and carry studies. The terms are modern, but the worldview is ancient. There is no self. No right and wrong. Just pure observation of sensation. That isn't peace. It's detachment from what is realty. There is a reality. There is right and wrong and the idea of losing the gift of discernment and to critically observe is a dememorization of spirit.
Here's the pattern. Repeated actions like mantras, breathwork, visualizations, even Christianized contemplative practices—even the modern secularized versions like mindfulness. These all demand effort. They all involve focus, concentration, and doing.
And every time you do it, you're not disengaging ego, you're reinforcing it. You're conditioning yourself to react, to try, to build a spiritual identity around some kind of performance. And while you're at it, you are unwittingly getting injected with foreign doctrines buried inside these methods—without even knowing it.
This is exactly why I developed and teach Non-Contemplative Meditation. Because it doesn't do any of that.
There are no mantras. There are no breathing tricks. No visualization. No focusing on anything. You close your eyes. You place your hands together with the pads of your fingers lightly touching. And you step back. That's it. You observe the flow of thought without chasing it. Without resisting it. Without reacting to it.
And at the same time as you observe the noise, something happens—you see light. Not imagined. Not visualized. It's already there. You don't make it happen. You don't create it. You just become aware of it. It appears to you because it was always there, beyond the stream of thinking. This light has nothing to do with euphoria or pleasure. It's not a feeling. It's a revealing.
This method doesn't hijack your dopamine like Transcendental Meditation or the mindfulness-based variations of meditation do. Those techniques stimulate a trance-like high while smuggling in belief systems and becoming addictive.
Non-Contemplative Meditation doesn't stimulate your nervous system into a fake sense of wellness. It reveals the noise already inside you as you automatically disengage, in stillness. And in that stillness, you experience the Presence, in the present. That's why it works.
So if you've been “meditating” and you still feel disconnected from God. Or worse, more open to ideas that you once rejected, then that feeling is valid. Because you've been conditioned for it. You were rewired to become passive, impressionable, and compliant.
To break that, stop reacting. And you do that by stepping back and just observe within. That's where God is. Everything else is just egoism masquerading as spirituality.