What has happened to me the more I meditate is the discovery of these two basic ways of interacting with the world. The first stance feels very familiar, it is

What has happened to me the more I meditate is the discovery of these two basic ways of interacting with the world. The first stance feels very familiar, it is the me that spends most of its time: 1) judging the present, e.g. "How does the present moment live up to my expectations of it? How can I change the present moment to meet my goals or aversions?"; 2) expecting the future, e.g. planning or fantasizing "What will I do if X happens? I must have X by Y or I won't be happy."; 3) replaying episodes from the past, e.g. "I wish I had/hadn't done X. I wish Y had/hadn't done X to me. When I had X I really felt great." 4) reacting to and getting caught up in emotions - anger, fear, desire, aversion, etc. After meditating, a categorically different stance towards reality becomes available: that of non-judgmental pure awareness. That part of you that is the awareness before all the other stuff begins, the awareness from which all the other stuff emerges. One way to tell the first stance from the second is the presence of judgement. If you're judging then you're not experiencing pure awareness. That's how you know that your experience, that of "another overbearing character watching my every move and telling me what to do" is not what people seek with meditation - it's merely another form that ego takes: judgement of oneself instead of judgement of others or of the present moment. That kind of duality is just the ego showing just one of its multitudes of forms. The more you meditate, the more time you fall into nonjudgmental awareness of the present moment, and act from that perspective instead of the other ego-directed perspectives. The great contemplative traditions have written extensively on these matters - the difficulty is finding a tradition or teacher that fits one's learning style and cultural context. I would not look to science for a fundamental understanding of these things, as these are subjective matters which science is ill-equipped to address (that's not to say science can show us the very real objective effects of the subject process of meditation).