Buddhist Meditation for Beginners: Silence, Blessed Silence…
When you can sit still for one hour without saying a word or moving a muscle, then you are a meditator. And I don’t really even care what ‘kind’ of meditation you do, I only grudgingly allowing that there are different kinds, I from the old ‘anapanasati’ school, long before Theravada was rechristened ‘Vipassana’ and long before Vajrayana became ‘crazy wisdom’ while the Buddha rolled over in his ashes and checked his phone to see what year it is. “Yep,” he supposedly said, “pretty much right on schedule.” Haha.
I only draw a line between silent meditation, true meditation, and ‘guided meditation,’ which I consider to be something else entirely. And I don’t mean to imply that that’s bad, because it’s not. It’s just more like a ‘dharma talk’ than mediation IMHO. So, there’s certainly nothing wrong with that, since the definition of such is so broad and inclusive that it can be almost anything, so long as it revolves around the Buddha and Buddhism. But meditation is something different, and if you’re not doing it silently, then you’re missing out on something good—and important. And that’s silence.
Because silence, I think, is the shunya, zero, that qualifies for the important category of ‘emptiness’ so revered in later Buddhism, and I like it. It’s possible that Buddhist monks even invented the numerical zero, but this is not the place for that discussion. But, if ‘American Buddhism is Buddha-flavored Christianity,’ as someone once said (me), then this is the litmus test.
Because psychological therapy is famously ‘talk therapy’ and this is something so different that those practitioners can, and do, make a case of ‘spiritual bypassing’ while they claim that ‘thoughts have no thinkers’, thus having some cake while eating it, too. Cool, since it’s an open doctrine, subject to interpretation. But don’t miss the forest for the trees. Good thoughts are essential to good and proper Buddhism, but silent meditation is, also. It’s not a case of one or the other. Talking can sometimes soothe the overwrought mind, but sometimes silence can do it better. And that largely defines Buddhism.
streaming consciousness... 
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