I had a revelation recently in regard with meditation and Buddhism, that made me almost completely change my view and opinion of it.
In early forms of Buddhism or Zen it was very common for the gurus or the masters to misguide their students, in order to help them understand something that would be impossible to explain or convey in some other way.
As far as I understand the main objective of Buddhism is to teach acceptance or surrender to life in order to eliminate sufferance.
This is basically an impossible task because if you give someone any instructions you tell them to control themselves. For example if I say pay attention to your thoughts, I am telling you to control your attention. Which means that I am teaching you the opposite of surrender I am teaching you control.
There is a story about Buddha that I like, after he become enlightened and he started to teach others. One day was visited by a woman of which son just died, somehow she got the idea that Buddha had magical powers.
And he begged the Buddha to bring her son back to life, no matter what the Buddha would tell her she wouldn't understand so he eventually agreed to bring her son back to life with one condition.
If she manage to bring him a grain of rice from a house from which nobody lost anybody. The woman eventually leaves satisfied, and of course she fails to accomplish that task because it is impossible, as death is a certainty of life everybody will eventually lose a loved one.
But in that process of attempting the impossible she understood the true nature of life and surrender to it.
You see the task of meditating, to silence or control your mind is as impossible as stopping your heart while you are still alive or your stomach from digesting.
Sure you can have really pleasant experiences while meditating, and periods that are free of thought. But you can have those doing almost anything: going on a walk, playing a game, cleaning your house etc.
It is not necessary to meditate, or I should say that it is necessary only if you believe it is. The purpose of meditation is to make you fail at it to realize that control is bulshit and give up on trying to control your mind.
Meditation is not a real thing in itself, it is a teaching tool, something to deliberately send you in too the wrong direction at an accelerate rate so you can understand that it doesn't work.
I guess you could considered meditation a metaphor to how most people are attempting to live their life. Am impossible to accomplish self administered torture, full of contradictions.