On the one hand I kind of want to ask other people about their thoughts or lackthereof now, but on the other I'm not the greatest of conversationalists and I have no idea whatsoever how I would go about approaching that kind of subject, even though my friends are generally used to me springing semi-random questions at them from seemingly out of the blue XD

I feel like the emptying of the mind thing came about because people generally have a lot of thoughts that causes stress and getting rid of them (at least temporarily) helps alleviate the stress. These days it seems to be more accepted that some people reach that meditative state differently (but of course with people being people the way they do it is the one true right way and the people that are achieving it slightly differently well sure they're kind of there but they aren't doing it quite right and thus will never achieve proper nirvana ;D)