A seeming contradicion in meditation
Excellent question. You're definitely onto something.
As everyone here said, wrong thoughts are real, these are thoughts that have a nature of conflict: thoughts of wanting more, thoughts of not wanting anymore, thoughts like &quot;it's not supposed to be like this&quot;.
Our tactical goal is Peace, a state of mind when there's no inner conflict, no conflicting thoughts. (Our strategic goal, at least in Mahayana, is Enlightenment and full Liberation, but let's not get ahead of ourselves).
To attain that tactical goal, you need to eradicate the conflicting thoughts (of both craving and aversion types). Now, if you were to judge your thoughts as &quot;wrong&quot;, you would only create more conflict right then and there. So the trick is to eradicate conflict without creating even more conflict. How is that to be done?
Instead of sitting there and hating yourself or hating your bad thoughts or blaming them or suppressing them - we just don't feed them and let them dissolve. We let our attention naturally move on to other thoughts. Or, if attention keeps getting stuck, we gently move it onto other topics, deliberately.
Depending on where you are in your practice this may require less or more effort. When you are very advanced, you just watch them and they dissolve like the writing on water. When you are a beginner, you may have to speak out loud on some positive topic in order to distract your attention. And everything in between.