I know there are two types of meditation,
Active meditation - Concentration on empty mind, a symbol/sigil/vision, or mantra/idea/verse,
Or Passive meditation, allowing free flow of words, ideas or visions.
Which is better for the beginner, and recommended time limit?
Passive meditation first so you can acknowledge your thoughts.
So that your mind can quiet down and enter active meditation.
“Why am I getting all these useless thoughts, and thoughts that I don’t want to see?”
“Why can’t I quiet my mind?”
Clearly, your subconscious is trying to tell you something.
Acknowledge these thoughts and your mind will quiet down in time.
@Lachdan1832
@Fuego1
I can not meditate, my mind is very active.
I also had the frustration of an overactive mind when I first started learning to meditate. This is often referred to as monkey mind as your thoughts are jumping around all over the place. I was offered a few tips on getting my mind to settle down, which ill list below…
*The first tip was to give the monkey something to do…such as follow your breath. By this I mean literally visualize your consciousness riding your breath deep into the bottom of your lungs, stay with it for the prescribed pause in breath and follow it back out and repeat. I like to count while I do this as well… 4 seconds inhale in nose, 4 second pause, 4 second slow exhale and then stay breathless for 4 seconds and repeat…
*The next advice was to be employed after 4 or 5 rounds of the above breath: the idea is to ask your self (in your mind) some simple but deep questions to ponder…
-“where will my next thought come from?”
-“what will the shape of my next thought be?”
-"what will my next thought taste like?"
My experience was that after posing the question to myself that it was followed by stone internal silence for a few seconds. The originater of this method, which I am not, links this pause in thoughts to a mental reset point. The theory I believe us that If you can do it for a short period of time then, like anything else, you can develop it to the extreme with dedicate practice.
*After success with the above methods, I took some meditation classes from a man who had spent 5 years living as a monk. He explained mantra work to me in a simple manner. He said if you visualize a dart board like picture to represent your mental activity with bullseye being a perfectly quiet and centered mind, and random intrusive thoughts as flyers on the board… Mantras act as a tether with pulls the random thoughts back to center. I use a 108 bead mala for this to help keep count though about 5 minutes of mantra work would represent a mala roughly. (Note this is a very superficial explanation of mantra and this is universal to any mantra even made up ones… Mantra work is a deep subject and this is surface level)…I use 5 min mini meditations randomly during the day.
*even 5 min twice a day morning and night is a good start. Many people have great success with 20 minute sessions. I hope this helps improve your practice.
Guided meditation to be helpful initially and then go off piste so to speak.
Yes, you can. 
Have a look through this: