The idea is not to escape the concepts, or the abstractions that we use to represent reality, any more than to escape from thinking. As goals that we could work toward (total mental silence, for example), they too are just abstractions. The idea, instead, is to simply allow thoughts, words, and their imperfect representation of reality to be, and simply strive to recognize them for what they are. Like Pema Chodron said, it's important to know thinking for the thinking it is, not to escape it because it is only a representation of actual experience. Because, as a representation, it's real too. When you get lost in thought, you are experiencing thought; the mistake is when you forget that it's just thinking, and not the voice of holy reality talking to you.
Once you strive to experience experiences as experiences (and you do this not by trying to experience, but by allowing the experience to simply be in your attention) then you will understand emptiness, because it is impossible to experience directly. There's really nothing there to experience. It's just like Indra's net of jewels, in which each jewel reflects all the others. The only experience is the reflections. The substance, the reality, is simply inferred.
The Rev