I would be interested in what the Vedic or Eastern position is with regard to our modern western society’s “midlife crisis” or “midlife transition?”

I’m having difficulty understanding detachment, specifically relating to my children. I want to rid myself of material and emotional attachments but I have (as we all do) a deep bond and love for my children. I really want to understand.

How does one go about trying to persuade others to awaken their spirit, and to pursue enlightenment – if those that one wishes to help are too stubborn and egotistical to allow themselves to be helped?

A thought/concept… If we are to make an assumption that good and evil do exist, that they are opposites of the same condition of existence and strive against each other, that existence is the state of being, that reality is simply the observable portion of existence…I am rambling, but this is the way my thoughts, my conscious and unconscious are struggling at the moment.

To the point; good is love that tends towards order and higher functioning, the opposite is evil, anti-love that tends to chaos and entropy, however neither can exist without the other.  What if the ultimate expression of order is disorder and vice versa?  Would then existence strive against itself to become more and more ordered to eventually create a state of disorder that would create a new existence?  Could the opposite be true; that chaos can eventually become a new ordered state of existence?

Do the two seemingly diametrical opposed forces eventually end up at the same point of singleness and begin again?

In your reply about accessing the higher self you wrote: ” If you use a mantra in meditation, the mantra allows the mind to be undirected and neutral. This state permits the inherent attraction of the one’s inner nature of silence, joy and knowledge to draw the mind to the higher Self.”  My question is: Isn’t using a mantra a form of directing the mind, and therefore, how can the mind be neutral – and what does ‘neutral’ mean?  If one becomes aware of the mind ‘being drawn to the higher self” how does one distinguish that from the mind becoming distracted?