Face Facts of Human Life
Sister Nivedita
The facts of life must be faced. There is no escape from the actual. It is the actual which we, as human beings, are dealing with and if from the boundaries of the actual we can see the horizon of that which exists beyond what we term the actual, well and good. This life which we live must be exalted and widened so that its form embodies the empyrean of the ideal. Even the ideal must become the actual. The objective is the subjective incarnate, and thus the ideal, to be realized, must assume the embodiment of the objective.
The realization of something higher than life can come only when life has been extended so as to include all areas of thought and experience. In the process of transforming the ideal into the real, or the real into the ideal, the mind must always balance itself through a never-varying tendency towards objectivism. The ideal must become the actual. This is the portent of realization. For what is now real and actual was at one time only possible and ideal, but in the larger definition of the word Real, what is called the ideal and the real are seen as aspects of tat Reality which synthesizes all relativeness, and unifies all manifoldness, and of themselves the ideal and the real, as they are commonly interpreted, must ever war with each other, unless their juxtaposition and harmonizing relation can be touched and sensed in some definite third and inclusive Reality.
It is that Reality, the explanation of all variants that we must search for in life. The dualities will always continue to puzzle, unless their background is discovered, and this background, beyond all variants, beyond all dualities, beyond the relative, beyond the relatively real and the relatively ideal is the Self of man/woman, which, in its progress of unfoldment lends larger or smaller interpretations to different facts in life according to the progress, area, intensity and faithfulness with which it manifests. The ultimate is its own Self-sufficiency without need of manifestation.
The same struggle continues—the war against the instincts that bind the mind of human being to animal life, when the soul would rise into its own region and express its own life. Morality is only a means to an end—that end being the uplifting of the levels of living, because with the refinement of the ways of living, the levels of living are shifted from the lower to the higher, and the mind and the soul broaden their vision, their activity and life.
Properly regarded, there can be no struggle, or at least the idea of struggle should be forgotten and the ideal of vaster opportunities and of expanded life should take its place. We must realize the great advantage to be derived from control over the animal tendencies that would drag the soul to inferior expression. This advantage should be the spur urging us speedily onward to the goal of morality which is always the refinement of the feelings, and the genesis of the capacity to feel in other and loftier ways than we are now aware of.
Direction of force is the keynote of the power over force. Psychically speaking, our minds are vessels of power and unless it is safely protected, the vessel will meet with ill-fortune. This ill-fortune comes through un-controlled emotion that tosses, throws overboard, the vessel of the mind and dissipates its contents.