Page 37 - All India Magazine Sep-2025

Did You Know This?
(Faith is covertly and openly the pivot of
all endeavour and action)

The world thinks that it moves by the light of reason but it is really
impelled by its faiths and instincts.
CWSA 12: 458

Reason adapts itself to the faith or argues out a justification of
the instincts, but it receives the impulse subconsciously; therefore
men think that they act rationally.
CWSA 12: 458

[Something in man clings to his faith:] if it were not so, man would
be the plaything of a changing mind or a sport of circumstances.
SABCL 23: 616

This soul faith, in some form of itself, is indispensable to the action
of the being and without it man cannot move a single pace in life,
much less take any step forward to a yet unrealised perfection. It
is so central and essential a thing that the Gita can justly say of it*
that whatever is a man’s śraddhD, that he is, yo yacchraddhaU sa
eva saU, and, it may be added, whatever he has the faith to see as
possible in himself and strive for, that he can create and become.
CWSA 24: 771 Sri Aurobindo
* ... there comes a remarkable line in which the Gita tells us that
this Purusha, this soul in man, is, as it were, made of śraddhD, a faith,
a will to be, a belief in itself and existence, and whatever is that
will, faith or constituting belief in him, he is that and that is he.
ŚraddhDmayo ’yaW puruIo yo yac-chraddhaU sa eva saU. If we
look into this pregnant saying a little closely, we shall find that
this single line contains implied in its few forceful words almost
the whole theory of the modern gospel of pragmatism. [Gita 17:3]
CWSA 19: 482

All India Magazine, September 2025 37