This term—in full, Dharma-megha, cloud of righteousness, or of
religion—is one which is very scantily explained by the commentators.
In fact, the only explanation they give is that all the man’s past
karma of good gathers over him, and pours down upon him a rain of
blessing. Let us see if we cannot find something more than this meagre
interpretation.
The term “cloud” is very often used in mystic literature of the West;
the “Cloud on the Mount,” the “Cloud on the Sanctuary,” the “Cloud on
the Mercy-Seat,” are expressions familiar to the student. And the
experience which they indicate is familiar to all mystics in its lower
phases, and to some in its fullness. In its lower phases, it is the
experience just noted, where the withdrawal of the consciousness into a
sheath not yet recognised as a sheath is followed by the beginning of
the functioning of that sheath, the first indication of which is the
dim sensing of an outer. You feel as though surrounded by a dense mist,
conscious that you are not alone but unable to see. Be still; be
patient; wait. Let your consciousness be in the attitude of suspense.
Presently the cloud will thin, and first in glimpses, then in its full
beauty, the vision of a higher plane will dawn on your entranced sight.
This entrance into a higher plane will repeat itself again and again,
until your consciousness, centred on the buddhic plane and its
splendouis having disappeared as your consciousness withdraws even from
that exquisite sheath, you find yourself in the true cloud, the cloud
on the sanctuary, the cloud that veils the Holiest, that hides the
vision of the Self. Then comes what seems to be the draining away of
the very life, the letting go of the last hold on the tangible, the
hanging in a void, the horror of great darkness, loneliness
unspeakable. Endure, endure. Everything must go. “Nothing out of the
Eternal can help you.” God only shines out in the stillness; as says
the Hebrew: “Be still, and know that I am God.” In that silence a Voice
shall be heard, the voice of the Self, In that stillness a Life shall
be felt, the life of the Self. In that void a Fullness shall be
revealed, the fullness of the Self. In that darkness a Light shall be
seen, the glory of the Self. The cloud shall vanish, and the shining of
the Self shall be made manifest. That which was a glimpse of a far-off
majesty shall become a perpetual realisation and, knowing the Self and
your unity with it, you shall enter into the Peace that belongs to the
Self alone.
Lecture II
SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT
Brothers:
In studying psychology anyone who is acquainted with the Sanskrit
tongue must know how valuable that language is for precise and
scientific dealing with the subject. The Sanskrit, or the well-made,
the constructed, the built-together, tongue, is one that lends itself
better than any other to the elucidation of psychological difficulties.
Over and over again, by the mere form of a word, a hint is given, an
explanation or relation is suggested. The language is constructed in a
fashion which enables a large number of meanings to be connoted by a
single word, so that you may trace all allied ideas, ,or truths, or
facts, by this verbal connection, when you are speaking or using
Sanskrit. It has a limited number of important roots, and then an
immense number of words constructed on those roots.
Now the root of the word yoga is a word that means “to join,” yuj, and
that root appears in many languages, such as the English—of course,
through the Latin, wherein you get jugare, jungere, “to join”—and out
of that a number of English words are derived and will at once suggest
themselves to you: junction, conjunction, disjunction, and so on. The
English word “yoke” again, is derived from this same Sanskrit root so
that all through the various words, or thoughts, or facts connected
with this one root, you are able to gather the meaning of the word yoga
and to see how much that word covers in the ordinary processes of the
mind and how suggestive many of the words connected with it are,
acting, so to speak, as sign-posts to direct you along the road to the
meaning. In other tongues, as in French, we have a word like rapport,
used constantly in English; “being en rapport,” a French expression,
but so Anglicized that it is continually heard amongst ourselves. And
that term, in some ways, is the closest to the meaning of the Sanskrit
word yoga; “to be in relation to”; “to be connected with”; “to enter
into”; “to merge in”; and so on: all these ideas are classified
together under the one head of “Yoga”. When you find Sri Krishna saying
that “Yoga is equilibrium,” in the Sanskrit He is saying a perfectly
obvious thing, because Yoga implies balance, yoking and the Sanskrit of
equilibrium is “samvata—togetherness”; so that it is a perfectly
simple, straightforward statement, not connoting anything very deep,
but merely expressing one of the fundamental meanings of the word He is
using. And so with another word, a word used in the commentary on the
Sutra I quoted before, which conveys to the Hindu a perfectly
straightforward meaning: “Yoga is Samadhi.” To an only English-knowing
person that does not convey any very definite idea; each word needs
explanation. To a Sanskrit-knowing man the two words are obviously
related to one another. For the word yoga, we have seen, means “yoked
together,” and Samadhi derived from the root dha, “to place,” with the
prepositions sam and a, meaning “completely together”. Samadhi,
therefore, literally means “fully placing together,” and its
etymological equivalent in English would be “to compose” (com=sam;
posita= place). Samadhi therefore means “composing the mind,”
collecting it together, checking all distractions. Thus by
philological, as well as by practical, investigation the two words yoga
and samadhi are inseparably linked together. And when Vyasa, the
commentator, says: “Yoga is the composed mind,” he is conveying a clear
and significant idea as to what is implied in Yoga. Although Samadhi
has come to mean, by a natural sequence of ideas, the trance-state
which results from perfect composure, its original meaning should not
be lost sight of.
Thus, in explaining Yoga, one is often at a loss for the English
equivalent of the manifold meanings of the Sanskrit tongue, and I
earnestly advise those of you who can do so, at least to acquaint
yourselves sufficiently with this admirable language, to make the
literature of Yoga more intelligible to you than it can be to a person
who is completely ignorant of Sanskrit.