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,
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