Om Is the Bow, Self the Arrow, Brahman the Aim

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 3 pages

Three pages from the Commentary on the Pistis Sophia in Blavatsky Collected Writings volume XIII, pages 74-75. A passage of the Pistis Sophia is printed first, with the commentary given beneath it as a numbered note.

The Gnostic text describes the soul of a man who has received the Mystery becoming a great stream of light able to traverse all the regions, and contrasts it with one who has not received it. The commentary begins by identifying this as the original of the rite of Extreme Unction as practised in the Roman Catholic and Greek churches, and the commendatory prayer said at the moment of death to protect the soul through the middle passage as carrying the same inheritance — with the remark that the older churches have preserved the occult tradition more faithfully than their more iconoclastic younger sister. The doctrine follows: the frame of mind in which a man dies is of the utmost importance because of the abnormal psychic state he is then in, and his last thought does much to influence his immediate future. The image that gives the file its title is used to make that concrete — the arrow ready to fly, the bow-string abreast of the ear, and the aim deciding its fate — with the beatitude that happy is he for whom Om is the bow, the Self the arrow, and the Brahman the aim. Strong spiritual aspirations at that moment, natural or induced by the exhortation of someone with true conviction or with the divine Gnōsis, are said to protect the soul that is leaving life. The passage then closes the obvious loophole: this is expressly not an endorsement of death-bed repentance, since the immutable justice of karmic law can return only a fleeting effect for a fleeting cause, and the rest of the debt must be paid in future earth-lives.

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