As we go through life, alternating between strife and success, hope and despair, joy and sorrow we need a hand to hold on to and share our happiness, a hand that reassures, a hand that wipes tears. We do cry out ardently, we know we can trust, we pour out our heart and reach out in love and also say ‘Awahanam na janami.’ This work tells us that the love in the call was it. It had it all and this fact puts the work in a double role! It is as much the bhakta’s call as it is the answer to it.
This work therefore cannot be separate from ‘Tadatmanam srujamyaham’, the other side of the same coin. In ‘Awahanam na janami’, it is the bhakta who speaks to the Sadguru whereas in ‘Tadatmanam srujamyaham’ the bhakta listens, in all probability with his eyes closed in contentment for all that falls on his ears is all that he craved to listen to.
The title ‘Awahanam na janami’ is precisely ‘my’ situation here and now. The very first thought that occurred to most people who read this work was, ‘Yes, this is what I feel, these are my thoughts, I am reading what I always wanted to say and did not know how’. Every one of us is as common as any one of us on this score. Basically inclined towards the good, the Pure, the Almighty I keep groping, seeking. Aware of imperfections and flaws, bogged down by troubles, I worry about when and how more than the actual calling out. The work also assures and right in the foreword that I do not know how to reach out to him is a hopeful thought because it implies I want to but I do not know how; I do not know where to begin and how.
‘Awahanam’ does it for me. It assumes my role and becomes ‘me’. Then calling out to ‘him’ as me, it tells me how to, it tells me I don’t need to know anything but honesty and love, it assures me that I am accepted; it opens my heart and also a channel. Most importantly it tells me that not knowing how to reach out is no matter at all, it is important to want to. The bond is and so is the love. All I need to do, is turn to him, in love and open up. In the course of reading, I realize that it was indeed ‘me’, my own natural self.
And so reading this work is reading and journeying into our own mind and yet reassuring it; it is the gentle dissolution of the apprehension one might feel for not being well read in the intellectual and spiritual field. It is just as the foreword says, the call of a child eager to hold or to be held by his mother.
Although ‘Tadatmanam srujamyaham’ appears to be in a situation diametrically facing that of ‘Awahanam’ it is indeed a sweet paradox that each of the two works implies the other and so the call of the child in ‘Awahanam’ implies the love of the mother in ‘Tadatmanam….’ and is its anchor and refuge. Tadatmanam is the word of the one who listened to all that could be said and more.
‘Tadatmanam’ does communicate that ‘He’ the Creator of all that be is the Almighty but yet so close to every bhakta’s heart no wonder the bhakta feels ‘Awahanam na janami’.
And yet simply speaking, the works reunite and strengthen because the bond of love always was and will be.