The Art of Not Arriving: The Point Just Before (Part I)
For one who knows me, I am one with him;
for one who wants to know me,
I am very near to him;
and for one who does not know me,
I am a beggar before him.
— Anandamayi Ma
Reality is so whole, so uncapturable, that even the opposite of what’s spoken here would carry the flavour of truth, yet neither could ever hold it wholly.
Before You Begin
This is not an offering of answers, nor a journey with a final step.
Each Part of The Art of Not Arriving series invites a different texture of immediacy, a different rhythm of noticing.
There is no thread to follow, no truth to adopt.
Only the movement of noticing - unfolding without arriving; unfolding as having arrived.
It is intimacy with what is without a path.
The Invitation
What is being spoken of here is not something far away.
It is not something to be solved, figured out or attained.
It is you.
So as you read on, invite yourself not to aim solely for understanding or an experience, but to notice: gently, curiously, openly.
Yes, thoughts will arise.
Ideas will connect.
Meaning will form.
It’s okay. It belongs.
Notice all that. But not only that.
You’re not invited into something new - not a new experience, not a new understanding.
You are being invited to recognise what has never not been here.
What has never been hidden.
What requires no seeking to be present.
As you read this writing,
be read by it.
It doesn’t add anything to you.
it celebrates you.
Let this sink in.
Imagine holding something tightly in your fist.
Feel the warmth of the skin pressing into itself,
the subtle ache in the forearm,
the hum of effort that’s become familiar.
Now, instead of being asked to open your hand, notice:
You are just as much the clench,
as the stillness that holds the clench,
as the openness, of which even tension is made.
There is no effort in this.
No task to complete.
No process to finish.
Only noticing…
including the noticing itself.
And also, notice how unsatisfactory this may feel, how the mind longs for meaning, for a takeaway, for something to capture.
But this… carries no promise.
It simply is the unceasing letting go
of having to capture anything at all,
yet being right here as here.
Letting go is not something you do.
It is what you are.
There is no gap between you and letting go.
It is complete intimacy resting into itself.
And no, you don’t need to keep the fist clenching.
So as you read, don’t try to force clarity.
Instead, notice the stillness everything is made of:
the effortless, ungraspable transparency that has never held on, and so cannot let go as an act.
This is an invitation to witness that all seeking, meaning-making and experiencing are movements arising and dissolving within (and as) the already complete, unmoving transparency that you are.
What you are is not something to become or define.
The seeking doesn’t lead anywhere. It simply burns itself out - not in failure, but in revelation - and collapses into itself as being, without needing to abandon itself as form.
The Ache for Elsewhere
As sheer, boundless transparency, we do not appreciate ourselves as we are because we are enchanted by what is happening within transparency itself. We imagine ourselves to be someone moving through life, seeking the nature of reality, trying to become, to achieve, to arrive. This kind of seeking rests on a quiet, powerful assumption: that this, here and now, is not it.
I am something within something I am not.
And so, I must get somewhere, become someone or something else
because what I am right now is too ordinary.
And ordinary, somehow, is not enough for the nature of reality, for truth, for arrival.
So we set off on the journey: to find peace, to find truth, to arrive at a place where “I” might finally be okay, even if it means replacing “I” with a “no-I.” We try to migrate into a version of ourselves where none of what we don’t want remains. And when we find what works as that version even for a moment, we want to capture it, either as an experience or as a refined understanding.
What we’re after is a kind of capture, something to hold onto, whether embodied or conceptual, somewhere to hide from ourselves as raw wholeness. And the nature of reality (the nature of you) is then asked to be that for us: luminous, distant, anything but the ordinariness of now.
The moment we imagine ourselves as someone experiencing or understanding truth, we have already conjured ourselves as separate from it. What is held is not experienced as what we are. It becomes an object, and we stand apart from, still incomplete. Such truth is always subject to change. It cannot capture wholeness, because it always leaves something “outside,” including “you.”
Elsewhere, Wrapped in Meaning
The longing to move away from “now” and arrive at “then” is mirrored in the mind’s journey through meaning.
A beauty in and as itself, meaning becomes a movement toward elsewhere through understanding and coherence, where the “I” that understands is experienced as separate from understanding. Both stand apart from what is understood, forming the illusion of a final, objective truth.
But this, too, is the same gesture:
the dream of becoming,
now dressed in meaning.
And so, the seeking of truth (of reality, of self) continues as the search for meaning. We expect that this truth must be meaningful in a familiar way:
something objective that has an application beyond itself,
a consequence in relation to context,
a structure in time,
meaningful in comparison, in contrast, in pursuit or in explanation.
And much of what we call “truth” is simply meaning dressed in the garb of insight, shaped by time, context, and the desire to grasp and conserve. It is always at a distance from the heart of what you are.
Meaning, by its very nature, is time-bound. It requires a beginning, a middle and an end. It organizes experience into cycles, and into movement towards something - a future promise, an imagined final arrival. This is the structure of seeking. It’s enchanting, whether beautiful or painful. It always whispers that the “ultimate that” is just around the corner.
We look for deeper meanings, clearer insights and more refined understandings, believing that one of them, finally, will bring lasting peace or awakening. But this is still the game: consciousness imagining itself as a part (the seeker) within the vastness of itself, “journeying” to find the whole.
And what’s invited here is not meaninglessness - for that, too, is a meaning, a position that must be maintained, that, ironically, still means something.
No, what’s revealed is that meaning simply does not capture; it does not apply. Not because it’s false, but because it’s irrelevant to what can neither be held nor escaped: the ever-present intimacy of being.
Consciousness is, in this sense, a romantic, enchanted with the journey, with form. It is reality in love with itself, as the dance of seeking and becoming.
And the arrival is never really the point in this enchanting game, though its anticipation is a prerequisite. Enchantment is fulfilled in the very act of journeying. The promise of arrival, of satisfaction at the “end station,” is never actually fulfilled. Is it?
Meet What’s Here
Can you remember a time when you believed that understanding, experience or resolution would bring lasting satisfaction? What happened after you “arrived”? Did the questions stop? Or did the seeking simply move on to the next promise?
The nature of the journey-as-seeking is to overlook the now as a possible place of rest and arrival. It rejects the immediacy, and intimacy, of what is in favor of the imagined completion that lies ahead.
But to arrive fully in the now would mean to see ourselves fully, including in ways we have spent lifetimes learning to avoid. The actual arrival is not just unsatisfying. It’s “dangerous.”
In the now, there is no movement, no striving, no future, no meaning to clothe yourself in, no insight to grasp as distraction.
What you are cannot be found through time, cannot be captured through conceptual frames or fleeting experiences. You are that which is never absent - not in life, not in death. To the mind, this makes it invisible.
And so it keeps looking,
as though reality were elsewhere,
as if it’s another domain just beyond reach,
a realm reserved for the awakened ones.
But any “elsewhere” is already a form arising within (and as) this timeless presence that you are. There is no separation. There is no possibility of separation.