The Art of Not Arriving: The End of Elsewhere (Part II)
There is no reaching the Self.
If the Self were to be reached,
it would mean that the Self is not now and here,
but that it is yet to be obtained.
What is got afresh will also be lost.
So it will be impermanent.
What is not permanent
is not worth striving for.
— Ramana Maharshi
So That… What?
Whether the promise is spiritual awakening, resolution of karma, attaining nirvana, liberation or simply escaping the discomfort of the present moment, the underlying motivation is often the same:
I am doing this so that…
so that I may fully ease into myself
and allow the peace of stillness and the joy of movement
to reveal themselves as one,
so that I may feel whole…
when my conditions are met.
What happens if we honestly, with genuine intimacy and curiosity, follow that promise to its end? What if we trace every imagined destination, every condition, every “so that,” all the way through?
Since the destination is imagined by the mind, it’s fair to play its game and imagine, too, what results it’s after.
Take a moment to reflect on your own spiritual or personal journey:
What is the promise of your current efforts?
What is the “so that” behind what you are doing?
Really go there.
Not only conceptually - feel it.
Let yourself imagine, fully, that you have arrived.
Everything you’ve longed for: complete.
Stay here as long as you like.
Let it saturate.
Imagine spending an eternity here,
not just a moment of arrival, but endless fulfillment…
perfectly preserved.
And now… what?
The Exitless Exit
Through the Gateless Gate
Perhaps we are seeking liberation from rebirth -
freedom from the cycle of lives and becoming.
We imagine countless lifetimes behind us,
and an end to them ahead, as a kind of final exit.
Exit from where and into what?
If the promise is to no longer be born,
ask: who is it that will not be born?
If there is still an “I” who hopes not to return, that “I” is still conjured as something apart from the totality; as someone who can step outside the infinite dance of creation and remain untouched in separation or isolation. And if there is truly no “I,” then who is left to care whether there is rebirth or not?
You don’t need to avoid being born again.
You are not even here as anything in particular.
THIS is your nirvana. And you are it.
We might then ask:
how about karma?
Does karma still apply to the one who awakens?
To glimpse what’s really happening, we might ask whether the movement of the ocean applies to a wave.
Yes - if we draw a line around the wave, make it something defined. Where does the wave end without that line though?
No - if the wave is nothing but the ocean, moving as ocean, then there’s no edge where karma starts or ends.
Is the wave liberated once it sees it is the ocean?
Liberated from what?
From movement?
From change?
But movement is what it is made of.
And so it is with karma, with rebirth, with awakening.
The movement belongs to the whole.
And the one who sees clearly is not free from the dance,
but free as the dance.
Not removed, but inseparable.
Water does not mind if it is shaped as a drop, a wave or the ocean itself. It is not defined by forms yet dances as form.
You, as all-that-is, have never been born,
yet are born as all possible lives, all possible worlds -
a timeless ceaseless expression that doesn’t last.
We cannot escape ourselves without dreaming separation. We only seem to when we dream separation — when we imagine ourselves to be a particular thing, and seek to migrate into another. But even that won’t last.
No One Arrives
Let’s take a closer look.
The moment we witness ourselves as having arrived,
we have already turned ourselves into something
to the exclusion of everything else, of everything that could be.
We have turned this so-called final realisation into a state, a condition, a holding. And anything that is captured, anything that is seen as “this but not that,” is necessarily rigid and limited. It is another dream infinity dreams.
And so we cannot rest there. Not really. Because as soon as we’ve captured ourselves and the world as a state, a feeling, an experience, an understanding, something subtle begins to happen.
We feel compelled to defend it from changing, from the very dance of life, because its “finality” insulates us from the raw here and now where nothing is censored. And if we’re honest, this “final” never quite satisfies deeply and unconditionally. The mind begins imagining the next destination.
Even the most pristine experience - “I am resting in perfect peace, untouched, in the silence of nothingness” - will eventually give way to a subtle question:
What’s next?
There is still an I there that journeys,
that cannot not journey.
There is no such thing as “I am free”
or “I am liberated.”
There is only centreless freedom,
free even of itself as anything conjurable.
And you are that,
and that is you.
A destination that is anything other than timeless here and now with its ever-changing dance is a something - an endpoint, another capture. And anything fixed, no matter how refined, is still a thing, an object held by an “I,” dreaming separation and longing for unity with what is held.
The ultimate cannot exclude anything.
Not the breath sinking quietly into itself in confusion.
Not the clench of your truth rising uninvited in your throat.
Not the hollow in the chest that forgets it once felt warmth.
Not the silence you’ve been waiting your whole life to stop avoiding.
It cannot exclude this moment,
with all its ache, its wild unclarity,
all the secret turning-aways from itself
met without flinching.
Only then, with presence to all that is, illusions can be unraveled. Otherwise, we wage a war against the fullness of the here and now, against ourselves, against the dance of life.
The ultimate cannot be something that replaces or overrides what you currently reject. The moment we define the end station as anything at all, it becomes exclusive. It becomes that, and in becoming that, it necessarily rejects the flow of everything else. It becomes fixed, quietly and secretly conceptual. A boundary.
An actual, unconditional end that doesn’t depend on something being different, cannot be grasped, because the only such end is already, continuously here: uncapturable and timeless.
We can only imagine an end as a future event, something still ahead. Even the most elevated notions of arrival eventually collapse into dissatisfaction. Because we can dream of the infinite ahead, but we cannot be it anywhere else but here and right now.
So, maybe, quietly,
what’s been chased all along
has always been this:
to completely ease into this very moment,
exactly as it is,
exactly as you are,
and to deeply listen,
with innocent curiosity,
a gentle question mark…
not to confirm, but to see what’s true -
to greet every assumption,
and no agenda.
Here you belong to yourself,
safely seen
where shame took root,
where guilt learned your name,
where anger shielded you -
as you have shied to be seen…
but longed for,
and hugged
to melt into infinity.
Every imagined step in the journey of the mind is a reflection, however distorted, of what is already here. Not in concept, but in direct clarity. The moment we bring sincere attention to this process, it becomes evident that there was never a departure, never a journey and never an arrival.
There is only this,
as it is,
and it is unfathomable.
Born as Every Moment
The moment you conceive of yourself as something that moves through lifetimes, through days, through experiences, you have already conjured yourself as something separate from the rest of yourself, from the whole.
But you are not captured by something traveling within something else.
As wholeness, you are not something evolving or arriving anywhere.
You are the absolute transparency,
not “beneath” these movements and forms,
but as them - all you:
the unfolding of the cosmos,
of lifetimes,
of days,
of thoughts,
of sensations.
Even what you call “your body” is not yours, and not other,
not a container of presence, but presence shaped as sensation.
It’s all you,
the intimacy of all appearances,
arising as you,
dissolving into you.
None of it belongs to you as something separate.
As wholeness, you are unattached to yourself as “wholeness,”
and so you stand unchanged, unmoved,
in this bewildering freedom without beginning,
birthing yourself as the infinite change you dance…
right here,
and right as this very moment,
filled with you to the brim.
You are the possibility of everything. You cannot travel anywhere. The character in the dream journeys, but the dream itself, the edgeless wholeness of all appearances - you - does not.
This is the infinite play, the dance of nothingness as form, the unfolding of infinity as infinite movement, infinite complexity, infinite journeys within the stillness of the whole.
There is no boundary beyond which something else can exist. There is no distance between you and what you seek, because the very idea of “distance” is already an illusion, a construct within the dream. Anything that is possible is already you, completely and fully. There is no separation between “here” and “there,” between “now” and “later.” There is no “beyond” you. No realm, no truth, no experience that stands apart from what you are.
You are the unity that dances as an apparition of trinity:
you, the world, and everything in between.
And none of it is more you than the other.
None of it is less you than the other.
Literally.
It is only an imagined version of yourself, an idea of being incomplete, that seeks completeness elsewhere. But what you actually are has never been incomplete to begin with. The openness and transparency that you are cannot be incomplete, because there is nothing about it that can be measured in those terms. The categories of complete and incomplete, worthy and unworthy, simply do not apply to wholeness.
Can you fully soften into yourself unconditionally -
not to pursue anything, but to listen to this very moment of you as if it were the last?
Can you fully allow yourself to see yourself,
to not shy your attention away from that in you which begs for it?
And can you let this be your every moment,
not just a quiet trick to earn the next “so that…,”
but the soft landing of being, without terms?
…and if you can,
wonder -
who is there for all that listening?
And where, exactly, is the dividing line?