Let us say that your place of origin is the western port city of Dakhla, and your destination is Halaib on the east coast. You begin your solitary trek through the sands of the vast Sahara. Years, and years you plod along, and thus are assuredly making progress, but because of the featureless landscape, and because it is an internal journey where you are forever alone, you can never be sure of where precisely you are between the two locales, and thus the rate of your advance. But since you have been on the journey for some time, you most certainly have made some headway…most certainly.
Those who will eventually reach Halaib, and those who never will, both feel the above. They both believe that they make gradual progress toward the goal, but in a quite valid sense neither do, for only the end game counts. At the end, you either know what is going on, or you do not, and there is no in between, no, partial-knowing.
As for all the years you have spent trudging through the desert – you have never set foot out of Dakhla, and you unwittingly embarrass yourself to talk as though you have. A dead-on, unintended public admission of your know-nothing-state is to speak of what you do or do not know. Those who did not instantly, originally get it when they first heard of it, are the ones most anxious to discuss their progress and present degree of awakening. This is completely understandable and expected in that talking about it is an enormous part of the whole fun of being involved in it: comparing notes, comparing books, comparing gurus and their proffered maps of that North African desert.
By almost everything an ordinary man says, he reveals himself to be a fool, but when he speaks specifically of how much he knows about life, and how awake he is – his admission of foolishness is compounded. Those who get it as soon as they hear about it, and who will one day finally wake-up-in-Halaib, will suddenly just find themselves there, and realize at that blazing instant that they arrived there directly from Dakhla, that they never were gradually-trudging-through-the-Sahara.
That is what is meant by:
Even at the end, you either get it or you do not.
J.