People talk about sudden enlightenment, a sudden glimpse, satori and all kinds of other spiritual attainments. But those things require the conditions for you to pull yourself together. You need to be in the right frame of work, so to speak, and frame of mind to experience such a thing. So-called sudden enlightenment needs enough preparation for it to be sudden. Otherwise, it can’t be sudden. If you have a sudden accident in your motor car, you have to be driving in your car. Otherwise, you can’t have the accident. That is the whole point: whenever we talk about suddenness and sudden flashes of all kinds, we are talking in terms of conditional suddenness, conditional sudden enlightenment. Sudden enlightenment is dependent on the slow growth of the spiritual process, the growth of commitment, discipline and experience. This takes place not only in the sitting practice of meditation alone, but also through the life-long experience of dealing with your wife, your husband, your kids, your parents, your job, your money, your sex life, your aggressive life, whatever you have. You have to deal with everything you experience in your life, and you have to work with and learn from those situations. Then, the gradual process is almost inevitable, and we could almost say quite safely at this point that scholastically and experientially there is no such thing as sudden enlightenment in Buddhism at all.

–Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche