The Chronicles of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche

Conditional Sudden Enlightenment

People talk about sudden enlightenment, a sudden glimpse, satori and all kinds of other spiritual attainments. Those things require the conditions for you to pull yourself together. You need to be in the right frame of mind to experience such a thing. So-called sudden enlightenment needs enough preparation for it to be sudden. Otherwise, it can’t happen at all. 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 emotions, whatever you have. You have to deal with everything you experience in life, and you have to work with and learn from those situations. Then, the gradual process is almost inevitable.

Scholastically and experientially there is no such thing as sudden enlightenment in Buddhism. So-called sudden enlightenment is simply insight, or understanding, that depends on what we have already experienced. We call it sudden in the same way that you might say, “Suddenly I saw the sunrise.” Or, “Suddenly I saw the sunset.” But what you are seeing is dependent on the situation that already exists, and you are just making it sound dramatic. The sun doesn’t suddenly rise or set, although you may suddenly notice that it’s going to happen. It depends on your experience.