How Practice Prepares Us for Awakening
Accidents are rarely welcome. They’re events that disrupt plans, crack illusions of control, and leave us changed. Spiritual awakening carries something of that wildness. It can’t be willed into being like a project with clear steps and predictable results. Yet there’s a paradox: devoted contemplative practice seems to make one more likely to be undone by it.
Meditation does not guarantee enlightenment. It prepares no certificate, no badge of arrival. Instead, it functions more like softening the soil so a seed can break through when conditions conspire. This isn’t an engineering feat—it’s an invitation to the uncontrollable.
Spiritual traditions often warn against striving too hard. Effort burns away distractions, but effort itself becomes another barrier if clung to. Discipline is essential, but so is surrender. A meditator learns to sit still enough for their self-concept to slip, fragile as old paint on a crumbling wall. What breaks through is not what the ego planned.
Such a shift is catastrophic for self-image. One can’t choreograph being seized by silence, seen through by awareness, or stripped of all strategies. Preparation helps only because it erodes resistance. A lifetime of practice might be nothing more than a way of making oneself more susceptible to grace.
Grace here is no moral reward. It’s the inexplicable unveiling of what has always been true. Practice hones attention so that, eventually, one notices the absurdity of separation. The boundary keeping “me” apart from the rest collapses. It can feel like an accident precisely because it breaks expectation so thoroughly.
So why practice? Not to force awakening but to grow familiar with letting go. To cultivate the courage to be shattered. To understand that no amount of control can deliver the gift, but the willingness to wait can make one receptive. A practitioner may become the sort of person for whom awakening is more likely—not because they deserve it, but because they are no longer guarding against it.
True meditation is a kind of sabotage of our usual certainties. That is its danger, and its promise. The question isn’t whether practice causes awakening like cause yields effect, but whether practice makes us vulnerable enough to be struck by what is always here.
Morgan O. Smith
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Morgan O. Smith 