There have been stories of people suddenly becoming enlightened without a history of meditation. If that's true, then would it be possible to devise some technique to acquire instant enlightenment?

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Paul Follows's answer is great, and i wanted to add more supporting rationale. The first distinction that needs to be made is that enlightenment happens slowly, if something happens suddenly, the term at hand is awakening. These are not the same thing, what’s happening in the brain and mind are different and the speed of the proceedings is a great clue to what’s going on.

The problem with not meditating and having a change in consciousness happen suddenly is that without any practice, the long term prognosis of your change isn’t a very good one. If you look carefully at the Buddha’s life, he tried a lot of things before meditation worked for him. The two things he tried before meditation both had to do with the body, and neither of these things are seriously considered to be pathways to enlightenment today.

Yoga is a wonderful thing to practice, the physical body offers many delights and insights. But you can easily spend your entire life doing yoga without producing the identity dissociation that insight meditation offers. The Buddha was asked to succeed his yoga teachers and he turned them down, considering it a dead-end road.

The other pathway the Buddha rejected is asceticism. Nobody seriously considers denying the desires of the physical body a viable pathway to enlightenment or awakening any more. It offers a unique change in perspective, the Buddha doesn’t denounce the practice, but he didn’t teach it either.

Neither of these two practices offer instant progress, and nothing the Buddha taught does either.

There is, however, something at play in the stories of sudden enlightenment that mean that you can’t really devise a method for replicating it. And that’s inborn talent. Virtually nobody wants to talk about it, because it’s a little oppressive to think about. You can’t teach talent. You can work hard your whole life, and find out somebody got just as far as you did with 5% of the effort.

And meditation and enlightenment are among the only avenues of human achievement where talent is more relevant than hard work. They aren’t the only avenues, sports and athleticism offer the same kind of oppressive realization. Some guys were just born 7 foot tall, these guys will forever be better at basketball than you, just by virtue of how their early development progressed.

And that’s it. For there to be another mechanism by which consciousness transformation to happen ‘instantly’ that doesn’t boil down to talent, would mean that it’s teachable. If it were teachable, then someone would have found it over the last 2000 years.

It’s just not realistic. If a method works fast for you, then you are talented, that’s the reason why it brought about awakening so quickly. The reason it worked fast for you won’t be teachable. You can’t teach someone to be 7 foot tall.

My own journey to discover the fact that I personally am so talented has brought about my two-component paradigm for understanding consciousness achievement. You have your level of perceptive responsiveness and your level of surrender. Talent is mostly a product of perceptive responsiveness, it’s generally what we call ‘giftedness’. Not all people with high levels of perceptive responsiveness find a path of surrender. Luck is a factor as well, and luck can’t be taught either.

In the end, it must be accepted that not everything can be taught. This really shouldn’t be all that depressing, in fact, I think it would be a more depressing world if everything related to spiritual achievement could be taught. Pure meritocracy turns out to be really ugly in practice.