You have been measuring your readiness by what you understand — which texts you can follow, which structures you can map. I want to offer a different measure, because the one you are using will mislead you.
The question is never only what you can reach. It is who is doing the reaching. The real preparation for the heights is not knowledge. It is the slow shaping of character — patience, humility, honesty, the capacity to be moved without being swept away. A brilliant, ungrounded person is more endangered by the deep things than a plain, steady one is.
The question is never only what you can reach. It is who is doing the reaching.
Character is the vessel
This is why an ordered life matters so much more than it appears to. The fixed obligations, the daily discipline, the law kept in small things — these are not separate from spiritual readiness. They are how character is forged. They sand down the grandiosity that mysticism would otherwise inflame.
The tradition's caution that the hidden Torah waits for maturity is, read closely, a statement about character — that a person must first become someone the heights will not break. The revealed law and the ordered day are precisely the workshop where that someone is made.
Become, then ascend
So turn your attention, for this season, inward and downward — not toward higher knowledge, but toward steadier character. Where are you proud? Where are you impatient? Where does your conduct, in plain and visible matters, still wobble? That is the work. It is humbler than what you imagined, and it is the actual preparation.
And no one shapes their own character well in isolation; we are too kind to our own flaws. Place yourself before a living teacher who can name what you cannot see and hold you to the slow work of becoming. When the self is ready, the heights will not need to be stormed. They will open.