Buddhist Enlightenment as Operative Mode

Just some thoughts to reemphasize what I think is a view of buddhism (which after all, means “awake-ism”) that trumps any mistaken view that it is about doctrinal debates or exclusion of any particular spiritual (or “worldly”) practice:

In the Tibetan Nyingma tantrik tradition, enlightenment, as the discovery of non-duality, is not a goal or end state in the normal sense. Instead it is an operative mode, “the non-dual way”, “the dao of non-dual”: Wei wu wei, doing non-doing. The path is the goal and the goal is the path, the union of actor, action, and object of action.

From this way of seeing it, a beginner can discover the non-dual state, or more accurately, he can discover that he is ALREADY in the non-dual state.
From there that person can choose to get into any situation at all. There is no problem with learning anything at all–daoism, hinduism, cooking, politics, motorcycle maintenance, anything. The non-dual state is the optimal learning state or the best state for any endeavour, but it doesn’t know Spanish unless it takes lessons, though it might make psychic ability that facilitates “cheating” more likely, since it lives and breaths, riding the lightning of the life force, in an atmosphere where everyhing is occupying the same space as one total, continuous movement, to paraphrase J. Krishnamurti, who I hereby dub an honorary Nyingmapa (Krishnamurti did two hours of hatha yoga every day, by the way).

Some forms of zen teach the same thing, and I believe the best spirit of daoism or any tradition or spiritual person basically teaches it like that; beyond that, what you do with that state, once discovering it, the state wherein the path is the goal, will be different according to what tradition(s) or vocation(s) you choose to adventure within. Also, there’s nothing wrong with engaging in any (useful) pursuit–why would there be?–on the way to discovering the “most optimal operative mode”, which I’m calling here the non-dual state, though actually I like the term doing non-doing the best.

“It is a self-existent jigsaw puzzle put together by itself”
–Chögyam Trungpa