Here's a paradox at the heart of nondual Śaiva Tantra. The whole tradition is organized around liberation (mokṣa) — the goal you practice toward, the destination of the path. And yet the tradition also says liberation, as a concept you're pursuing, is itself something to be transcended — because if you were always already the free Consciousness (the View), then there was never actually anywhere to get to. So "liberation" functions as a teaching tool: a goal you walk toward in order to discover, at the end, that you were never bound and never needed to walk. The progression itself turns out to be a kind of illusion — useful, even necessary, but ultimately a scaffold to be dismantled. Wallis's image: it's like walking to learn how to walk.1
The goal is real enough to organize your whole practice, and unreal enough that reaching it means realizing you were already there.2
Wallis presents liberation as a concept that must eventually be transcended.3
If you were always free, why have a goal of liberation at all — and why does it then have to be discarded? The resolution is that the goal is pedagogically necessary and ultimately false, and both halves matter. It's necessary because a contracted being who feels bound cannot simply be told "you're already free" and have it land — the felt sense of bondage is real (āṇava), and you need a path, a practice, a direction to move in, to work with that felt bondage. "Liberation" gives the journey a North Star. Without the goal, the contracted being has no orientation, no reason to practice, no scaffold for the work.
But it's ultimately false because the goal-structure itself (a separate self traveling toward an unattained state) encodes the very dualism that the recognition dissolves. As long as you're pursuing liberation, you're implicitly affirming "I am not yet free, freedom is elsewhere, I must reach it" — which is the contracted framing. So at the moment of genuine recognition, the goal has to dissolve, because the recognition is the seeing that there was never a separate self who was bound, never a distance to cross, never a liberation to attain — only the free Consciousness that briefly believed otherwise. The scaffold (the goal, the path, the progression) was real and useful for the climb, but the building it was scaffolding was already complete — and you discover this precisely by completing the climb the scaffold enabled. This is why it's "walking to learn how to walk": the practice doesn't create the freedom (it was always there); it dissolves the belief that the freedom was absent, and that dissolution retroactively reveals the whole path as a teaching device for un-learning a false premise.5
This is the View applied reflexively to its own goal-structure, and it's the deep logic behind grace-before-practice (you don't earn what you already are) and the anupāya / non-means (the recognition that there was nothing to do). It connects to anti-teleology (no destination to progress toward) and to the recognition-not-attainment core. To the vault, it names the tradition's most self-undermining and sophisticated move: holding a goal seriously enough to organize a life while knowing it's a device to be discarded.
The cleanest image for the paradox is scaffolding around a building. You erect elaborate scaffolding to work on a structure — it's essential, you couldn't do the work without it, it organizes the whole project. But the scaffolding is not the building, and when the work is done, you take it down — and if you mistook the scaffolding for the building, you'd never finish, you'd just keep adding scaffolding.
Now the twist that makes it Tantric: in this case, the building was already complete before you started — the scaffolding wasn't for constructing it but for cleaning the glass so you could finally see that it was already there, finished, all along. The "liberation" you pursue is the scaffolding; the free Consciousness you already are is the finished building. You erect the path (practice, goal, progression) not to build freedom but to clear away the obscuration hiding the freedom that was already complete. And the danger is exactly mistaking the scaffolding for the building — treating "attaining liberation" as the construction of something new, which keeps you forever adding more practice-scaffolding to a building that was done before you arrived. The recognition that ends the path is the moment you see through the glass to the finished building and realize the scaffolding was only ever for the seeing — at which point it comes down, because its job (revealing what was already there) is complete. You walked the path to discover you'd never left home.
This paradox is hard to use without either of two errors, so the practice is a particular lightness. Do hold liberation as a goal — practice toward it, let it organize and orient your spiritual life; you need the scaffolding, and "you're already free so don't bother" is a recipe for drift and bypass. But hold it lightly, knowing it's a teaching device: don't reify "enlightenment" into a distant state you're a failure for not having reached, and don't let the pursuit harden the very sense of "I am not yet free" that it's meant to dissolve. The lived posture is something like earnest non-grasping — practice wholeheartedly toward the goal while quietly knowing the goal is a finger pointing at what's already the case, and that "reaching" it will feel less like arriving somewhere new than like recognizing where you always were. When practice starts to feel like an anxious pursuit of a far-off state, that's the cue you've reified the scaffolding into the building — and the correction is to remember you're walking to learn how to walk: the capacity was never absent, and the path is teaching you that, not building you a new leg.
Reifying the goal. You harden "liberation/enlightenment" into a distant attainment and pursue it as something you lack — which deepens the sense of bondage (I am not yet free) the goal was meant to dissolve. The tell: your practice runs on spiritual lack and deficiency-relative-to-the-goal; "enlightenment" is a far-off state you're failing to reach, and the chase tightens the contraction.
Discarding the goal prematurely. The opposite error: you hear "liberation is just a teaching tool, you're already free" and drop the practice entirely — kicking away the scaffolding before the glass is clean. The tell: "I'm already free so why practice" used to justify drift and bypass; you've discarded the device before it did its work, mistaking the concept of already-being-free for the recognition of it.
This is insider doctrine, the View turned reflexively on its own goal-structure.6 The live tension is the practical paradox it leaves: how do you earnestly pursue a goal you know is ultimately illusory without either reifying it (deepening bondage) or discarding it (drift)? The tradition's answer (hold it lightly, earnest non-grasping) is a posture, not a method — it describes the right relationship without fully resolving how a contracted being is supposed to maintain it. And there's a deeper open question: is the "you were always already free" claim experientially verifiable (you can recognize it), or is it a retrospective reframe that only makes sense after the recognition (and is therefore useless as a prospective instruction)? Whether "you're already free" is a usable instruction or only a true-but-unhelpful description before the fact is the live edge.
This converges almost exactly with the Zen and Dzogchen paradoxes of sudden awakening — "there is nothing to attain," "you are already Buddha," practice-as-the-expression-of-enlightenment-rather-than-its-cause — and the Krama-Dzogchen convergence the tradition itself notes makes this unsurprising. All these traditions face the identical paradox (a goal-oriented path toward a goal that was never absent) and resolve it the same way (the path dissolves the belief in absence, doesn't create presence). Both land on strong enough to suggest it's a structural feature of any nondual soteriology: the moment you say "you are already That," you generate the walking-to-learn-to-walk paradox, and you need some version of "practice wholeheartedly while knowing there's nothing to attain." The Tantric flavor, consistent with its world-affirmation, is that the dismantling of the goal doesn't lead to a featureless "nothing to do" quietism but to engaged life lived from the recognition — the scaffolding comes down and you live in the building, fully, rather than sitting in empty completion.
The "goal that dissolves itself / walking to learn to walk" structure connects to how learning, skill, and development relate to their own goals.
The Sharpest Implication If liberation is a teaching tool — a goal you pursue to discover you were never bound — then the entire structure of spiritual seeking, with its sense of being not-yet-there and its pursuit of a far-off attainment, is built on the very premise it exists to dissolve: the belief that you are a separate self who lacks something. The destabilizing turn is that seeking itself can become the obstacle — the harder you pursue "enlightenment" as a distant state, the more you reinforce the "I am not yet free" that is the only thing in the way — and yet you can't simply stop seeking (that's drift, the scaffolding kicked away too soon). You're left with the koan the tradition hands you: walk the path wholeheartedly while knowing there was never anywhere to go, hold the goal seriously enough to organize your life and lightly enough that it can dissolve — because the day you "arrive" will feel less like reaching a destination than like laughing at having looked for home while standing in it.
Generative Questions