I was wondering if it is possible for a node to join the secret network “network” of nodes and to have access to the secret data unencrypted (in a secure enclave only of course) without participating in consensus. Essentially, the node would be able to perform computation on the secret data in a secure enclave but these computations would be purely non-state-changing and wouldn’t be propagated to the rest of the network (like off-chain computation on secret on-chain data).
If I understand you correctly, that’s what queries are for. The contract you want to interact with needs to define what kinds of queries it supports, so you can’t access things that are intended to be private, but otherwise you described one of the core functions of the network 
For example, SNIP-20 tokens are contracts, and to query your balance you just need a synced node. Querying your balance doesn’t change any state, and only the node you interacted with will see the request.
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Ahh yeah sorry just realizing how dumb my question was haha. Running short on sleep lol. Thank you for the clarification!
Wait never mind, I remember why I was asking the question. The actual question was really whether or not a node can serve query requests but not be limited to the SCRT (gas) limit. Essentially, the node would join the network and have access to the network-wide secret keys so it could perform private computation on contract state but not be limited to the SCRT limit when doing so. Is this in any way possible to facilitate?
I had an idea that required what would normally be expensive off-chain computation on on-chain state in the case of a public blockchain but for secret network, a node would need the network-wide secret keys to access on-chain data while still preserving privacy.