What do we call awakening?

By Simone Claridge · True Better You

Last week I ended with a question. What if we simply return to what is aware of all of it: the game, the players, the roles, the thoughts that don’t want to change?

A question I see often goes like this. I was calm for a long time, then I went home to my family and the old triggers came back. Does that mean I am no longer awake?

When I look at this, I see a pond. Thoughts are ripples, and what knows them is the water. The ripples come and go. The water stays.

Teacher Dao Xin (Wei) says that thoughts cannot observe the observer. Only the observer can observe itself, and when it does, consciousness wakes up. He calls this state Mingjue, the clear awareness, and says it is not an experience we enter. It is awareness knowing itself.

Teacher Xu gives it a Chinese name, Kai Wu. Kai means to open, and Wu is a sudden understanding. He says it is not the final station but the beginning of the journey, and that Zhineng Qigong sees the way as a spiral that keeps opening, not a closed circle.

He also says that if we really understood what he describes, we would see that we had such a moment before, maybe several times. Because we didn’t know what it was, it came and went. And in the beginning, he says, the state can be gone again, and once we have been in it, it is easier to find it again.

How do we know this is true? We can check it in our own days. Think of a moment when you understood something all at once, and something simply knew. That was Wu. And look at what happens after. The game pulls us in, we lose it, and when we notice, it is here again. I see this in myself. It matches what Teacher Xu says, and that is how I can trust it.

Then what do we call it? Teacher Xu avoids describing it, because a description becomes an idea, and the idea limits us. Words are like a finger pointing at the moon. Kai Wu, Mingjue, awakening: they are all fingers.

When the game pulls me back, I let it be as it is and let it pass. Teacher Xu says every sound, every silence, and even an emotion is already n̈. Then I come back to the breathing of the whole, without effort and without control.

In his latest session, Teacher Dao Xin (Wei) says that when we are stable and centered, a trigger does not leave a deep blockage. We recognize the reaction and return to center. That is what I practice, to see clearly faster.

Awakening is not an arrival. It is the beginning, and it keeps opening.

When did you last notice you were in the game? And who noticed?

Next week: what Teacher Dao Xin (Wei) says about triggers, and why he says they can become gifts.

Every morning a group gathers to chant n̈ together, daily, 8–9am ET. No teaching, no performance.
We come as we are. We come for what we truly are.
And we stay conscious in it.

→ Join the Daily n̈-Tone Session

With Mingjue LOVE,
Simone

With gratitude to Grandmaster Pang Ming, Teacher Dao Xin (Wei), and Teacher Xu, whose teaching this rests on.