It is often said that the Ground awakening, as opposed to everything else, is not a state.
And as usual, it seems to be a truth with modifications.
It is not a state as it is only the void awakening to itself, and then to itself as awake void and form, allowing any forms to come and go as they do anyway. The only difference is that now, as the void is awake to itself, any thought is seen as just a thought, and there is an absence of identification with any stories, including the one of a separate self, of an I with an Other, and any other identities used to elaborate this sense of a separate self.
(There is an absence of identification with any stories, and so with any particular content, since the void is absence, and also since thoughts and everything else are recognized as nothing other than the void itself taking temporary forms.)
It is the Ground awakening to itself, allowing any state, any form, any change in content of awareness, to come and go on their own, living their own life on their own schedule, as they already and always do.
Said another way, it is the bottom dropping out, leaving all form suspended in space with no identification. The bottom – the sense of I with an Other, falls out, leaving form – the content of awareness, absent of identification. No change in states, only a change from identification to a an absence of identification and a realization that there was never any I with an Other there in the first place.
Yet, it also is a state, in a couple of different ways.
First, it is the state of void awake to itself, and all forms as nothing other than void itself. This is not a conventional state in the sense of a change in content of awareness (bliss, absorption, clarity, oneness, etc.), but it can certainly be called a state.
Then, it can also appear as a state as seen from within time. When there is a story of time, it happens at a particular (often well defined) point in time, and it may even go away in a particular point in time (and then it is called kensho instead of daikensho).
It is really the timeless now awakening to itself, always fresh, new and fluid in its form aspect, and from here time is recognized as only coming from a story overlaid on what is. Past, future and continuity is recognized as only appearing when what is is filtered through stories.
Yet, when this gets clouded over, a sense of a separate self, an identification with content of awareness, and with this a sense of the reality of time and space, reappears. And from here, the Ground awakening appears as having happened within time and space, so also as a state.