1. The first thing you may not have fully grokked is that you need to see whatever negative emotion or thought that arises as an instance of dukkha. Otherwise, you’ll continue to think: “Oh, I’m just nervous. What do I do about this instance of nervousness?” Or: “So and so and I are disagreeing. How do we resolve this?” Or: “I feel sad today. Why is that?” You need to see that nervousness, disagreeableness, sadness, and on and on are all none other than dukkha.

Once you get this, it’ll “click.”

2. The next step is to see dukkha as samsara. That is, it’s not just that dukkha has arisen on occasion X. It’s more potently the case that there is a pattern working out across time. That pattern of dukkha IS samsara. In other words, there’s a “method to the madness”: dukkha perpetuating itself in such a way as to be highly patterned. This patterning, again, is samsara, and it’s just, we might say, how “life works.”

3. The next step is to see that samsara is samskara. Or rather: samskara is that which is “behind” samsara. Samskara, here, refers to the fact that behind all samsara is at least one ego-self. You must keenly see, then, the way in which samskara is activated is such as to perpetuate samsara (to keep “the wheel of samsara” turning) and, of course, samsara “touches down” as dukkha. The face of dukkha is, e.g., disappointment, sourness, resentment, etc., etc., etc., etc.

4. To see how, e.g., disappointment is actually an instantiation of dukkha is the start. To see dukkha as patterning itself out is samsara. To see that samsara can’t “lift off” without any samskara is the third step. And, now, to see the full picture–samskara –> samsara –> dukkha–is maya. That is, this is just how the “magician’s” illusion works. Now the game is clear to you.

5. Thus, thanks to the above, you’re “teed up” for the longing for Liberation (moksha). 1-4 are like a “full court press”: the question is how are you going to go beyond the seeming impenetrability of maya, that is, of samskara-activated samsara. That is, if you now have a keen understanding of how bondage works, what is going to be the leap beyond? For those on the path of jnana, the answer is: Self-inquiry.