1st Step: The Near-ubiquity Of Dukkha

It dawns on you, often very slowly, that disappointment, sadness, anger, restlessness, and so on and so on and so on aren’t separate, self-enclosed episodes. They’re actually instantiations of one basic “thing,” which is dukkha. This can be a real shocker.

2nd Step: Dukkha Points To Samsara

After a while, it may strike you the dukkha you experience isn’t willy nilly or ad hoc. It’s not arbitrary; it’s actually patterned. That patterning, in the literature, has been called “samsara.” Samsara is the patterning of suffering, of ups and downs, of highs and lows; it’s “the law” of unrest.

3rd Step: The Mind Is “Triggerable”

At some point, it may also occur to you that nobody is “triggering” you. Rather, it’s the mind that is susceptible to dukkha, and it’s the mind that rises in the patterned way called “samsara.” 

4th Step: The Cause Of Suffering Is Samskaric Energy

What accounts for the above? Samskaras, or samskaric energy, is what gives rise to mind, which occurs in the patterned way called samsara and thus “touches down,” here and now, as dukkha. 

Samskaras are false identifications (cognitively speaking) as well as extroverting energy. Not two things–false identifications and extroverting energy–but instead two “aspects” of the “same thing.”

In any case, the cause of all suffering, it’s understood, is unresolved samskaric energy.

5th Step: What Atmananda’s Teaching Shows

Atmananda helps us to see that there’s only really (a) Consciousness and (b) experiences/arisings. We’ll discover that this seeming “middle layer” called “samskaras” doesn’t actually exist. We presume, for a time, that it does in order to discover samskaras, but once we examine each samskara closely enough we find that, no, this one is nonexistent. Which is to say that there is only Consciousness and experiences/arisings. But then it’s ultimately discovered that all experiences are nothing but Consciousness. So, there’s only Consciousness.