1. Suffering seems like the most obviously real thing. Who hasn’t said or felt, “I am suffering?” And don’t we see suffering so plainly on the news every day?

2. Here, we are investigating metaphysics, not conventional reality. “What, then, is ultimately real or true?” This is our principal question.

3. We can divide our investigation into two parts. In the first part, we’ll look at the nature of suffering; in the second, at the nature of the separate self. (And what’s funny, it’ll turn out, is that neither suffering nor the separate self has a nature!)

4a. No one doubts that the experience of suffering appears. But does it have a svarupa, an essence, a nature? No, suffering is just (a) a thought-arising or (b) a feeling-arising or a sensation-arising. That’s all!

4b. (a) A thought or a feeling is a mere ripple or vibration. Clear seeing of the direct experience of thought- or feeling-arising reveals that there’s “no there there”: no nature, no any-thing. In fact, when you actually draw consciousness, in the mode of attention, toward the thought- or feeling-arising, the thought or feeling up and vanishes!

4c. (b) As for the sensation, without any name or label (nama in Sanskrit), it’s a mere tingle. That’s all! There’s actually no suffering of any sort.

5. The crux: The illusion of the existence or reality of suffering hinges upon the illusion of the existence or reality of a self. But then is there a self? Well, what is a self? A self is just an I-thought-arising or an I-feeling-arising. Take any I-thought-arising or I-feeling-arising and see clearly that it has no nature. In fact, when you turn your attention toward the I-thought-arising or the I-feeling-arising, you find that there’s no-thing there! (No thing! No self! No problem!)

6. This investigation has, suffice it to say, an air of levity. There’s no real suffering–though there is the appearance of suffering. And there’s no self–even though there’s the appearance of self. But the self is an illusion. And since the self is an illusion, suffering can’t be anything but an illusion as well.

7. And what does “illusion” mean here? It means that what appears to be the case isn’t what is actually the case. Or put differently: the actual content of the experience is not what the experience, so to speak, purports or claims to be. (Ex: A self claims to be an entity that persists in its existence. But there’s neither an entity nor unbroken continuity. Oops.)

8. So, you see: until you get the joke, life is terribly dire, astonishingly serious, uber-high stakes. But once you get the joke, the whole thing is pretty darn funny: an unreal self is claiming to experience unreal suffering in an unreal waking dream, all of which are actually nothing but pure, perfect, completely peaceful universal consciousness.

Those Zen masters have a lot to chuckle about, don’t they?