6 ideas
What seems to be an external world of selves and things is actually consciousness transforming into representations and then taking those representations to be independent objects. The error does not lie in the appearing but in treating what appears as something outside and separate from the mind that produces it.
Beneath ordinary awareness is a base consciousness (ālaya-vijñāna) that stores the impressions, or seeds, left by past actions and experiences. These seeds ripen into new experiences, and those experiences deposit fresh seeds, so a self-perpetuating stream accounts for continuity, memory, and karma without needing a permanent self.
Any experience can be analyzed through three aspects: the imagined nature (the false split into a subject grasping an external object), the dependent nature (the causally conditioned flow of mental events that actually occurs), and the perfected nature (the dependent nature seen as empty of the imagined split). Liberation does not add anything new; it removes the imagined layer from what is dependently arising.
A distinct mental function (manas) continually turns toward the storehouse consciousness and misidentifies it as a stable 'I', accompanied by self-view, self-delusion, self-conceit, and self-love. The feeling of being a fixed self is therefore an ongoing mental operation rather than the discovery of something real.
The seer and the seen are not two pre-existing things that meet in perception; both poles are carved out of a single stream of consciousness. Examining any experience for the dividing line between perceiver and perceived shows the division is imposed, not found.
Grasping the idea that everything is merely representation still sets up a concept held before the mind, which keeps the subject–object structure alive. Real transformation comes when consciousness no longer apprehends any object at all, including the doctrine of mind-only itself, so the teaching works as a tool that undoes itself.