 Let’s take the most important example, for Buddhists, of a thing that appears real but has no nature: the self. With this as our example of something mistakenly thought to have a nature (svabhāva), we may run through its three natures. The self as it appears is just my self. I seem to be here, as a living being, typing on a keyboard, thinking thoughts. That is the first nature. The second nature is the causal story that brings about this seeming self, which is the cycle of dependent origination. We might appeal to the standard Abhidharma causal story, and say that the twelve sense bases or the five aggregates, causally conjoined, bring about the conceptually-fabricated self. In the Yogācāra, this causal story is entirely mental, of course, so we cannot appeal to the sense bases themselves as the real cause. Rather, the sense bases only appear to be there due to karmic conditioning in my mental stream. For this reason, the second nature should instead be said to be the causal series according to which the mental seeds planted by previous deeds ripen into the appearance of the sense bases, so that I think I am perceiving things—which, in turn, makes me think I have a self. Finally, the third nature is the non-existence of the self, the fact that it does not exist where it appears. Of course, if there was a real self, I could not have provided my explanation of how it comes to appear to be there. In Vasubandhu’s telling, the three natures are all one reality viewed from three distinct angles. They are the appearance, the process, and the emptiness of that same apparent entity.