 Ultimately, dharmas are all that there is: all experiential events are understood as arising from the interaction of dharmas. While the analogy of atoms may be useful here, dharmas notably embrace both physical and mental phenomena, and are generally understood as evanescent events, occurrences, or dynamic properties rather than enduring  substances.[7]  The Abhidharma exegesis thus attempts to provide an exhaustive account of every possible type of experience—every type of occurrence that may possibly present itself in one’s consciousness—in terms of its constituent dharmas. This enterprise involves breaking down the objects of ordinary perception into their constituent, discrete dharmas and clarifying their relations of causal conditioning. The overarching inquiry subsuming both the analysis of dharmas into multiple categories and their synthesis into a unified structure by means of their manifold relationships of causal conditioning is referred to as the “dharma theory.”