To cross the ocean of life and reach "the other shore" safely, skill is needed in navigating its currents and cross-currents. In adapting oneself to … - Nyanaponika Thera

If we observe our own minds, we shall notice how easily diverted our thoughts are, how often they behave like undisciplined disputants constantly interrupting each other and refusing to listen to the other side’s arguments.

When once clear awareness and comprehension have been firmly established in a limited but vital sector of the mind’s expanse, the light will gradually and naturally spread, and will reach even distant and obscure corners of the mind’s realm which hitherto had been inaccessible. This will mainly be due to the fact that the instrument of that search for knowledge will have undergone a radical change: the searching mind itself will have gained in lucidity and penetrative strength.

A specimen of research that is to be examined with the help of a microscope has first to be carefully prepared, cleaned, freed from extraneous matter, and firmly kept under the lens. In a similar way, the “bare object” to be examined by wisdom, is prepared by Bare Attention. It cleans the object of investigation from the impurities of prejudice and passion; it frees it from alien admixtures and from points of view not pertaining to it; it holds it firmly before the Eye of Wisdom, by slowing down the transition from the receptive to the active phase of the perceptual or cognitive process, thus giving a vastly improved chance for close and dispassionate investigation.