What Abhidhamma is trying to study (by Ven. Bodhi)

In the beginning of our study, I would like to share with you a beautifully written paragraph by Ven. Bodhi in the introduction session of the book: "Abhidhamma Studies - Buddhist Explorations of Consciousness and Time" (by Ven. Nyanaponika Thera):

For Wisdom or insight to arise, the meditator must learn to suspend the normal constructive, synthesizing activity of the mind responsible for weaving the reams of immediate sensory data into coherent narrative pattern resolving around persons. entities, and their attributes. Instead, the meditator must adopt a radically phenomenological stance, attending mindfully to each successive occasion of experience exactly as it presents itself in its sheer immediacy. When this technique of "bare attention" is assiduously applied, the familiar world of everyday perception dissolves into a dynamic stream of impersonal phenomena, flashes of actuality arising and perishing with incredible rapidity. It is the "thing-events" (名色) discerned in the stream of immediate experience, the constitutive mental and physical phenomena, that are called DHAMMAS, and it is with their characteristics, modes of occurrence, classifications, and relationships that the Abhidhamma is primarily concerned.

[Abhidhamma Studies] Introduction page XVI-XVII.