I think Diogo means the different frameworks of "relative reality" and "ultimate reality."
And for that, I think the Three Trainings are a more useful frame than the Seven Factors. Especially when the latter are correlated to different meditation practices. No benefits in clarity from that in this specific instant, I fear.
But I also wonder where in all the Buddhist discourses are there sentences like "be in the present?" I'm no scholar, though.
So I think Buddhist new age chliches are another layer that we may have to unravel here a bit, thanks to a lot of McMindfulness.
I do think that "to be here in the present moment" and "attachment leads to suffering" rather refer to the domain of insight practice and/or the results of insight practice. And it was only after that fateful Jon Kabat Zinn character produced his "Three Chords on the Guitar are actually the Essence of all of Musicology and you can learn them in my Three Month Course" version of Buddhist mind training, that we have people being major league confused about content and ultimate reality of sensations. Or rather, that is the newest version of dumbing down and confusion. After all, some Buddhist meanderings resulted in a religious practice without mediation. Not quite the point the Buddha was trying to make, I think.
Because nowadays, "isn't it this general, lifestyle-y thing to try to be in the moment, and to try to not attach to much? Isn't that what mindfulness is about? Isn't that what this Buddhism stuff is all about?" That is an attitude I encounter a lot. Not saying that is the OP's opinion, mind you.
In the framework of the Three Trainings, in the first and second training, the training of morality and the training of concentration, you treat reality as if the relative aspects all matter. You treat practice in concentration as if there is a continuous self that can experience a continuous state and that can get better at attaining that state, you treat training in morality as if the sense field is actually divided in a me and a you and how they treat each other matters.
In the third training, you look into the nature of sensate reality/of experience underlying ALL sensate reality. The three characteristics. In that frame, the sense field turns out to be centerless, without free will, control, etc. So, from a sensate point of view, there is ONLY the present moment, and attachment is impossible. And it is obvious that trying to grasp causes friction. (Wait, what is there to try to grasp? Huh?)
The frame of training 1 and 2 and the frame of training 3 seem very contradictory. So does it matter what I do, or is there not even a choice? Or what? Yes. No. Both. Neither. It's the wrong question, because it is something that cannot be resolved on the plane of logic. Has to be experienced.
So: Here, buy my three month course and learn the three chords to rule them all... I'm kidding.
Maybe this is helpful:
If you look at water under a microscope, you learn all kinds of usefull things about the nature of water. And that water is in principle the same liquid, H20, that you can drown in when you fall into a pool. If you fall into a pool, however, you need to know how to swim in water, your knowledge of how all water as the same characteristics on a molecular level might not help you much on that front.
Both frames refer to water. But they are used toward different goals. Statements like "Don't struggle and you'll float" might be useful in various watery scenarios, and then again, they might not. "All water is flow, and you can never grasp flowing water" might equally come in handy or be quite useless.
Is a map meant as a way to find a certain destination or to learn what geological structures are to be found in the area? Or might one help with using the other? By, for example, making clear that the destination street actually is high up in the mountains?
So it depends on the map, they might refer to the same territory but are not meant to help with the same navigation task in that territory. Some maps may have utility in different frames. But they still might have been conceived with only one goal in mind.
But here, in Buddhist practice, we have, I think, THREE MAPS, that you get as a package, because Prince G. thought that neither of them alone is sufficient to navigate the territory of relating to "life in general." On the one hand, that is more to juggle, but on the other, it is more navigation aid - if you can learn to figure out what map to use in what circumstance and how they might work synergistically.
Now, blanket statements like "be in the moment" or "don't get attached" MIGHT be useful in a relative frame of reality. If that is helpful in an ethical, behaviour modification kind of way, then, sure, take it as "general life advice".
But I think where these statements come from is the findings of the old pracititoners, that insight practice actually changes something fundamental about how experience unfolds, wich then let's experience actually "be" (for want of a better word) in the "here and now", because something about how default mode networks and attention network function has fundamentally changed, if we posit a meat brain to be a local projection node of experience.
So you can try to "be in the here and now" as an ethical, "general life advice", but what 4th path individuals mean by that, how they experience the momentariness of sensations, seems to be something fundamentally and qualitatively different from someone trying to be more present and trying to not be attached to the things in life that did NOT train in the third training, the training of insight mediation, and did not attain the changes that this training specifically brings about in the acomplished practitioner.
BUT our hypothetical 4th path individual cannot opt out of "relative life circumstances." The specifics of how you treat another person still matter, even though you might have had deep insight in the ultimate non-existence of a center point anywhere in the sensate field and there might be no more experiental contraction into that illusion in the cranium of that 4th path individual. There is still a body to feed, even if the experience is now just sensations displaying bodies moving around in a world, one of wich provides behind the skin barrier data.
So different ways to frame reality to work towards different goals are, in one sense, different frameworks and the differences matter, but, in another way of looking at it, they are different frames to work with aspects of the same reality.
Because the everyday, "general life" is known to you only as sensate experience and what sensate experience actually displays is "life in general".
As I said, I think the Buddha, metaphorically speaking, handed out a package of three maps. And then people started to produce all sorts of blanket statements relating to the whole package without making clear to wich map they refer, or whether they refer to where you end up if you actually use all three, and some people couldn't read maps and got things wrong and simplified overmuch (like that fateful Jon Kabat Zinn character), and here we are.
That samsara and nirvana may turn out to be the same "place" that you get to by using the three maps in conjunction is something that has to be experienced. Until then, it is a paradox. But I think the frame of the three trainings helps with understanding it, in so far as propositional knowledge can go in that direction.
