Jack: Zen teaching can be misleading in its gross form.

My aging dad doesn’t cling to much of anything anymore. He is often quite indifferent about life and living. His greatly diminished alertness has made him indifferent to bills, gifts, wants, etc. — even conversation at times. He truly clings to less and less.

A friend of mine works for a boss who is an incredible jerk, who blows up one minute, forgets it the next, and denies any knowledge of it (perhaps truthfully) the next day. His “living in the moment” wreaks great misery on those around him while completely insulating him from any awareness of the train wrecks he’s caused as he steams full ahead in this days warring.

Mentor B . This sort of observation is something I stumbled over temporarily when I first started. At one level, one really understands that the Buddha’s teaching isn’t about living in a stupor of either dullness or intense activity. It is about crystal clear awareness of the nature of phenomena rather than absorption in them or cluelessness (intentional or unintentional) about what is going on. You might dress a master and a servant in the same clothes. But if you observed their behaviors you would notice the mark of freedom in one, and a mark of servitude in the other.

The Buddha actually mentions this difference. The indifference you describe is the mundane non-clinging of dullness. Some even deliberately choose to live in a mundane drunken stupor where gutter mud seeping into the boots doesn’t mar the relief of unconsciousness. This is not awareness, enlightenment, mindfulness or freedom.

The “living in the moment” you describe is a mundane symptom of a mind dominated by trauma, emotion, fear, or other psychological phenomena. The mind in the grip of a daemon, whether positive or negative, is a mind in seizure. This state is not enlightenment; the existence is that of a slave, not a master.

The meditation of enlightenment does not have the attribute of shutting out, embellishing, or enhancing phenomena that absorptive states have. It is a mastery of living with phenomena as they are, rather than coloring them so that one is happy and content to be their servant. Enlightenment is understanding and choosing to live within reality with fully aware freedom — without needing to tinker with phenomena.