Well clear comprehension as we said, is a little bigger than just moment to moment mindfulness. Clear comprehension includes a wisdom element which understands cause and effect. In the Pali language the word mindfulness gets translated from two different Pali words, one is just a compound of the other. In English the word "mindfulness" is used for the word "sati," which as we understand, it is just basic moment to moment awareness, knowing what you are doing in the moment. And then mindfulness also gets used as a translation for the compound word "sati-sampajanno" which also gets translated as clear comprehension. This type of mindfulness is bigger than normal moment to moment mindfulness.
So to give you an example of the difference between sati and sati-sampajanno: Suppose I want to practice sati, and I am just sitting here and I am moving my arm up and around, just feeling my muscles. So I mindfully move my arm up, and I mindfully move my arm over to the right, all the way over, just feeling the muscles in the whole arm, just practicing sati in the moment. Now if somebody is sitting next to me, I just hit them in the face. No sati-sampajanno.
So if I sit here next to someone and I want to practice sati, sati-sampajanno has to be here also, so I recognize, "oh, someone is sitting next to me here on my right, so okay I am going to practice sati but I am going to move my arm to the left to practice it. This is an example where our mindfulness gets bigger, understands cause and effect.
In daily life this is very important. Suppose you go into a shop and you have got a bad headache, but you want to buy some things. If you let that bad headache affect your speech and you are rude to the shop owner, the shop owner is not going to like you very much the next time you come in, even if you don't have a bad headache. Thus with more awareness of cause and effect and clear comprehension, that even when you have a bad headache you have to make extra effort to be pleasant in that shop, so that you don't create a problem for the future.
When washing your dishes, when going to put them away, in your normal life, where you have your dishes and such, Sati is what works to hold the glass still, to put it on the shelf, to not drop it on the ground. Sati-sampajanno is what tells us why we should hold the glass, why we should not just throw it on the ground. If we don't have clear comprehension then we don't know why we should use mindfulness at all. So in daily life, everything that we do, whether it is just brushing our teeth - why? Why do people brush their teeth? They have an understanding of cause and effect, what will happen if they don't brush their teeth. And I might add here, that although all of you probably know the value of brushing your teeth every day, perhaps twice a day, maybe more; how many of you brush your mind everyday, twice a day, or more. Maybe you can reflect on brushing your teeth the next time you don't feel like doing the formal practice in your normal life.