Grounding Yourself In the Present Moment

In the sentences you mentioned (from my first argument), in the first one I was referring to the state of living in the future, ignoring the past and the present & in the second, living in the past, ignoring the present and the future. I hope this makes my point much more clearer. Motivation alone is not enough to take action. You can feel motivated to do something all day and still not do it. Taking action is the only action. There is no way to peace, peace is the way - A.J. Muste. There are not certain steps you can take achieve peace, peace just is. The same thing can be applied to my point. There is no action you have to take before you take action (do something), taking action (doing it) is the way. Motivation is nothing more than a measurement of what an individual's passion/interest is. What that person feels motivated to do represents the passion/interest of that person. But motivation only goes so far. Taking action goes beyond motivation. Every action is measured by the depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds - Ralph Waldo Emerson. What this essentially means is that what you do is not important, but where do you come from (which sentiment) when doing it. So the reasons to take action can be endless, not just because you failed before and want to succeed, or because you want to create a better future for yourself (which are both sentiments (states of mind) you can proceed from). Maybe I feel generous and want to make a donation. That's not because of a past failure or the desire to make a better future for myself. Going back to the Emerson quote, if you do something when you feel fearful, the sentiment you proceed from is fear. Now the question is, do you want to proceed from fear? Humans fear the unknown. The unknown is in the present and in the future. So fear in the present is very possible. But is fear good? If you stand on the edge of a cliff and you fear for your life, it's totally understandable, but if you fear failing your test, it's absolutely useless because the fear won't help you in any particular way. Fear is an evolutionary trait and it is said that all fear is inevitably connected to the fear of death. The more connections a fear has before connecting to the fear of death, the more useless that particular fear is. In the first example, you stand on the edge and you fear that you might fall and die, fear of death. That's one connection and the connection is fear of death itself. In the second example however, you fear that you will fail your test, you won't get your diploma, you won't be able to get a job, you won't have money, you will have nowhere to live and you will starve to death. Of course this was just an example so I can make my point more vivid, I managed to make six connections. You should know which number of connections you need to have before taking fear seriously. Knowing that, you should always be aware of fear, because it's there for a reason. Ignoring it would be a mistake. Feel it and in your mind, picture the outcome you fear and in your visualization you just might find the answer you need to induce calmness and defeat fear. Fear is a human emotion and it cannot be removed. But the fear you mention when doing important exams is not natural, because it persists over a longer period of time and is also known as stress. Stress is damaging for the functioning of the human brain. Grounding yourself in the present moment, feeling calm and powerful, like a tree spreading it's roots in the ground, can make your studying session much more productive. How do you think you would study better, stressed out or relaxed? How would you absorb more information? There doesn't have to be motivation/reasoning for every action we do. There are some things we do automatically, like handshaking. Handshaking is an automatic process, you don't have to think about extending your hand, grabbing the other person's hand and then going up and down, you just do it because you've done it so many times, it's automatic. Grounding yourself in the present moment doesn't need to motivate you to approach a woman, it needs to clear away doubt and fear so you can see the reason why you would want to approach a woman (take action). So essentially, you're looking for the sentiment from which to proceed from. You don't need to motivate yourself, if you have a good reason for doing it, you will do it. Do you motivate yourself to pay at the supermarket? No, you just do it 'cause you have to, so you can bring food at the table. Do you motivate yourself to go to the bathroom? No, you do it so you don't piss your pants. I just don't get what motivation is all about. You don't have to motivate yourself if the reason for what you need to do is pure. What I mean by "pure" is not clouded by destructive emotions, clear of all corruption. I hope you follow my poetic language. Humans in the stone age didn't motivate themselves to go out and hunt, because they knew if they don't eat, they will die. Their reason for hunting is pure, for the goal of their survival. Grounding yourself in the present moment doesn't ignore the future. It lets you see in your deepest self, why would you want to approach a woman. It searches the reason, the meaning. Imagine walking with a friend, having a conversation and all of a sudden, in your mind, you picture punching your friend right in that moment. That's called an impulse. The desire to act comes from impulses in out mind, ideas of ways we can act in the present and they just happen to happen in the present. By the moment the impulse finishes it becomes the past, but the time when the impulse came to mind, what you call the desire to take action was in the present moment, so the desire happens in the present moment. The same would happen if you're walking down the street and you see a beautiful lady, your natural impulse would be to approach her. An interesting fact is that cats cannot control their impulses, so whatever they think, they do. That's why they seem to be so aggressive at times. Humans however, can control their impulses. Because of the unchanging quality of the past we can always look back for answers and by doing it, we learn from it, we educate ourselves. What I mean by this is bringing the past in our present for the purpose of learning, recalling a memory etc. It is still being in the present, only being aware that the past is unchangeable. A mistake would be going back in the past and fantasizing about changing past events instead of bringing the past into the present, being aware of it's unchanging quality and learning from it for example. It's a totally different concept. We seem to agree on this. We seem to agree on some important aspects of this debate. I have to apologize, I was too poetic and ambiguous in my first argument.