Grounding Yourself In the Present Moment

Thank you for clearing up what you meant by your round one statements but you should have initially made it that clear. I went on what you said which didn't mention the explanation in which you now give. There was no way of me knowing otherwise. Now you say "Motivation alone is not enough to take action" however in order to complete or do out ANY action, there must be some kind of motivation behind it, no matter how small. For example (using the example you give) if you are buying groceries then there is a motivation for paying for them. This motivation often being that if you do pay for them you will have them for your home. This may seem like a non-typical association with motivation but motivation is motivation no matter how you look at it. There is a motivation for every action we do, no matter how small or petty it seems. Yes of course taking action is the only action but no matter what, you can not take action without some kind of motivation. In other words this "motivation" could also be called "future reasons for doing this action" i.e. not grounding yourself in the present per say, but more taking action in the present by thinking of the future. If you would still classify that as being grounded in the present well then that is your fault for not thoroughly explaining your position on the topic. I am going on how you have presented your meaning of "being grounded in the present". Again it is impossible for "taking action" to go "beyond motivation" as you cannot take action without some sort of motivation behind the action. Your example against this notion actually fits perfectly into my argument. You say, "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." However it is interesting that you used "making a donation" as an example. Why is this? Because there is no motivation associated with feeling generous and there must always be a motivation. Basically there are multiple reasons why you might make a donation but it cannot possibly be just because you feel generous. For example it could be because you, A) feel generous AND want to benefit a good cause etc. B) feel generous and will feed good if you give something back. So you see the reason or motivation behind making a donation would most commonly be because you want to benefit others/good cause or that you will feel good/proud of yourself for donating. I cannot see it possible that merely feeling generous would cause you to make a donation. There would have to be some kind of motivation, as well, no matter how small for making the donation. Now when you talk about "fear"(I assume you are talking about fear in conjunction with the future) you say "if you fear failing your test, it's absolutely useless because the fear won't help you in any particular way." I think this is a completely subjective thing but also irrelevant to the point. Firstly just because you might say that there is no point in having fear over a test another person might say that they are going to use this fear as a motivation to study hard in order to do well. As I said, fear can be a great motivator but it's an irrelevant argument because even if fear is a negative motivation, there would still have to be some kind of future motivation for wanting to do well in such tests. I think you would study better with some kind of motivation (not grounding yourself in the present) than studying while being relaxed, at the price of having no motivation. In other words I don't see how studying relaxed, but with no real purpose, is more productive than studying with motivation, no matter what that motivation is or may be. Again you say that there doesn't have to be a motivation for everything we do but I beg to differ. Using the example you used, a handshake, it usually consists of someone putting their hand out first. Their motivation for putting out their hand is because they want to show their respect, friendship, comradery etc. It's not like there is NO reason for a handshake. The person who then also extends their hand out to shake the other hands motivation to do so is because they want to reciprocate the respect, friendship comradery etc. I apologize if it seems as if I'm nit picking here but I am just trying to prove that there has to be a motivation for every action. Again you say: "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)." If grounding yourself in the present in order to approach a woman meant clearing away doubts and fear then there would still have to be a future thought process on why you are approaching the woman. You are obviously approaching a woman for a "reason", as you say and whenever there is a reason there must be a corresponding motivation involved. For example, you could say "I'm going to approach this woman to see where things go between us" or whatever the case may be but the corresponding motivation for that is "I'm going to approach this woman because I want to see where things go between us". With this logic, there MUST be a motivation for every action. Taking this back to the topic at hand here, there can be little actional benefits from grounding yourself in the present compared to doing actions based on future benefits. This is going to be my last example of how we need motivation to carry out an action as I feel I am getting the point across and do not want to be repeating myself so much that I suffer my argument because of it. You say "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." The motivation from this sentence couldn't be more obvious. They hunted BECAUSE they knew if they didn't they would die. Blatant example of motivation causing action to take place. You keep saying that grounding yourself in the present doesn't ignore the future but could you please explain how it doesn't? I don't see how it doesn't. Again from your last paragraph we are back to the end of the last round again. I never argued that we should fantasize about changing past events as a means for my reasoning. You acknowledge this. I merely said that we can learn from the past and my point was that how can we learn from the past if we are stuck in the present. You seem to agree with me that the past is beneficial because we can learn from it however 1) is that not essentially going against your stance on this topic? and 2) again that is not how you expressed your position on the issue in your opening round. I have been merely going by your expression of your position so far but you are saying now that that is not what you meant? If that's the case then we essentially are agreeing on one very important issue of the debate/. However I don't see how you agreeing on this goes for your stance, especially when taking your round 1 explanation into account.