excited about everything,” they commented, and stayed
where they were. All of the Smoothies eventually were tram-
pled by the mammoths. None survived. Thus, none of the
Smoothies became our great-, great-, great-, great- great-
(etc.) great-grandparents. That explains why we are the way
we are today.So, when you wonder why you feel any particular sensation—
”Why am I angry today?” or “Why am I afraid to speak up?”—the an-
swer is “It’s because of the hairy elephants.” While it isn’t the most
accurate answer, it’s the most usefulone.
The moral is: Your feelings are your natural response to any
challenge. And your feelings have the potential to help you.
Whether you are able to take advantage of the potential benefit de-
pends on you. Begin today to develop your sensory acuity and use
your feelings as feedback to help you succeed.
It’s very difficult to determine the exact cause of any feeling, be-
cause the increase in energy is so deeply programmed into our
genes. You could conclude that your anger when someone insulted
you was caused by their insult. Perhaps. Another possibility is that
the anger was there all along and the insult merely brought it out.
After all, there are people who simply laugh at insults, rather than
react angrily. An honest assessment of your emotional life may lead
you to conclude that your effort to identify the cause of your feel-
ings is, in fact, an attempt to justify them in a society where feelings
are not OK. Ask yourself which side of the cause-and-effect equa-
tion (discussed in Chapter 4) you are living on right now.
The Primitive and Ancient Design of
Our Emotional System
Anthropological evidence suggests that our brain and the rest of
the human emotional system are of ancient design, unchanged in
thousands of years. Thus, our emotional system was designed to aid
survival in an environment far more violent and primitive than
most of us face today. In a primitive environment, added energy is
essential to meet most challenges. This is less so in our modern so-
ciety. A traffic jam is the classic example of a situation where the
added energy isn’t useful in meeting the challenge. In order to
function stress-free, we must be able to experience added energy
and at the same time do nothing about it.
The Primitive and Ancient Design of Our Emotional System 121