For Joyful Life

Beware of the Negative Feedback Loop

All of us know that the positive feelings and the positive interactions with fellow human beings and nature, will help us to lead to a joyful life.

To ensure that, all of us need to be aware of the feedback loop influences on us.

What is a feedback loop?

When a part of the output of a process is fed back to become a part of the input to that process, it becomes a feedback loop.

Everyone of us lead a life with our own social circle involving our family, friends, work place, affiliated forums, ideology, books, etc – a process with complex inputs and complex outputs.

The food we take, ideas, suggestions, etc we permit to our mind, our physical and mental efforts etc are all the inputs to the life process we are associated with.

The generation of revenue, the results of our all kinds of our physical and mental efforts as well as the results in our social circle, are all the complex outputs.

Note that we also contribute to the inputs as well as the outputs in our social circle (both online & off line).

Till our death, we have to undergo the process of the feedback loop, in which the part of the above output, would be fed back as the input.

If our life is dominated by the negative feelings, negative emotions, destructive violent actions, etc, we are already caught in the negative feedback loop, ensuring stressful negative life bordering to become a negative human robot.

Instead of identifying and encouraging lawful mechanism to punish the culprits, if we develop hatred to the caste, race, and country for that action of the culprit, we are already in a negative feedback loop. Good and bad people are in every caste, race, country, etc,; we must always remember, when we start drowning ourselves in negative emotions.

While encountering a view point opposed to ours, if we are tempted to divert the attention to personal attack, instead of dealing with the points and evidences in an open minded, objective manner, it is an indication that we are caught in a negative feedback loop.

Another inevitable contamination of the negative feedback loop would be the infection of comparison.(Don't compare yourself with others (Your competition is with yourself)

http://veepandi.blogspot.in/2013/12/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_16.html )

Once we suspect that we may be in a negative feedback loop, we need to have a temporary withdrawal of our emotion related actions, and move to a calm place in a lonely, preferably, in a serene natural surroundings,  to reflect on our feedback loop.

Are the human beings in our circle the shelters of positive feelings and positive values? Are the books we read, the films we see, the forums we are associated with, nurture the positive feelings and positive values? (A Self Check-Up;  Are We The Shelter of The Positive Feelings?; http://veepandi.blogspot.in/2013/01/normal-0-false-false-false_22.html )

Are we living with the ‘dead bodies’? (http://veepandi.blogspot.in/2012/12/normal-0-false-false-false_3340.html )

If you really want a joyful life, the above exercise will give the awareness and empower you to redefine your social circle and inputs.

Once you start doing it, you will experience that your feedback loop is undergoing transformation from the negative to the positive.

Also we need to be aware;  in real life even those leading a joyful life, need to experience their ‘quota’ of negative feelings and emotions. But the relative magnitude of the positive dimension to the negative dimension in our feedback loop, will point out the nature of the loop we were in.

When the process of the negative feedback loop dominates, contaminating a significant section of the people in a country, that will facilitate the emergence of unworthy leaders.

With vigilant awareness, we can monitor our feedback loop towards a joyful life, as well as to contribute to decontaminate the world to the extent possible to us.

‘Good and bad to us, could not come from others, unless we permit them ‘, according to the ancient Tamil text, puRanhAnURu.

‘தீதும் நன்றும் பிறர் தர வாரா’ – புறநானூறு.

Note : The above post was the result of my reflection on the following comments from my UK based friend V.Tholkappian.

“Tamils are suffering the negative feedback loop. It will be a hard struggle until it switches to positive feedback loop. ”