States, Processes, and Qualities

Some brief definitions of engineering and thermodynamic concepts to be used as an analogy to explain spiritual phenomena.

Readership: Reference

I feel there is a general haze of confusion surrounding many spiritual concepts, such as defilement, uncleanness, consecration, sanctification, and redemption. I will be studying these concepts in some future posts, and in order to help our understanding of these matters, I will be discussing them in terms of an analogy to the comparable concepts ubiquitous in thermodynamics, industrial engineering, and manufacturing science, namely states, processes, and qualities, among others. So this post is meant to serve as a reference to some general definitions. I may add to this post in the future.

A State is defined as the equilibrium condition of a system, and is described in terms of several state variables or state quantities that depend only on the current equilibrium condition of the system. State functions do not depend on the path by which the system arrived at its present state. For example, internal energy, enthalpy, and entropy are state quantities.

• Uncleanness is a state defined by certain extrinsic properties.
• Defilement is a state determined by certain intrinsic properties.

A Process is how a system passes from one state to another. Process functions depend on the path taken to reach one state from another. As an example, mechanical work and heat are process functions because they describe quantitatively the transition between equilibrium states of a thermodynamic system.

Process Quality is having the highest efficiency and best utilization of all resources in production.

Product Quality means to incorporate features that have a capacity to meet consumer needs (wants) and gives customer satisfaction by improving products (goods) and making them free from any deficiencies or defects.

Six Sigma (6σ) is a set of techniques and tools for process improvement. Six Sigma strategies seek to improve the quality of the output of a process by identifying and removing the causes of defects and minimizing variability in manufacturing and business processes. It uses a set of quality management methods, mainly empirical, and statistical methods, and creates a special infrastructure of people within the organization who are experts in these methods. Each Six Sigma project carried out within an organization follows a defined sequence of steps and has specific value targets, for example: reduce process cycle time, reduce pollution, reduce costs, increase customer satisfaction, and increase profits. A six sigma process is one in which 99.99966% of all opportunities to produce some feature of a part are statistically expected to be free of defects.

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