Processes, The Argonauts, my muse, things don't exist...and energy vampires

Bear with me while I explain the really boring issues we get at work... but a very interesting problem...

A question has got us stuck at work. We have a process that produces a product in two stages. Each process makes a batch which has a unique number today it is 1698. Data is recorded on two separate forms which are headed with this batch number 1698.

Stage 1 is made and added to stage 2. A query was raised that the second form makes no reference of the addition of the first stage. If the two stages were completed and never combined it would never show up on the accompanying documentation.

A tick box was added to the second form asking whether the first stage had been added. The problem was what to call the first stage. The first form is headed by the batch number, and the document has a name, "F0020", but how to refer to the product that arises from this process which is added to stage 2?

Maybe we call it 1698.1 but does that make the result of the second stage 1698.2? So actually we ship 1698.2 not 1698.

What if we added 1697.1 to 1698.2? This has accidentally happened. In the past the documents were amended so that 1697.1 and 1698.2 had the same batch number. The "batch number" names a process, or a stream of manufacture, which ties the stages together. Where the batch numbers are the same the stream has flowed. This was how the system was supposed to work. But regarding naming the stages in the stream there is this problem.

Let us take the manufacture of a chair. There are established names for the parts. The back-rest, seat, four legs and various supporting slats. Each has to be manufactured separately and then assembled. Now if we take a chair and trace it back through the factory we can see where the bits and pieces came from. However working forward it would be silly to make legs for
a particular chair. I imagine there this just a pile of legs which are fitted together as needed into final chairs. Any front pair of legs will fit any chair.

However run out of front-pairs and there are no more chairs! All of a sudden, because of only one missing part, there are no more chairs. That is how fragile the existence of a chair is! Remove one part and the whole thing fails. Take a part from another chair and suddenly we have a chair. It can be switched on and off this easy.

The parts don't really "belong" to the whole. They are inter-changeable, fickle creatures that do have a role in the process of being a chair, but drop out at a moments notice and leave the whole chair project floundering.

Back to the manufacture process at work. So what name for the products first component? That is easy. "Stage 1" and this is what we call it. So we have Stage 1 "of" batch 1698. And we have documentation "for" 1698. And when it is bottled into 10 identical 1Litre bottles we have bottles "of" batch 1698. But if someone wanted to actually see batch 1698 we would gesture at the 10 bottles on the table and say there is it. And we would collect the 10 bottles and maybe put them in a box for shipping. But look again. There is nothing there called batch 1698! There are 10 bottles "of" batch 1698. Each bottle has the plastic container and 1Litre of a polymer in aqueous dilution. But the batch is 10L not 1L. It is a part "of" batch 1698.

Suppose we get all 10L together in a big beaker. "OK this is batch 1698" we say. The contents of this beaker. But we are still not pointing at batch 1698 only the beaker and saying obliquely the contents "of" this beaker are it.

If we can point at a beaker why not point at batch 1698?

The problem is that 1698 is not a real thing. It is a process. It never really begins and it never really ends. We don't call the raw materials 1698 when they come into the building, but we do document them so that if anything happens in the 1698 stream it can be traced backwards.

The problem is most famously, and more romantically, found in the story of Jason and the Argonauts - so named because they sailed in a boat called the Argo. During its decade long journey into the Bosphorous every part of the boat was repaired and replaced many times. The question that then faced the Thessalians when the boat returned was were the people aboard still Argonauts? The boat was different from the one they set sail in, so they can't still be Argonauts!

The Argo was built by a man named Argus. He simply took part in a process that gained the name of Argo. Thus when the process involved the replacing of timbers it regained that same name. So of course the sailors that returned were still Argonauts.

Argo is derived from its makers name Argus. This is the name that came to be given to a process that has a stage of birth from his mother and took up a life which involved ship building. We ourselves are processes. Streams of manufacture. Names refer not to the momentary things, these do not exist, but to the stream which flows through them. Things, as Heraclitus would have said in Ephesus over the sea from Thessaly many centuries later, are in a state of flux or becoming, forever changing.

And so we come to "my muse". Tomorrow is 6/6/2008. It is 10 years since "early June" where "I took my place upon a chequer floor" and she gave "her World and Eternity". If only she had, but such things are just processes I am coming to see. It seems very harsh to end all this, this ten years of heart ache, longing and musings with so dismissive a conclusion. How can the softness, the romance and beauty of all that come to this? But I think this is the truth, and seems my only means of escape. Maybe I won't stay here for her forever. Maybe I should stop haunting the places where we one met, the memories of what once was. Maybe the process that I have called "my muse" is taken a turn. It is hard to do, but the evidence is over whelming, that the girl the world once called "Reena" was a process. A beating heart, a smile, a skip in the step, a bounce of voluminous hair, a giggle, a flash of excitement in the eye, a letter, a poem: these were the parts that manufactured "Reena". But she was never there. I never spoke to her, I never touched her, I never wrote to her, I never met with her, I never had her: I have only missed her, cried for her, longed for her, lost her. Had any part failed then the whole illusion would have failed, but I never longed for any part of her: I longed for "her", for "Reena". How foolish the heart! how ignorant! how destined for sorrow and torture! Why do we give hearts a moments thought! It was my heart that believed in her, and it was her heart that shattered the illusion! Where is the process we once called Reena now? Do I still long for that? I regret those last words, "see you in another life" i said before I turned away from that form forever. What! see that "form"? the dark hair, the slight body? More accurately I have wished to be part of her process again. But this is a lie! My heart wishes to be with that form. That "person" who stood before me, who I never had, who I wished for, who has been lost.

So really I never knew her. I never even met with her. She is an illusion which has haunted my mind every day for a decade and which has driven my pen and hand endlessly. But she never existed and she never lived, and she never died. And me? "I" too do not exist. I have never written a word of this blog. But you may call the stream from which these words are issuing Alva.

But while I came to the belief last night that may be I might be nearing a turning point in this situation, another thing happened. My lab partners daughter went into "shock". There is a good chance that I drained her of energy. It has been a suspicion, a fear, for a while but maybe the energy that I found with Reena - the love as I thought it was - the spiritual connection which persisted until she died - was fuelled from her rather than anything happening between us.

Last night I resolved an issue regarding the closure of all this. I need to know whether what happened was really the thing I have been searching for. I have been convinced that it was, but doubtful also because other guys seemed - on the surface of it - to get very much more! And its not exactly a "loving relationship" in the usual sense. So I have doubted the depth and significance of it. But it seems to have held a place in her heart, but I can't believe a scratch on the place that her fiance held. And so the mystery. If for me it is everything I have ever wanted, to the point on walking away that I had taken part in my only reason to live. If for her it is just a casual friendship then to anyones thinking this cannot have been "it". Yet it persists for me as "it" and so the problem of how to move on remains. If it is "it" - then I have aretez. If it is not "it" then I am mistaken and must search more - and I have allez.

But the twist is that maybe I have a hand in her death afterall. That connection was a drain of her youthful energy and I am a vampire. I am not going mad, maybe this happens. Suddenly everything is different. What for me is bliss and happiness and the goal of my life, is to other people a path of destruction. If this is so then my whole life must be re-written. My whole existence is based upon a false premise, that to live others must die.

Well its very sad if its true. There really goes any dreams of happiness. But it might come at a good time. Now that I really suspect this is true I need to restructure myself to find energy with harming people. I have no idea how to do this, but I must switch off the "heart" which seems to be the antenna which picks this stuff up. Its the same antenna that linked to the "earth goddess" in that experience at Mere if you read my webpage.

It also means that I'd better move quickly into the next stage of my Buddhist process. Recently I've become convinced that the main goal of Buddhism is to "extinguish desires". This has become plainly simple to me. It means to resist the lure of "thirsts". In other words that "force" that generates within us when we want something. Which drives our thinking, our analysis of how to get it, and drives our actions toward getting it: that force must be mastered. Let us call that force : "empulsion" which is the root of all movements both outside and inside: movement and emotion.

The arising of empulsion is of no consequence when we are master of it. But when it directs us then karma becomes our enemy. Karma means almost the same as empulsion - I think. It is the process by which things happen when we act, and especially whether those consequences are considered good or bad when we experience them again. A simplistic example might be: you throw a rock in the air in a fit of rage and it falls down to hit you on the head. That thud on the head is the karmic repercussion of that empulsion. You want to know why your head hurts? it lies in that very moment of empulsion. Of course processes in the world are very much more complex and have been going on for a very long time! There is a lot of karma waiting to hit us on the head, but also make us very happy too - delayed results of ancient empulsions we have had. It all depends upon what we have done in the past.

Back to the point. When empulsion arises it strikes me as very simple. If we can achieve the goal of that empulsion we are happy and if we can not then we are unhappy. If we are master of empulsion and we cannot achieve the goal it is a very simple matter to simply let the empulsion die away (nothing lasts forever). But if the empulsion is directing us, then we experience loss and suffering. Pain is not suffering. We have a dental operation without anaesthetic it is a simple matter to ignore the empulsion which pushes us away from the dentist drill and which would try to stop the operation or take pain killer. If we are controlled by empulsion then the pain is "too much" and we must take action to avoid it.

"Be seated it will pass" is a most wise line I picked up from the excellent film "Withnail and I". Indeed if you can remain seated then all things will pass. The problem is when we cannot remain seated. In these situations we are generating karma which will create the unpleasantness of the situation again. The situation itself is not so much the issue, as the empulsion that it causes within us. Some people might like to sit with a person, while others cannot sit in the same room as them. Same person - two different empulsions: wanting to sit and wanting to walk away.

So in the last 24 hours a lot has happened in this stream, a lot of karmas, but I'm hoping to master the empulsions particularly that one which previously I have thought was love.