From spike to baseline: distance-collapse in Buddhist contemplative practice and durable wellbeing

Background Across contemplative traditions, the most experienced practitioners describe an endpoint in which devotion is no longer confined to particular times and places but becomes a continuous, featureless condition scarcely distinguishable from ordinary living. Positive psychology, approaching the same terrain from a measurement perspective, distinguishes fleeting hedonic states from durable eudaimonic wellbeing and finds that repeated contemplative states can consolidate into stable traits. What has been missing is a single structural account of the mechanism that carries the first into the second. Objective This study proposes that contemplative maturation is, at root, the collapse of the separation between the practitioner and what the practice orients toward, a single distance parameter D whose fall toward zero generates the rest. As D → 0, the duration of each contact contracts and its frequency rises toward continuity; their product (the devotional throughput) acts as a compensatory trade-off rather than a conserved quantity; the amplitude of the sacred–profane oscillation falls to zero; and the baseline of consciousness rises to absorb it. The endpoint is a straight line, embodiment, in which the separation has vanished: one no longer visits the temple or performs the prayer but is the temple, is the prayer. The practitioner is flat relative to their own elevated baseline and elevated relative to the ordinary world. Approach The argument is developed within the Liberation Mathematics program, joining a wave-mechanical description of practice to the Phenomenology Quotient (PQ) and Threshold Modulator ( τ ) constructs. Theravāda insight practice (the sustained observation of arising-and-passing, udaya–vaya, toward the unconditioned, asaṅkhata) provides the structural backbone; jhānic factor-dropping, equanimity (upekkhā), and the brahmavihāras supply the operational detail; and a cross-traditional comparison finds structurally analogous trajectories in dhikr, the Jesus Prayer, japa, and nembutsu. Conclusion Durable wellbeing is a baseline phenomenon, not a peak phenomenon. Buddhist contemplative practice enhances wellbeing by shifting from amplitude-seeking into baseline elevation, a reading that recovers what the traditions have long described and yields falsifiable predictions about the affective signatures of long-term practice.