This goes back a long way to the way my dad introduced me to drugs, not as in gave me drugs, but educated me on them.
He was always open and when I asked what the man chicken in our garden was doing to the lady chickens he explained at great length. I apparently listened with great interest, nodding at the right times, and walked away seemingly a wiser young 5 year old than before.
I returned later in the day to ask "but dad, how does he squirt it through the shell of the egg?"
With drugs he classed everything together, seeing no use in boundaries we got the chocolate, caffeine, nicotine, heroin, lsd, lecture all in one. All these things gave an Up that was followed by a Down. The problem with the more addictive ones was that the first Up was never matched, and the Downs went lower - dragging the baseline down with them so that with no drug the person felt worse than they had previous to ever taking drugs.
So when the Change you Mind Change your Brain lecturer mentioned a similar wave of happiness in the talk he gave it got me thinking again.
He said it was possible, and scientifically measured to be the case, that mediation can lift your baseline of happiness. He did not go into great detail, and I have not read the report, but it is quite easy to infer that a well practised mediator can have a unhappiness that is still higher than a day-to-day persons happiness.
like my graph will now show:
^ Meditator's High
| Meditator's Baseline
| Meditator's Low
| Normal folks High
| Normal folks baseline
\/ Normal folks Low
(You're probably fairly blown away by my graphing skills so take a breath to get over it...)
and here we go, Enlightenment in a scientific way may still be a normal state with highs and lows but even the lows are comparatively high compared to Mr and Mrs average.
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