Sufficient

Still Life - Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers, 1889

I'm listening to This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan.  In the mescaline chapter, describing his trip, Pollan writes about his sense of being caught up in the current sensory experience of the world -- being so filled with sensory input that he can't think about the past or the future.  He uses the term "sufficient" several times in his notes while he's tripping and in explaining his preceptions.  (The "Doors of Perception" were opened.) The input of senses - the vast variety of the world -- was "sufficient" for him.  He didn't need to fill himself with other things.

While I was walking and listening to the book, I began making connections:

• Thubten Chodron's saying: "it is enough."
• Meditation's directions to focus on the present, not the past or future.
• The Buddhist thought: "be here, now" or "right here, right now".... all of which to focus on the current things/phenomena happening
• My own post-running trippy moments when gazing at a bunch of mulch, for instance, was diverting and interesting, and the awareness of multiple things moving around me (woman with stroller, train around corner, birds in flight) were completely interesting... sufficient.
• My own trippy states where I'm thinking about how life/perception really is and how our normal brains are focused on constricting input or labelling input
• Pollan can also focus on things in his head when his eyes close... and he still has that ability to be focused on ideas and thoughts... similar to Buddhism.

This made me wonder if all my meditation is trying to get back to earlier trippy states, which are just pleasant.

I write about the post-run trippy state here using language very similar to Michael Pollan's (along with similar low-grade ecstatic states from Thoreau and poetry by Gerard Manly Hopkins)