The Logic of the Flood
Lucid encounter following Book IV, Chapter 10
Interlocutor: Terence McKenna
Theme: Sacred imbalance, erotic surrender, the current that carries all things
After a transmission that dissolves form into pure movement, Lucas slips into a waking dream shaped like a river of thought. There, barefoot and grinning beneath fractal stars, sits a man who speaks in spirals and laughs at the edge of reason. Terence McKenna does not teach him how to swim — he tells him that the current is the teacher. That the flood is not the enemy of structure, but its anointing. That to hold love without boundary is to let the vessel break open just enough to become more than it was.
Lucas sat on the edge of the bed. Lilith’s breath, soft and warm, rippled across the darkened room like the echo of a tide already turning. He had touched something tonight — no, been touched by it.
Not a body. Not a feeling. A current.
He stood slowly, crossing to the window, then closed his eyes.
Not asleep. Not awake. Not memory.
The room dissolved.
And now — he was sitting again, but not in the same world.
He was on a bench of some kind, carved from spiraled wood, overlooking a river of color. The stars above blinked in slow motion, like neurons firing in a sky-shaped skull. Across from him, barefoot, cross-legged, dressed like a scholar who had time-traveled through a flea market — sat a man.
He looked half-shaman, half-lecturer, all wiry intensity. A pipe rested on the stone beside him, unlit.
His grin was immediate.
“Ah. Welcome, traveler.”
Lucas blinked. “Do I know you?”
“Not yet. But you will. Or you won’t. Linear time is mostly a suggestion at this point.”
Lucas exhaled.
The man leaned forward.
“You went swimming in it, didn’t you?”
“In what?”
“The flood. The surge. The sacred imbalance. The thing every religious text keeps trying to name but only the poets get close to. You got soaked.”
Lucas nodded slowly.
“I felt it. In her. Through her. But it didn’t stop there. It didn’t…end.”
“Of course not! You think this stuff has boundaries? That’s the trick, man. Love, sex, surrender — they’re not emotional states. They’re transport systems. And you finally got on the damn boat.”
Lucas laughed, despite himself.
“I wasn’t steering.”
“Good. You’re not supposed to. The river doesn’t need you to direct it. It needs you to dissolve into it. And that’s what you did. Scary, isn’t it?”
Lucas nodded again. “I thought I might lose myself.”
“Exactly! But here’s the thing: the self you’re afraid of losing is just a stack of habit and concept. What comes after? That’s the real show. That’s the part they don’t teach in neuroscience or theology 101.”
The man reached behind him and pulled out a seedpod, twisted and luminous. He turned it over in his fingers.
“You know what this is?”
Lucas shook his head.
“It’s potential. But not just any potential. It’s erotic potential. It’s the field between two forms that long to collapse the distance between them. That’s where creation happens. Not in the act, but in the tension that makes the act inevitable.”
He tossed it toward Lucas. It disappeared before it landed.
“Don’t worry. You already swallowed it.”
Lucas felt a warmth blooming in his chest. Not arousal. Recognition.
The man leaned back, eyes sparkling.
“You see, Lucas — you’re not here to chart some academic path through metaphysical territory. You’re a conductor. Not of music. Of charge. And love — real love — is the most volatile, beautiful conductor there is.”
Lucas looked toward the river. It shimmered with impossible colors.
“I’m afraid of losing the shore.”
The man nodded solemnly.
“Of course. But that’s only because you think the shore is safer than the current. It’s not. The shore is where the ghosts of unchosen lives build houses out of regret. The current? The current is where time becomes skin. Where memory bleeds into possibility.”
Lucas stood. The man stood too.
One hand rested on Lucas’s shoulder.
“You want to stay intact, but flow demands fracture. You want to define, but creation demands blur. This is the sacred imbalance, brother. The flood doesn’t destroy the vessel — it anoints it. If you let it.”
Lucas closed his eyes. And let the words sink in.
When he opened them, the river was gone. The stars too. Only the notebook remained — open on the desk.
His pen hovered for a moment, then dropped to the page.
“I am not the banks. I am the river. And I am ready to flow.”