Whatever You Think or Feel, the Universe Says Yes – Part I

The series

Introduction
Part I – The Attitude That Precedes You
Part II – The Scientific Frame: Unus Mundus
Part III – We Are Strange Attractors
Part IV – The Dark Side
Part V – Practical Kairomancy: Working with the Yes

The attitude that precedes you

You’re walking toward a meeting you’ve been dreading for days. Your shoulders are tight. There’s a knot in your stomach. You’ve rehearsed the conversation a dozen times, each version ending badly. As you reach for the door handle, you’re braced for conflict, already defending yourself against attacks that haven’t happened yet.

Or: you’re walking toward the same meeting, but something shifted this morning. You slept well. You had a positive conversation with a friend who reminded you of your competence. You’re curious now about what might emerge. Your body is alert but open. You’re ready for anything.

Same meeting. Same room. Same people waiting on the other side of the door.

But here’s what Robert Moss¹ wants you to understand: it’s not the same meeting at all. Because you’re not the same. And more radically and more disturbingly, if you really let it land, your attitude has already arrived before you. “Before you walk into a room or turn a corner,” Moss writes in Sidewalk Oracles, “your attitude is there already. It’s engaged in creating the situation you are about to encounter.”

Not just colouring your perception of what happens. Not just influencing how you respond. But creating the situation itself.

Most of us operate from an unexamined assumption: the world happens to us, and then we react. Events are external, objective, and fixed. Our job is to navigate them as skilfully as we can, managing our responses and controlling what we can control, which is to say, very little. We are passengers in a vehicle we don’t drive, trying to make the best of whatever road we find ourselves on.

But what if that’s backwards? What if, as Moss insists, “we are constantly setting ourselves up for what the world is going to give us”? What if the emotional weather we carry, the texture of our expectations, the quality of our attention, the flavour of our inner commentary are already shaping the reality we’re about to encounter?

This is Moss’s first rule of kairomancy, his art of navigating by synchronicity: whatever you think or feel, the universe says yes.

It’s a claim that makes the rational mind recoil. It sounds like magical thinking, like the worst kind of New Age narcissism that blames people for their misfortunes and credits cosmic favouritism for their wins. It seems to ignore structural realities, power differentials, and plain bad luck. It feels dangerous.

And yet, haven’t you noticed? Haven’t you felt it? The way certain days seem charmed, doors opening before you even knock, strangers offering exactly what you need. The way other days feel cursed, every traffic light turning red, every conversation going sideways. The way your anxiety about something going wrong seems to summon the thing going wrong. The way your body knew before your mind did whether a situation would unfold badly or well.

We have language for this, of course. We call it self-fulfilling prophecy, confirmation bias, or the observer effect. We explain it away, reduce it to psychology or coincidence. But what if these explanations are just comfortable stories we tell ourselves to avoid a more unsettling possibility: that there is no impermeable barrier between mind and matter, that consciousness and world are not separate things but aspects of a single, responsive reality?

This essay is an exploration of that possibility, not as mystical speculation but as practical physics, not as wishful thinking but as radical responsibility. If our attitudes truly are creative forces, if we are, as Emerson declared, “magnets in an iron globe,”² then we have far more power than we’ve been taught to claim. And far less excuse for unconsciousness.

The question isn’t whether this is true in some absolute, provable sense. The question is: what happens when we act as if it’s true? What happens when we notice what we carry, what we broadcast, and the magnetic field we create with every thought and feeling?

What happens when we realise we’ve been doing magic all along and just didn’t know it?

Magic as Psychology

Before Jung and Pauli³ gave us a scientific vocabulary for this, before quantum mechanics made the observer inseparable from the observed, human beings already knew. They knew it in their bones, in their rituals, and in the careful attention they paid to their own states of mind before undertaking anything important.

The alchemists knew it. They understood that the inner disposition of the practitioner was as crucial as the outer procedure. They knew that you couldn’t transform lead into gold without first transforming yourself. The Great Work ⁴was always both material and spiritual, and the boundary between the two was never as solid as it appeared. When they spoke of prima materia, the base substance that could be transmuted, they were talking about matter and psyche simultaneously. The laboratory was a place where consciousness did things to substances, and substances did things to consciousness, and neither could be fully separated from the other.

This is why mediaeval grimoires don’t just give you the spell. They give you elaborate preparations. Fast for three days. Bathe in spring water. Wear clean linen. Approach the work with reverence and focused intention. Modern readers think this is superstitious window dressing around the “real” magic words. But the adepts understood something we’ve forgotten: the preparation is the magic. The ritual creates a particular state of consciousness, and that state is what makes things happen.

“The passions of the soul work magic.” This wasn’t a metaphor to them. It was an observable fact.

The great French novelist Honoré de Balzac, writing in the 19th century, put it with startling clarity: “Ideas are projected as a direct result of the force by which they are conceived, and they strike wherever the brain sends them by a mathematical law comparable to that which directs the firing of shells from their mortars.”

A mathematical law. Balzac isn’t being poetic here—he’s claiming precision, predictability, and physics. Your thoughts are projectiles. The intensity with which you think them determines their velocity and impact. Where you aim your attention is where they land. This is mechanics, not mysticism.

And notice: it’s not just positive thoughts that have this power. Balzac says “ideas,” not “good ideas.” Fear is an idea. Resentment is an idea. The expectation of failure is an idea fired with tremendous force, and it strikes its target with mathematical regularity.

We’ve spent the last few centuries trying to outgrow this way of thinking. We’ve called it primitive, pre-scientific, the result of pattern-seeking minds desperate to find control in a chaotic universe. We’ve learned to separate subject from object, mind from world, and psychology from physics. We’ve built entire institutions on the assumption that consciousness is an epiphenomenon, a ghost in the machine with no causal power of its own.

But here’s what’s curious: the people who work most intimately with the creative process—artists, inventors, entrepreneurs, athletes at the highest level—still talk like alchemists. They speak of being “in the zone,” of “alignment,” of things “flowing” when their internal state is right and everything going sideways when it’s not. They’re superstitious about their rituals, their routines, and the mood they cultivate before beginning the work. They know, even if they can’t explain it, that their inner weather affects outer outcomes.

Ask a jazz musician about the nights when the music is alive, when the band is locked in and the room is electric, when impossible things become easy. Then ask about the nights when everyone’s technically proficient but something’s dead; nothing catches fire. What’s the difference? Not skill. Not even preparation, exactly. It’s something about the quality of attention, the collective mood, and the invisible field that forms when consciousness aligns in a certain way.

High emotions generate results. When raw energy is loose—love, rage, grief, ecstatic joy—it has effects in the world. Every wisdom tradition has known this. Every magical system has worked with it. The question is not whether intense feeling does something beyond the boundaries of the individual psyche. The question is: what exactly does it do, and how?

This is where we hit the limit of the ancient intuition. The alchemists knew that consciousness and matter interweave, but they lacked a framework for understanding how. They had to speak in symbols and correspondences, in elaborate metaphors that pointed toward a truth they could sense but not articulate.

It would take a psychologist and a physicist, working in unlikely collaboration, to find the language.

But before we get there, sit for a moment with what Balzac is claiming. Your ideas are shells fired from mortars. Your emotions are forces that ripple outward. Your attitude arrives before you do.

If this is even partially true—if consciousness has even a little causal power beyond the skull that contains it—then we’ve been catastrophically unconscious about what we’re firing into the world, moment by moment, thought by thought, feeling by feeling.

And the universe, indifferent to our intentions, says yes to all of it.

The series

Introduction
Part I – The Attitude That Precedes You
Part II – The Scientific Frame: Unus Mundus
Part III – We Are Strange Attractors
Part IV – The Dark Side
Part V – Practical Kairomancy: Working with the Yes

1. Robert Moss is an Australian-born historian, novelist, and teacher who has spent decades exploring the intersection of dreaming, shamanism, and synchronicity. A former professor of ancient history, he experienced a series of near-death experiences in childhood that opened him to non-ordinary states of consciousness. He’s the creator of Active Dreaming, a synthesis of modern dreamwork and ancient shamanic practices, and has written over a dozen books including Conscious Dreaming, The Secret History of Dreaming, and Sidewalk Oracle. Moss teaches worldwide and is known for making practical tools from esoteric traditions accessible to modern practitioners. His work emphasizes that we don’t need to travel to sacred sites or adopt foreign traditions—the extraordinary is available right where we are, in the speaking land of everyday life. ↩︎
2. “We are magnets in an iron globe” — This line comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Resources” (1876), part of his later work exploring human potential and spiritual power. Emerson was writing about the law of attraction decades before it became a New Age concept, but his version was earthier and more dynamic than modern interpretations. The full passage reads: “We are magnets in an iron globe. We have keys to all doors. We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided each by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.” For Emerson, a Transcendentalist who believed in the fundamental unity of spirit and nature, this wasn’t metaphor—it was observable fact about how consciousness interacts with the material world. He also warned of the inverse: “A low, hopeless spirit puts out the eyes; skepticism is slow suicide.” ↩︎
3. Carl Jung (1875-1961) and Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958) — Jung was the Swiss psychiatrist who broke with Freud to develop analytical psychology, introducing concepts like the collective unconscious, archetypes, and synchronicity. Pauli was an Austrian theoretical physicist and one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945 for his exclusion principle. Their collaboration began in 1932 when Pauli came to Jung as a patient, troubled by psychological distress and vivid dreams. What started as therapy evolved into a decades-long intellectual partnership exploring the connections between psychology and physics. They exchanged over 1,000 letters and co-developed ideas about synchronicity, acausal connecting principles, and the concept of unus mundus—the unified reality underlying both psyche and matter. Their work is documented in Atom and Archetype: The Pauli/Jung Letters and represents one of the most fascinating interdisciplinary collaborations of the 20th century, suggesting that the breakdown of classical physics and the exploration of the unconscious were pointing toward the same territory. ↩︎
4. The Great Work (Magnum Opus in Latin) — In alchemical tradition, this refers to the process of creating the Philosopher’s Stone, which could supposedly transmute base metals into gold and grant immortality. But alchemists understood this on multiple levels simultaneously: it was both a literal laboratory process and a metaphor for spiritual transformation. The “lead” to be transmuted was as much the practitioner’s consciousness as any physical substance. The work progressed through distinct stages—nigredo (blackening/death), albedo (whitening/purification), citrinitas (yellowing/illumination), and rubedo (reddening/completion)—each representing both chemical processes and psychological states. Carl Jung spent years studying alchemical texts and concluded that the alchemists were unconsciously describing the individuation process, the journey toward psychological wholeness. The Great Work required not just the right ingredients and procedures, but the right state of being in the practitioner. As the alchemical maxim states: “As above, so below; as within, so without.” The transformation of matter and the transformation of consciousness were understood to be aspects of the same process. ↩︎