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
We Are Strange Attractors
Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in 1876, didn’t have quantum mechanics or Jung’s psychology to reference. But he had something else: he paid attention. And what he observed was this: “We are magnets in an iron globe.”1
It’s one of those sentences that lodges in your mind like a splinter. Magnets in an iron globe. Each of us exerts a field, pulling and pushing, attracting and repelling according to our polarity. The whole world is iron. It’s responsive, susceptible, and waiting to be arranged by the forces we emit.
Emerson continues: “We have keys to all doors. We are all inventors, each sailing out on a voyage of discovery, guided by a private chart, of which there is no duplicate. The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.”
This is the optimistic side of the equation. When we’re aligned, energised, and clear in our intention—when we’re “upbeat and positive,” as Emerson puts it—we become powerful attractors. The world opens. People appear with exactly what we need. Resources materialise. Obstacles dissolve or reveal themselves as disguised opportunities. It’s not that someone’s out there arranging things in our favour. It’s that our magnetic field has shifted, and the iron filings of reality reorganise themselves accordingly.
But Emerson doesn’t shy away from the shadow side: “A low, hopeless spirit puts out the eyes; scepticism is slow suicide. A philosophy which sees only the worst…dispirits us; the sky shuts down before us.”
Slow suicide. That’s not metaphor—that’s mechanism. The negative attitude doesn’t just make us feel bad. It actively closes possibilities, repels opportunities, and attracts circumstances that confirm the hopelessness. The sky doesn’t shut down because we’re seeing it wrong. The sky shuts down because our magnetic field is generating closure, pushing away the very things that might help us.
This is what Moss means by energetic magnetism. “Through energetic magnetism, we attract or repel people, events, and even physical circumstances according to the attitudes we embody.”
Notice: embody. Not “think” or “believe.” The magnetism operates at the level of what we’re carrying in our bodies, in our energy fields, and in the texture of our presence. You can have all the positive thoughts you want, but if your body is clenched with anxiety, if your energy is broadcasting fear, that’s what the world responds to. The universe says yes to what you are, not what you claim to be.
The Irish poet and mystic George Russell—known as AE—spent years observing this principle in action. He called it “the law of spiritual gravitation” and summarised it in five words: Your own will come to you.2
In his book The Candle of Vision, he describes how it worked in his own life: “I found that every intense imagination, every new adventure of the intellect [is] endowed with magnetic power to attract to it its own kin. Will and desire were as the enchanter’s wand of fable, and they drew to themselves their own affinities.”
He wasn’t trying to make this happen. He just noticed it happening. When he became intensely interested in mythology, people with knowledge of mythology appeared in his life. When he explored mysticism, he encountered other mystics. When he painted, he met painters. Not because he went looking for them—they came. As if his intense focus on a subject sent out a signal, and those attuned to that signal picked it up and followed it to its source.
“One person after another emerged out of the mass,” he writes, “betraying their close affinity to my moods as they were engendered.”
This is stranger than simple networking or confirmation bias. AE is describing something more like resonance. A tuning fork begins to vibrate, and across the room, another tuning fork pitched to the same frequency starts vibrating in response. You become intensely interested in something—really interested, not casually curious—and people, books, and opportunities related to that thing start appearing. Your own comes to you.
But here’s the part that matters for our purposes: it’s not selective. The magnetism doesn’t only attract what you want. It attracts what you are.
If you’re carrying resentment, you attract situations that give you more to resent. If you’re broadcasting victimhood, you attract people and circumstances that victimise you. If you’re emanating scarcity consciousness, the belief that there’s not enough, that you have to hoard and protect, you create conditions of scarcity around you.
This isn’t punishment. It’s not the universe being mean. It’s just how the iron filings arrange themselves around your particular magnetic field.
AE understood this. He wrote: “I feel I belong to a spiritual clan whose members are scattered all over the world and these are my kinsmen.” He was choosing his clan by choosing what he gave his energy to, what he let himself become magnetised by. And in doing so, he was also choosing what would be drawn to him.
Moss extends this into an even more provocative territory: “What we feed our minds and our bodies attracts or repels different parts of ourselves as well as different people and different classes of spirits.”
Different classes of spirits. He’s not being coy or metaphorical. He means actual intelligences, entities, powers, whatever you want to call them. The things you give your attention to, the emotions you cultivate, the thoughts you rehearse, all of this feeds something. And what you feed grows stronger and draws closer.
Feed anxiety, and you attract anxious thoughts, anxious people, and anxiety-producing situations. Feed curiosity, and you attract mystery, discovery, and fellow seekers. Feed gratitude, and you start noticing—or generating—more things to be grateful for. Feed cynicism, and watch how the world becomes cynical around you, confirming your suspicion that everything’s corrupt, nothing matters, and hope is for suckers.
You become a strange attractor in the mathematical sense, a pattern that draws certain elements into its orbit while repelling others. The shape of your attractor field determines what kind of reality coalesces around you.
This is why Moss insists that kairomancers must “take care of their poetic health.” You have to be conscious about what you’re feeding, what you’re becoming magnetised by, what frequency you’re vibrating at. Because you’re not just observing the world from a neutral vantage point. You’re constantly broadcasting, and the broadcast has effects.
The good news: this means you have tremendous power. If you can shift your magnetic field—change what you’re carrying, adjust your polarity—you change what comes to you.
The bad news: this means you have tremendous responsibility. You can’t blame circumstances anymore. Or rather, you can, but you’re lying. Because the circumstances are, at least in part, a function of what you’ve been attracting.
Emerson again: “We have keys to all doors…The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck.”
But first you have to check: What kind of magnet are you right now? What are you pulling toward you? What are you pushing away?
And the only way to know is to pay attention to what keeps showing up.
Your own is coming to you. The question is: what have you claimed as your own?
The Body Knows First
Here’s where the whole thing gets practical and more difficult.
Because you can understand the theory—unus mundus, energetic magnetism, strange attractors—and still be completely unconscious about what you’re actually broadcasting moment to moment. The gap between intellectual understanding and embodied awareness is vast. Most of us live in that gap.
You think you’re feeling confident, but your shoulders are up around your ears. You think you’re open to possibilities, but your jaw is clenched and your breath is shallow. You think you’re calm, but there’s a low-grade buzz of anxiety running through your nervous system like electrical interference. And it’s that—the thing your body is doing, not the thing your mind is thinking—that’s out there ahead of you, arranging reality.
Moss is blunt about this: “It is not sufficient to do this on a head level. We want to check what we are carrying in our body and our energy field.”
This is why affirmations often don’t work. You can stand in front of a mirror saying “I am confident and successful” while your body is screaming “I’m terrified and about to fail.” The universe doesn’t hear your words. It responds to the electromagnetic signature of what you’re actually carrying. And your body doesn’t lie.
Athletes know this. Method actors know this. Anyone who works with presence knows this. Your cognitive layer is the thinnest, least reliable part of you. Underneath it are older, wiser systems—the gut, the nervous system, the cellular memory, and the part of you that knows before you know you know.
This is what Moss means by developing “your personal science of shivers.” You need to learn to read your own body the way a sailor reads weather, to trust the data coming through your skin, your gut, your inexplicable hunches and free-floating impressions. These aren’t less reliable than thought—they’re often more reliable, because they’re registering things your conscious mind hasn’t caught up to yet.
Pay attention to what happens in your body when you think about a decision you need to make. Not what you think about it, but how it feels. Does your chest open or contract? Does your breathing get easier or more restricted? Do you feel energised or depleted? Your body is telling you something about the energetic field around that choice, and that field is already shaping what will happen if you move in that direction.
The kairomancer’s practice begins with a simple question: What am I carrying right now?
Not “what am I thinking about” or “what’s my opinion on this situation.” What am I carrying? What’s the actual texture of my presence in this moment? If someone walked into the room right now, what would they feel coming off me?
And the deeper question: What am I projecting?
Because whatever you’re carrying is already out there, preceding you, creating the field you’re about to walk into. This is Moss’s radical claim: “Before you walk into a room or turn a corner, your attitude is there already. It is engaged in creating the situation you are about to encounter.”
Your attitude isn’t just your private internal weather. It’s a broadcast. A signal. A force that’s already at work in the space before your body arrives.
This is why preparation isn’t just mental. The actor doesn’t just memorise lines; they do physical warm-ups, breathing exercises, and rituals that bring them into the right state. The athlete doesn’t just review strategy, they have routines that calibrate their nervous system and get their body into the zone. The shaman doesn’t just decide to journey, they drum, they dance, they fast, and they do whatever it takes to shift their energetic state because they know the state determines what they can access.
You can’t think your way into a different magnetic field. You have to shift the field itself, and the field is embodied.
This is what the alchemists understood with all their elaborate preparations. The bath in spring water, the clean linen, the fasting—these weren’t superstitions. They were technologies for shifting state. The ritual wasn’t ornamental. It was essential, because you can’t do the Great Work from the wrong energetic frequency. The lead won’t transmute if the alchemist is carrying lead consciousness.
So: how do you shift it?
First, you notice it. You develop sensitivity to your own field. This takes practice. Most of us are so identified with our thoughts that we can’t feel the substrate they’re arising from. But if you pause, really pause, several times a day, and check in with your body, you start to develop literacy. You start to recognise the difference between authentic confidence and fake-it-til-you-make-it bravado. Between genuine curiosity and anxious control disguised as interest. Between openness and collapse, between strength and rigidity.
Then, once you notice, you have a choice. Not an easy choice, but a real one.
You can work with the attitude directly. If you notice you’re carrying dread about a meeting, you can ask: What would I need to feel or remember or release to shift this? Sometimes it’s as simple as breathing differently—deeper, slower, into your belly instead of your chest. Sometimes it’s moving your body, shaking out the tension, going for a walk, or changing your physical state. Sometimes it’s calling a friend who reminds you of your capability, or remembering a time you handled something difficult well, or simply acknowledging the fear instead of pretending it’s not there.
The acknowledgement itself sometimes shifts it. Fear that’s denied goes underground and broadcasts from there, distorting everything. Fear that’s seen clearly often transforms—not into false confidence, but into alert readiness, which is something entirely different and far more useful.
Moss emphasises this: “High emotions, high passions generate results. When raw energy is loose, it has effects in the world.”
This cuts both ways. Intense fear has effects. Intense anger has effects. But if you can feel the energy underneath the emotion—the sheer aliveness of it—and consciously direct it, you can work wonders. The same force that, unconscious, generates chaos can, when harnessed, generate breakthroughs.
This is practical magic, but it’s not easy magic. It requires you to become exquisitely sensitive to your own states and brutally honest about what you’re actually carrying versus what you wish you were carrying. It requires you to do the unsexy work of checking in, noticing, adjusting, and checking in again.
The payoff is this: you stop being at the mercy of unconscious patterns. You stop walking into situations blind, broadcasting distress signals and then wondering why everything goes sideways. You start to become conscious of the magnet you are, and conscious magnets can choose their polarity.
Not all the time. Not perfectly. The Trickster will always have something to say about your best-laid plans, and sometimes life will knock you sideways no matter what attitude you’re carrying.
But more often than you’d think, more often than chance would allow, you’ll notice: when you shift what you’re carrying, the situation shifts. When you change your field, reality rearranges itself around the new field.
The universe says yes to what you are, not what you’re pretending to be.
So the practice is simple, even if it’s not easy: Become what you want the universe to say yes to.
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
- “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. The image is precise: we’re not magnets in empty space (where we’d attract nothing), but magnets in an iron globe—a responsive medium that reorganizes itself around our magnetic fields. He also warned of the inverse: “A low, hopeless spirit puts out the eyes; skepticism is slow suicide. A philosophy which sees only the worst…dispirits us; the sky shuts down before us.” The magnetism works both ways—toward possibility or toward closure. ↩︎
- “Your own will come to you” — This phrase and “the law of spiritual gravitation” come from George Russell (1867-1935), known by his pen name AE, an Irish writer, poet, painter, and mystic who was a central figure in the Irish Literary Revival alongside W.B. Yeats. Russell described this principle in his book The Candle of Vision (1918), where he wrote: “I found that every intense imagination, every new adventure of the intellect [is] endowed with magnetic power to attract to it its own kin. Will and desire were as the enchanter’s wand of fable, and they drew to themselves their own affinities….One person after another emerged out of the mass, betraying their close affinity to my moods as they were engendered.” Russell wasn’t theorizing—he was reporting direct observation from his own life. When he became intensely interested in mythology, people with knowledge of mythology appeared. When he explored mysticism, he encountered mystics. He experienced this as a law as reliable as physical gravitation: what you give sustained, passionate attention to will draw its corresponding elements toward you. He concluded: “I feel I belong to a spiritual clan whose members are scattered all over the world and these are my kinsmen.” ↩︎
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