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 Dark Side
We need to talk about what happens when you get this wrong. Or worse, when you get it right in the wrong direction.
Because the magnetism doesn’t discriminate. The universe doesn’t say yes only to your noble aspirations and healthy desires. It says yes to everything. Your fears. Your resentments. Your victim stories. Your conviction that you’re fundamentally unloveable or incompetent or doomed. All of it gets the same response: Yes. More of that. Coming right up.
Emerson’s phrase haunts me: “A low, hopeless spirit puts out the eyes.”1
Not metaphorically. Actually. The hopeless spirit doesn’t just fail to see opportunities; it actively extinguishes them before they can fully form. It’s not that good things are happening and you’re too depressed to notice. It’s that your depression is a force in the field, repelling the very things that might help you and attracting circumstances that confirm your hopelessness.
“Scepticism is slow suicide,” Emerson continues. Not because scepticism hurts your feelings, but because it’s a corrosive force that eats away at possibility itself. The sceptical attitude—the one that expects betrayal, anticipates disappointment, and sees the con in every offer of help—creates a field so defended that nothing good can penetrate it. And worse, it attracts the very things it’s defending against. The sceptic doesn’t just fail to find trustworthy people; they attract untrustworthy ones, because that’s what their field is magnetised for.
“A philosophy which sees only the worst…dispirits us; the sky shuts down before us.”
The sky shuts down. Not your perception of the sky, but the actual sky. The field of possibility contracts around you. The doors that might have opened stay closed. The person who might have offered help walks past. The opportunity that was forming dissolves before it reaches you. And you never even know what didn’t happen, what got repelled before it could enter your awareness.
This is the nightmare side of “whatever you think or feel, the universe says yes.”
If you’re carrying a story that you’re cursed, that nothing ever works out for you, that you’re fundamentally broken or undeserving, the universe says yes. And then it proves you right. Not because it’s mean, not because you’re actually cursed, but because your magnetic field is set to that frequency, and reality crystallises around it.
The cruellest part is how self-reinforcing it becomes. You expect rejection, so you broadcast defensive energy, so people respond coolly, so you feel rejected, so your expectation is confirmed, so you carry more defensive energy into the next encounter. The loop tightens. The field strengthens. The prophecy fulfils itself with increasing reliability until it feels like an absolute truth about the world rather than a pattern you’re generating.
I once knew someone—I’ll call her Rachel—who was convinced that people always abandoned her eventually. She had evidence: a childhood full of broken promises, relationships that ended badly, and friends who drifted away. “I’m just unlucky with people,” she’d say. But if you watched her in action, you could see the mechanism at work.
She’d meet someone new, connect quickly, and get excited. But underneath the excitement was terror. She was already bracing for the inevitable abandonment. So she’d test them, small tests at first, then bigger ones. She’d cancel plans last minute to see if they’d get angry. She’d pick fights to see if they’d leave. She’d withdraw suddenly to see if they’d chase her. And when they finally, exhausted, stopped trying, when they did, in fact, abandon her, she’d have her proof. See? Everyone leaves eventually.
She wasn’t wrong about what happened. She was just blind to her role in making it happen. Her abandonment wound was so deep that it had become an attractor field, pulling in situations that matched its frequency. The universe was saying yes to her deepest fear, over and over, with perfect fidelity.
This is what Moss means when he says we’re “constantly setting ourselves up for what the world is going to give you.” Not as blame, this isn’t about fault, but as a mechanism. The setup happens whether you’re conscious of it or not. The only question is whether you’re running the setup consciously or letting it run you.
The danger increases with the strength of the emotion. Remember: “High emotions and high passions generate results. When raw energy is loose, it has effects in the world.” This applies to rage, despair, chronic anxiety, and shame. These aren’t just unpleasant internal states. They’re forces. And strong forces have strong effects.
Jung understood this. He wrote about people who seemed to generate a field of misfortune around them, who had accidents and illnesses and disasters cluster in their wake. Not because they were cursed by external forces, but because their unconscious was erupting into the world, manifesting as apparently external events. The split-off parts of the psyche that couldn’t be acknowledged internally would appear externally, as accidents, as “bad luck,” as situations that perfectly mirrored the inner chaos.
This is the shadow side of living in unus mundus. If mind and matter are one reality, then your unintegrated shadow doesn’t stay safely tucked away in your psyche. It leaks out. It manifests. It creates situations that force you to deal with what you’ve been avoiding.
The person who can’t acknowledge their own rage somehow keeps encountering enraging situations. The person who won’t face their own neediness attracts needy people who drain them. The person who denies their own power keeps finding themselves in situations where they’re powerless. The outer world becomes a mirror, but a mirror with consequences, with weight, with the full force of material reality behind it.
And here’s where this framework can become dangerous if misunderstood: it can sound like you’re blaming people for their suffering. Like the person with cancer attracted it with negative thinking. Like the victim of violence was broadcasting victim energy. Like poverty is just a failure of abundance consciousness.
This is where we have to be careful. Structural realities exist. Power differentials are real. Some suffering is not a manifestation of inner state but of living in a world with injustice, violence, and random catastrophe. Not everything that happens to you is something you attracted.
But, and this is the crucial but, even when terrible things happen that are not your fault, that you didn’t create, that you couldn’t have prevented, you still have the power to choose what attitude you carry in response. And that attitude will shape what comes next.
Viktor Frankl, writing from Auschwitz, from conditions of absolute horror that he did not choose and could not control, still insisted: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”2
He wasn’t saying the concentration camp was a manifestation of Jewish consciousness. He was saying that even there, in extremis, attitude was the one power that couldn’t be stripped away. And that power, exercised consciously, could mean the difference between becoming what the camp wanted to make you and maintaining something essential and human.
This is the thread we have to hold. Yes, we’re magnets. Yes, we attract according to what we carry. Yes, the universe says yes to our inner states. And also: shit happens. Life is unfair. People suffer through no fault of their own. Both things are true.
The question isn’t “Did I attract this terrible thing?” The question is “Now that this is happening, what am I going to carry? What field am I going to generate from here? What am I giving my magnetic force to?”
Because if you respond to genuine misfortune by collapsing into victimhood—not honest grief or appropriate anger, but the chronic state of victimhood that becomes an identity—you will attract more situations that cast you in that role. The universe doesn’t judge whether your victimhood is justified. It just says yes.
And if you respond by hardening into bitterness, by deciding the world is fundamentally hostile and you have to be defended at all times, you will attract a hostile world. Not because you deserved the original wound, but because your defensive field repels help and attracts threat.
The alternative isn’t toxic positivity or spiritual bypassing, pretending everything’s fine when it’s not, slapping affirmations over genuine pain. The alternative is what Moss calls radical responsibility: recognising that regardless of how you got here, you have power now to choose what you’re going to carry forward.
Moss again: “Kairomancers know that whatever our circumstances, we always have the power to choose our attitude, and that this can change everything.”
Not change everything instantly. Not erase the consequences of what’s already happened. But change the field. Shift the magnetism. Interrupt the self-reinforcing loop between low spirits and confirming circumstances.
The sky can open again. But first you have to stop putting out the eyes.
First you have to recognise that scepticism—the defensive, bitter, “I knew it” variety—is not wisdom. It’s slow suicide. And the universe will help you die that way if that’s what you’re committed to.
Or you can commit to something else. You can notice what you’re carrying. You can ask if it’s serving you. And if it’s not, if the low spirits are generating low outcomes, if the defensive field is repelling what you actually need, you can choose differently.
Not easily. But really.
The magnetism will respond. It always does.
The only question is: toward what are you choosing to be magnetic?
The One Thing We Can Always Control
There’s a story about the Stoic philosopher Epictetus that gets repeated so often it’s become almost cliché, but it bears repeating because it’s the hinge everything turns on.
Epictetus was born a slave. He had no control over his circumstances, his body (which was permanently disabled, possibly from torture), his freedom, or his daily conditions. Everything external was in someone else’s hands. And yet he became one of the most influential philosophers of human freedom.
His central insight: there are things you can control and things you cannot. And the only thing fully within your control, always, in every circumstance, no matter how dire, is your prohairesis, your moral purpose, your attitude toward what happens.
Not the events themselves. Not other people’s actions. Not outcomes. Just this: how you meet what comes. What you make of it. What you choose to carry in response to it.
This is not a consolation prize. This is the game.
Because if Moss and Emerson and Jung and Pauli are right—if consciousness and matter are woven together, if we’re magnets in an iron globe, if the universe says yes to what we carry—then this one thing we can control is actually the most powerful lever in the system.
You can’t control whether you get the job, but you can control whether you walk into the interview carrying desperation or capability. You can’t control whether a relationship works out, but you can control whether you approach it from neediness or wholeness. You can’t control whether your project succeeds, but you can control whether you’re working from fear of failure or love of the work itself.
And those different attitudes—desperation versus capability, neediness versus wholeness, fear versus love—set up entirely different magnetic fields. They attract different responses, different opportunities, and different outcomes.
This is why Moss insists: “Kairomancers know that whatever our circumstances, we always have the power to choose our attitude, and that this can change everything.”
Not change the circumstances themselves, necessarily. Change everything—the field around the circumstances, what becomes possible within them, what they magnetise, and what they become.
The practical question becomes: How do I exercise this power? How do I actually choose my attitude rather than being chosen by it?
Because most of the time, attitude doesn’t feel like a choice. It feels like a response, automatic and inevitable. Something happens, and you feel how you feel. Someone criticises you, and anger or shame arises unbidden. You face a challenge, and anxiety floods your system before you’ve consciously decided anything. The attitude seems to choose itself.
But there’s a gap, sometimes just a split second, between stimulus and response. And in that gap lives your power.
The practice of kairomancy is, in large part, the practice of finding that space and widening it. Learning to catch yourself before the attitude solidifies. Noticing the moment when the anger is just beginning to form, when the anxiety is first starting to spiral, when the defensive posture is starting to harden. And in that moment, asking: What do I actually want to carry here?
Not what feels most righteous or most justified. Not what your wounded ego is demanding. What do you want to carry? What do you want to be magnetic for?
Sometimes the answer is: I want to carry my anger. This situation deserves rage, and I’m going to let myself feel it fully, use its energy, and let it inform my action. Fine. That’s choosing the attitude consciously rather than being hijacked by it. Conscious anger is very different from unconscious rage. One is a tool; the other is a wildfire.
Sometimes the answer is: I want to carry curiosity instead of defensiveness. Or grief instead of bitterness. Or determination instead of defeat. Or acceptance instead of resistance.
And here’s the thing: you don’t just think your way into the new attitude. You have to embody it. You have to find it in your body first, let it become a felt sense, a texture of presence. Remember, the universe responds to what you’re carrying, not what you’re thinking about carrying.
So if you want to shift from anxiety to calm, you might need to literally slow your breathing, drop your shoulders, and soften your belly. Feel what calm feels like as a physical state, even before the circumstances that triggered the anxiety have changed. The body leads; the mind follows. Change the body, and you change the field.
If you want to shift from scarcity to abundance consciousness, you might need to practise generosity—give something away, share something, act from overflow even when you don’t feel it. The action trains the attitude. Do the thing that an abundant person would do, and the abundance consciousness starts to follow.
If you want to shift from victimhood to agency, you might need to take one small action, any action that demonstrates to yourself that you have power here. Not power over everything, but power over something. The smallest exercise of agency begins to shift the field from passive to active.
The Stoics had practices for this. They’d do voluntary discomfort—sleep on the floor, fast, go without comforts—not as punishment but as training. They were practising choosing their attitude in uncomfortable circumstances when the stakes were low, so they’d have that capacity available when the stakes were high. They were strengthening the muscle of prohairesis, the ability to decide what they would carry regardless of conditions.
Modern athletes do versions of this. They train in uncomfortable conditions, push past the point where the body wants to quit, and practise maintaining focus under pressure. They’re not just building physical capacity; they’re building the capacity to choose their state consciously rather than being at the mercy of circumstances.
Artists do it too. They show up to the blank page or canvas even when they don’t feel inspired, because they’re training the capacity to work from discipline rather than waiting for mood. They’re learning that attitude isn’t something that happens to them; it’s something they can cultivate, invoke, and embody through practice.
This is the kairomancer’s discipline: recognising that while you can’t control what happens, you can always—always—control what you make of it, how you meet it, and what you carry in response.
And that choice, repeated consistently, becomes a pattern. The pattern becomes a field. And the field attracts or repels, opens or closes, according to its nature.
This is not the same as positive thinking or denial. You’re not pretending difficulty isn’t difficult or loss isn’t loss. You’re choosing what relationship you’re going to have with the difficulty, what story you’re going to tell about the loss, and what meaning you’re going to make from what happened.
Did you fail? You can carry that as evidence of your inadequacy (which will attract more situations that confirm inadequacy). Or you can carry it as data (which will attract situations where you can learn and improve). Same event, radically different fields.
Did someone betray you? You can carry that as proof that people can’t be trusted (which will attract untrustworthy people or push away trustworthy ones). Or you can carry it as information about that particular person while staying open to others (which keeps the field receptive to genuine connection).
Did you lose something precious? You can carry that as a wound that defines you (which will attract situations that pick at the wound). Or you can carry it as grief that deepens you (which will attract others who understand depth and loss).
These aren’t just different interpretations. They’re different magnetic fields. And they will generate different realities going forward.
Moss puts it simply: we need to do regular attitude checks, asking, “What attitude am I carrying? What am I projecting?”
Not once a week in therapy. Not when things fall apart. Regularly. Multiple times a day. Before you walk into a meeting. Before you have a difficult conversation. Before you start your work. When you notice things going sideways.
What am I carrying right now? Is this what I want to be magnetic for?
If the answer is no, you have a choice. Maybe not an easy choice. Maybe not a choice that immediately changes your feelings. But a real choice about what you’re going to feed, what you’re going to embody, and what field you’re going to generate.
This is the secret the ancient practitioners knew: you can’t always control the lead, but you can work on becoming the kind of person who transforms lead into gold. You can’t always control what enters your field, but you can always control what you do with it—how you metabolise it, what you make of it, and what you allow it to become.
The universe will say yes to whatever that is.
So the question that matters isn’t “What’s happening to me?” It’s “What am I choosing to carry about what’s happening to me?”
That question, asked honestly and answered consciously, changes everything.
Because it puts the power where it’s always been: in the one place you can actually exercise it.
Not out there in circumstances you can’t control.
Right here, in the attitude you can.
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
- “A low, hopeless spirit puts out the eyes” — This comes from Emerson’s essay “Resources” (1876), the same piece where he declared we are “magnets in an iron globe.” The full passage reads: “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.” Emerson wasn’t speaking metaphorically about depression clouding judgment—he was describing an actual mechanism. The hopeless spirit doesn’t just fail to notice opportunities; it actively extinguishes them before they can form. It creates a field so contracted that possibilities can’t enter. For Emerson, this was observable causation: your inner state literally shapes what becomes available in your outer world. The inverse was equally true: “We have keys to all doors….The world is all gates, all opportunities, strings of tension waiting to be struck”—but only if your spirit isn’t putting out the eyes that could see them. This wasn’t optimism or pessimism; it was Emerson’s version of physics, his understanding of how consciousness participates in creating reality. The “slow suicide” of skepticism happens not because negative thinking feels bad, but because it’s a corrosive force that eats away at the structure of possibility itself. ↩︎
- Viktor Frankl (1905-1997) was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor who founded logotherapy, a form of existential analysis focused on meaning-making. This quote comes from his seminal work Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), written about his experiences in Nazi concentration camps including Auschwitz. Frankl observed that in conditions of absolute horror—where prisoners had no control over their circumstances, their bodies, whether they would live or die—some people maintained an inner freedom that couldn’t be stripped away. They could still choose how they would meet their suffering, what meaning they would make of it, what attitude they would carry. This wasn’t abstract philosophy for Frankl; it was survival data. He noticed that prisoners who found meaning (caring for others, holding onto a future purpose, choosing dignity despite degradation) had better survival rates than those who gave up internally. The book has sold over 10 million copies and remains one of the most influential texts on human resilience. Importantly, Frankl wasn’t saying the camps were “meant to be” or that suffering has inherent meaning—he was saying that even in meaningless suffering, humans retain the power to choose their response, and that choice creates meaning where none existed before. ↩︎
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