The Pull We Cannot See

Magnetic Fields and the Metaphysics of the Psyche

In physics, a magnetic field is invisible, yet it exerts a precise and undeniable force. It orders iron filings, guides compasses, and makes entire galaxies spin in alignment. But maybe we’ve been staring too hard at the scientific side of it, forgetting that metaphor often points the way when reason meets its limit.

Think of how we speak of love or longing: “drawn to you,” “pulled by desire,” “a magnetic connection.” We reach instinctively for language that echoes attraction. There’s a silent grammar to the way we’re moved by something unseen.

Now bring Neoplatonism into the frame. Plotinus described the soul as reaching upward toward the Good, the One, the source of all being. But this reaching isn’t effortful in the way we typically imagine struggle. It’s more like an inward current. A yearning. The soul doesn’t climb to the Good. It’s drawn to it.

This is where the metaphor gains weight. What if the soul’s relationship to the Good operates like a metaphysical field? The same way a magnet pulls filings into form, the Good draws fragmented souls toward unity. Not through coercion. Through presence.

We don’t see the field. We see the effect.

And here’s where it gets interesting. Magnetic fields don’t require contact. They act across space. So does intuition. So does longing. So does love. The psyche might be a kind of tuning fork, resonating when it enters the proximity of what matters most. We don’t “know” the Good in a clear-cut way, but the field of it arranges us.

Maybe the field is the soul’s epistemology.

A way of knowing without possessing.

Plotinus wouldn’t have had Maxwell’s equations, but he understood the strange intelligence of attraction. He spoke of how the soul remembers its origin, not through facts, but through a kind of sympathetic vibration. A metaphysical magnetism.

There’s something comforting about the idea that we are already within the field. That we don’t need to invent the Good, or chase it, or even define it precisely. We only need to notice the way we’re moved.

The pull is the proof.

So when you feel that strange draw to beauty, to truth, to something larger than your life, maybe that’s not confusion. Maybe that’s guidance. Maybe that’s the field doing what it does.

Realigning.

Gathering.

Calling you home.