Welcome to a crisp new Creative Season, fresh off the Twin Flames press!
Our theme? As per the usual, we’ll be getting weird, exploring hidden connections between tarot and tesseracts, sympathetic magic and black holes, and more.
But first, we need to pay a visit to an unsuspecting book club…
When you saw the flyer at the local café—Cappucinos and Contemporary Fiction, First Thursday of the Month—you told yourself 2026 was the year you’d stop lurking online. You’d sign up for face-to-face conversations with actual humans.
So you buy the book, you dutifully complete the reading, and you show up, your copy bristling with sticky tabs.
You can’t miss them—they’ve pushed a few tables together—and while you wait for your chai latté, you take inventory from the corner of your eye.
Eight people. No one you know.
Although you recognize one of them, a literature professor from the local university. What was her name? You attended her talk at that indie bookstore. She’s articulate, funny, and seems supernaturally at ease in front of a crowd.
This is good—great, even! It’s exactly why you came. You’re hungry for rigorous discussion and reasons to change out of your sweatpants. You might even meet a new friend or two.
After brief intros, the conversation kicks off casually enough. Someone mentions the novel’s treatment of memory, and the professor—Lana—offers a quick aside about narrative temporality, referencing an author you haven’t read.
You take a sip of your latté, shifting in your chair, trying to release that subtle, familiar tightening. Your knees press; you try to relax. Maybe you should chime in. Are you being too quiet?
Tia quotes an entire passage from memory without even glancing at her copy.
“Classic example of unreliable focalization,” Brent adds, everyone nodding in unison.
Lana taps her chin. “It’s interesting how the narrative withholds interiority here. We’re close to the protagonist, but never quite inside her,” she says, before referencing a novel by W.G. Sebald you’ve only ever meant to read.
Sweat trickles down your ribcage. You need to contribute something meatier than your inane comment about how “the ending felt ambiguous.”
There’s a brief lull, and now, suddenly, you’re talking.
You reference a New Yorker interview with the author. You outline a structural parallel to Madame Bovary. You correct someone’s interpretation of the cracked teacup as a symbol of fragility, suggesting instead that it represents social constraint, heat crawling up your throat. Now that you’ve said it aloud, you’re not entirely sure that’s what they were arguing in the first place.
You can feel yourself droning on, but to peter off now, before you’ve made your point—that’s way worse. What’s your point, again?
On the walk to your car, the narrative is already calcifying. You sounded like a douchey blowhard. It was obvious you hadn’t really understood the author’s intent.
You replay Lana’s expression during your embarrassing little diatribe. Was that a flickering smile of pity? Contempt?
You remember nothing of the drive home, but as you’re brushing your teeth you pull out your phone and cancel your order for next month’s book club pick.
Woah—hold the phone. What just happened here?
No one excluded you, not really. No one challenged your intelligence or suggested you didn’t belong. And yet, somehow, that’s exactly how it felt.
A breezy, confident tone, one too many unfamiliar references, an ambiguous smile—these elements activated something with the power to transform a Thursday night book club into a much older drama.
Jung called these charged clusters of memory, emotion, and belief complexes.
A complex isn’t merely a thought like “I’m not smart enough.” It’s an organized network of associations gathered around a fundamental—and often unconscious—expectation of how the world works. Once activated, it reorganizes perception, spotlighting certain details and filtering out others. It supplies a ready-made narrative that eclipses competing facts.
From inside a complex, you might not notice the takeover—frequently we don’t. You could feel more alert, convinced that you’re seeing what’s really going on. But something fascinating is happening under the surface: your interpretive landscape is bending around a hyper-charged center.
Approaching the (psychic) event horizon
Physics provides us with a metaphor that’s uncanny in its parallels: a black hole. So let’s shrug into our lab coats and nerd out for a sec.
A black hole forms when a ginormous amount of mass collapses into a very small region of space. In Einstein’s model of gravity, mass doesn’t “pull” objects the way a magnet gathers iron shavings.
It bends the fabric of spacetime itself.
The more mass you compress into one place, the more extreme that bending becomes.
Imagine a hammock. If you place a bowling ball in the center, the fabric sags. The more weight you add to the hammock, the deeper the sag. If you set a marble on the hammock, you can probably guess where it’s heading, right? Straight into the sag.
At the start of this little experiment, a marble might escape if you gave it enough speed to roll down into the sag and up the other side. But once the dip becomes steep enough, no matter how hard you roll, every path slopes back toward the saggy center.
In a black hole, that point of no return is called the event horizon. Once something crosses it, there’s no way back. Every possible path leads inward.
And unfortunately, there isn’t a neon sign at the boundary, in case you change your mind. From close up, nothing appears to change, but structurally, the landscape has radically altered. The range of possible futures has narrowed to one.
Psychologically, a complex functions in a similar way.
When a core belief like “If I’m not exceptional, I’m disposable” becomes charged enough, experience curves around its psychic mass.
And when the complex is activated, a comment, a tone of voice, a glance—everything rolls downhill toward the same conclusion: “If I’m not exceptional, I’m disposable.”
From inside the complex, no other thoughts, feelings, or actions seem available. Your interpretive space has narrowed. And just as a black hole grows by gathering more mass, a complex grows by gathering more confirmation. Each time energy is added to that story, the curve deepens.
In Jung’s experience, we can’t eliminate complexes; they’re structural features of the psyche. So is it hopeless? Do we simply let all our marbles roll downhill?
What if the goal isn’t to eliminate psychic gravity—but to harness it? And what if doing so supercharged our magic?
That’s where we’ll pick up next week.
