Concepts
The Haze
Noun: A state of being; typified by a lack of feelings of agency, and a desire for numbing behaviors. It may feel like one is floating through life, and that it is difficult to focus your attention on anything.
I first became of aware of the Haze in the summer of 2025. In between jobs, living in a legal state, I spent tons of time stoned in nature, just observing and existing. I allowed myself to float to and fro, and to drift where the wind took me. It was liberating, but somehow dissatisfying. I was never nearly as relaxed as I thought I should be. Despite having no schedule, no immediate responsibilities, and a little spending money, I consistently felt strangely empty.
Instability and Uncertainty: The Unknown
Months of introspection, journaling, and therapy have helped me get to a place where I can better understand this Haze. Before I understood it, I assumed that the sensation of the Haze was the result of being stoned, naturally. That would certainly make sense.
Though, as I spent more time inside my head, observing and accepting, I realized that the Haze is actually a sort of pulling-in of the Self. An overwhelming desire to retreat from sensation, which encourages the use of substances (for example) that we associate with numbness, or being able to numb negativity.
Why would we ever want to retreat from sensation? Simply put, we do so out of fear. Humans, maybe as a result of being born into a physical world built by natural laws, love and crave certainty, stability, and continuity. We’ve spent eons trying over and over to make something more permanent, to impact more future lives, to, in many ways, achieve immortality.
And yet, in the world we find ourselves in, “permanence” is a myth, a lie, even. We constantly build our realities around us on the lie of permanence, and when something shakes that shoddily-made tower, it falls to the ground in an instant.
Instability and uncertainty are brought on by anything that forces us to come face to face with impermanence, regardless of the circumstance. For many of us, that could look like the death of a loved one. Suddenly learning of the death of a beloved parent, or cooing to your cat as the vet injects their final medicine will shake us, and will make us realize in a very visceral way that we’re actually missing some major pieces of the Reality Puzzle and, actually, that we may never find them.
We may also find ourselves feeling uncertain and unstable as our government is taken over by fascist pedophiles, threatening every institution we’ve relied on for our entire lives. We often don’t know what services will exist tomorrow, or when a group of masked and armed men will suddenly appear in our neighborhoods to disappear one of our neighbors.
It is certainly for these reasons and more that I am experiencing uncertainty and instability, and I am unable to create enough internal stability to keep myself going. It’s at that point that my senses become overwhelmed; every new stimuli feels like an attack on my very existence, and the aura draws in. Or, the sense organs turn their sensitivity way down. And it’s here that I find myself in the Haze, so afraid I’m no longer aware of it.
Accepting the Haze
It’s important to remember that as I speak about drugs and alcohol, food and sex, and anything else that we may use to numb ourselves, that I want to be explicit in saying I am not attributing any moral or ethical lens to these practices in this discussion. I do not believe that there is anything inherently wrong with any practice done to numb the Self. This is a self-soothing and self-protective behavior and, regardless of the outcome, the intention is one of continuing to exist.
That being said, I think we should examine why we are attempting to numb ourselves in the first place. There isn’t a universal answer here, I don’t think, aside from the basic fear of the unknown. How you will choose to engage with that fear depends on your goals and your situation, and all kinds of other things.
One option we have is to accept and even lean in to the Haze. This involves a kind of radical acceptance that is not usually accessible to most of us, and is not something I am consistently able to achieve (to be charitable of my skill as a magician). However, I have had brief, fleeting moments of clarity when it felt I did truly accept the Haze; when I was able to release my desire to experience numbness, and instead allowed myself to experience those big juicy feelings we’re always running from.
This has been easier, in my experience, with the very big, dramatic feelings. The recent death of a loved one brought me to such (continuing) grief, and through it, I have had multiple experiences of suddenly moving beyond the grief, or maybe experiencing grief get out of the driver’s seat of my mind. In that place is transcendent existence. There is a quiet oneness and knowing that overwhelm everything else, making it a holistically and truly neutral experience.
In this place, there is no fear of uncertainty or death. There just is.
Resolutions and Questions
Now, to be clear, my time in this place has been so, so short, and I’ve really struggled to figure out even what allows me to get there. I have, even now, precious few answers, and a growing suspicion that I won’t be able to comprehend the answers, if ever I find them.
This is an active exploration. I am beginning to suspect that the Haze may be an entry point to this place of oneness. When you notice the Haze settling in around you, try to find out what feelings you’re running from in the first place. If the Haze is showing up at all, you’ve probably got some intense big and gushies hiding right below the surface. When you’ve found them, just accept them. Allow them to exist without attempting to change or control them. Allow your senses to be overwhelmed. Cry, scream, emote if you feel it. Increasingly, it’s at that point that the cool clarity begins to seep in.
I’ve wondered lately if the Haze is actually a type of trance. Trance, after all, being a particular mental state, and, if the creation and adoption of such mental states is what magic actually is.
For my whole life, almost, I’ve understood a basic dichotomy in the world: magic and mundane. You could also think about it as supernatural and natural. Therefore, any attempt to alter my mental state via the occult has only been done under specific occult circumstances, essentially, in an occult time and place. This is done separately from and independently of the mundane. That dichotomy has weakened over the years, allowing for my therapy experience and my spiritual experience to begin to overlap.
All that is to say that the concept of trance may not be confined to the occult. You very well may have experienced trance many times. It may be just another mental state, another tool we have access to within us.
Conclusions
The Haze may be just one of limitless states of consciousness available to us at any given time. The occult, and spirituality in general, attempts to investigate these states by methods of definition and discrimination.
Occultists create their own language by assigning new, unique definitions to commonly used words. This isn’t done intentionally, and is not done in order to hide anything from anyone else. It is simply the only method available to the occultist to describe that which can not be understood from a material perspective.
Occultists discriminate in the same ways each and every one of us do: by using our sense organs to group all the stimuli around us in a way that we can understand. The stimuli is grouped by way of discrimination; we decide to identify things we interpret as similar enough, and/or different enough.
In this way, I think you can see that occultists are operating in exactly the same way as any other person. What I described above is simply the experience of being alive as a sentient being and interpreting the world around us. We are all using the magic of the occult every minute of our lives.
Actual Conclusion
The Haze is not a named state in a realm of named states of being. It’s simply the name I’ve given to something I observed in my life. Maybe you’ve identified something similar in your life, and maybe you haven’t. That’s neither here nor there.
The point here is that the same feelings we are unthinkingly pushing away from us are actually the gatekeepers of experience.
Realizing you are experiencing the world a particular way implies you have experienced it another way, a different way. Becoming aware of these different states of consciousness you constantly flow through gives you the tools to begin to thoughtfully design your consciousness, that is, to create your own reality.
Brother, Know Thy Self.