Over the years, the Darkroom Practice technique has positioned itself as the most reliable method of learning sorcery among serious independent practitioners.
Darkroom Practice emerged from an "unfavorable phase" in the sorcery community, which took place in the following 20 years since the death of Carlos Castaneda.
That period was characterized by the lack of genuine testimonies of success, and the exponential growth of frauds and liars.
It is therefore important to consider that the nature of Darkroom Practice is not only "technical", but also “cultural”.
It is designed both to teach serious practitioners to move the assemblage point, and the damaged community to distinguish between real sorcery and fraud.
The very principle that real magic must be found visually allows the practitioners to locate their results in a map, and also raises the bar among the lazy crowd.
Having a regular practice in a dark room until a piece of magic is isolated makes the sorcerer achieve a feat worthy of Castaneda's books: defixing the assemblage point from its ordinary position, and making it shift vertically to a new one.
Allowing the practitioner to experience for himself an authentic manipulation of reality, generated from internal silence.
Wich also reveals the potential of human perception, by showing a hidden secret: the J Curve, an ideal path of the assemblage point to a worthy destiny, suggested by Carlos himself, now known as "the purple zone".
The validity of other methods remains recognized, although the lack of success in the community suggests that they should be treated with the same principles as Darkroom Practice.
For instance: daylight gazing, recapitulation, stalking or lucid dreaming are in fact known possible, but there are few cases of genuine success that meet the above conditions, which leads to them having a rather secondary position in the current sorcery community.
As a result of following specific instructions, the progress can be greatly accelerated compared to any other spiritual, meditative or religious system.
Providing instant understanding of the nature of sorcery, and the actions that lead to it.
So the first challenge for a beginner is to experience what prevents him from perceiving a genuine piece of magic; the uncomfortable task of identifying the "forces" that keep the assemblage point fixed in its ordinary position, and suspending their influence while the practice lasts.
25 Comments
The previous main Darkroom Practice index post, with resource links:
https://www.reddit.com/r/castaneda/comments/ifu1bv/darkroom_practice/
I'll steal it for Facebook, and make a picture too.
Of course Dan.
I find it hard to imagine that wizard performing magical passes with such a belly!
Don MIguel Ruiz does.
Is that his last name?
It's such a common one, I have a hard time remembering.
So is Sanchez.
Absolutely. What about Torres??
Also typical in Spanish-speaking countries.
Maybe they wanted to be close to the emergency door with those artistic names.
In case a small group decided to create something like Darkroom...
Can you please elaborate on this?
I was meaning that anyone interested in learning should consider implementing a regular practice, to learn what "inner silence" entails.
We get a lot of passionate people who never manage to put all that theory into practice. Many times due to laziness, lack of time or ulterior motives.
We know that as children, our assembly point is loose, until our mothers teach us to hold an internal dialogue. Which fixes our attention in the daily world.
At some point of our childhood, we become unable to stop that voice, and we convince ourselves that's the normal condition.
So a beginner has the challenge of realizing exactly why that voice just won't stop, even after hours of concentration.
It's related to tons of hidden habits, but also, to our own fixation to the known world.
The sorcerers notice that when the internal dialogue is gone, the world as we know it vanishes.
That's what sorcery is about. Exploring seemingly hidden possibilities of our perception at first.
ty <3
From what I understand there is no point at which you are done with practice. Dan even said that for every day you miss, you lose a week worth of progress. But, I have noticed that the more one does darkroom, the easier it tends to get to reach at least the green zone, and a glimpse of red zone.
I was curious to know if your practice still involves the same 3-4 hours of darkroom or has it evolved into a more persistent practice integrated with your day to day activities.
We have a destiny and the point is to get closer each day.
In fact, we know that the sorcery we want STARTS on the orange zone.
But that's a guide. It doesn't mean that the magic you find before isn't cool, or that it won't make you satisfied, "done", or amazed for days.
Just keep in mind, we are a very damaged community. And despite that advice is true, it also has the purpouse of putting some pressure on the lazy.
On the other hand, there are accounts in the books of Carlos stopping his dreaming practices for months, or Taisha forgetting everything for a year.
In our situation it's a bit different. We don't have a structure behind us who makes sure we end up learning.
But you can still do magic if you manage to stop your internal dialogue, even after some days of not practicing.
The thing is that when you make it to the orange zone, you begin to understand the importance of not missing a day. You actually see it.
Leaving aside exceptional gift days, I still need 2 hours to produce a considerable shift, and another hour to explore the magic and hold that position.
Sometimes time is limited, but just trust your common sense.
Feeling bad for not practicing is worse than the fact of not practicing. It's like not doing the work but also feeding self pitty.
Be responsible and honest with your progress.
Thanks for sharing your perspective.
I do have another question. What are you thoughts on multitasking in day to day life? For instance, doing chores while listening to an audio book or music. As common as this is, I couldn't help but think this is the opposite of practicing silence where you focus entirely on what it is that you are doing. Whether it is driving the car or washing dishes.
Am I overthinking? Are there any specific things you personally do or suggest to magnify your darkroom practice?
Sorcery might increase your skills to multitask, and doing things that require concentration for long periods of time.
But it's the opposite direction.
First get the magic, and then just do what you have to do with your daily life, enjoying the extra powers.
Thanks. I practice using the Manta mask. However, others here have suggested to use an actual dark room by using blackout curtains. I hope that both are fine as long as one is practicing for 3-4 hours.
Just stumbled on a passage from Florinda Donner‘s book Being-In- Dreaming:
“Esperanza was a brilliant raconteuse and a most gifted mimic: Her face changed with each turn of her explanation.
It was at times the face of a young woman, at other times an old woman's; or it was the face of a man, or that of an innocent and impish child.
She said that millennia ago, men and women were the possessors of a knowledge that allowed them to slip in and out of our normal world.
And thus they divided their lives into two areas: the day and the night.
During the day they conducted their activities like everyone else: They engaged in normal, expected, everyday behavior.
During the night, however, they became dreamers.
They systematically dreamed dreams that broke the boundaries of what we consider to be reality.
Again she paused, as though giving me time to let her words sink in.
"Using the darkness as a cloak," she went on, "they accomplished an inconceivable thing: They were able to dream while they were awake."
Anticipating the question I was about to voice, Esperanza explained that to be dreaming while they were awake meant that they could immerse themselves in a dream that gave them the energy necessary to perform feats that stagger the mind while they were perfectly conscious and awake.”
Could I have a list of best face/sleeping masks that work 100%? Added bonus if one can realy go to sleep with them comfortabily. I would like to use on ear headphones sometimes too. I woild like a sticky thread because it is not easy to hunt down and choose the best.
I believe u/TechnoMagical_Intent is more on topic, but in what magic concerns I'd say you are focused on the wrong thing.
The mask is an extra detail that could improve your success once you have some.
Not something you should obsses over with if you hope to do the real thing.
In fact, a long soccer socks covering your eyes or some old swimming goggles with tape could both do a great work if the sorcery is well performed.
Is there a solid end goal to all of this? Or is it more about the experiences and the journey?
Interesting practice.
But I want to point out one thing that bothered me. The way this text pushes Castaneda's core practices — stalking, recapitulation, lucid dreaming — into the background is misleading. It was precisely through these practices that I achieved the stopping of the internal dialogue and dreaming, and I can say they shouldn't be dismissed. If the community has "stalled," maybe the problem isn't the methods themselves, but the fact that people simply stopped practicing them properly.
The argument about "rare cases of genuine success" also seems flawed to me.
After seven years of recapitulation practice, I began having intense physical sensations — my body felt like it was being pushed apart from the inside. This intensified especially during Taisha Abelar's exercises, where you draw your legs in toward yourself, and later when you run a circle through the body via the womb. At some point it reached a state hard to put into words: it felt like my body was tearing apart specifically in the area of the will. This lasted for months, maybe a year.
Then something shifted — I felt the will as a real sensation low in the abdomen, and the world began to be perceived through that point.
All of this eventually led me to seeing — I now see energy lines, specifically when I choose to, consciously shifting the assembly point through an act of will.
One more thing I want to add: many people, without going through all these stages gradually, may get frightened by what starts happening to them in the "Dark Room" and give up entirely. It's no accident Castaneda's work says that if a person lacks sufficient energy/power, the nagual's blow isn't a blow of freedom but a blow of death. In other words, without enough inner strength (will), the encounter with true perception itself can be destructive rather than liberating. That's exactly why sequence matters: the will is first strengthened through recapitulation, stalking, and other practices, and only then is a person ready for what seeing might reveal.
So the low success rate within the community isn't a sign that the method is weak — it's more a sign that it demands consistent, multi-stage work that few people carry through to the end.
I don't disagree that recapitulation, stalking or lucid dreaming can work. My post explicitly acknowledges that.
My point is about the community as a whole, not individual cases.
Your experience may be genuine, but one successful case doesn't invalidate years of observing the community. The question isn't whether these methods can work, but how often they actually produce verifiable results among independent practitioners.
During the two decades after Castaneda's death (almost three!), many people claimed to practice these methods, yet very few demonstrated consistent, recognizable or even honest progress. That's precisely the context in which Darkroom Practice emerged.
So we're not dismissing the classical practices. We're simply saying that, based on long-term community observation rather than isolated anecdotes, Darkroom Practice has shown a significantly higher rate of observable success. That's the distinction my post is making.
That's a fair point about the difference between an individual case and observing the community as a whole — that's a real distinction. But I'd push back on how it's being applied here.
"Verifiability" and "observability" aren't neutral criteria — they're defined by whatever Darkroom Practice happens to make visible. Of course it shows a higher rate of "observable success" — it was built from the start around a criterion that's easy to observe. Recapitulation, stalking, and dreaming were never meant to produce a visual marker you can point to on a map — their "results" show up as shifts in behavior, emotional patterns, and dream recall over years, which is much harder to verify from the outside, but that's not the same as the results being absent.
So the comparison might not be measuring the same thing. A low rate of visibly confirmable progress in the classical methods doesn't necessarily mean a low rate of actual progress — it might just mean these methods don't produce the kind of evidence this particular system is built to recognize.
I'd also gently question the baseline itself: two decades isn't really evidence of anything, considering that Castaneda himself, by his own account, was still a beginner after four years of apprenticeship and still couldn't truly grasp what he was being taught. His entire path with don Juan stretched over roughly ten years. Twenty years of community "crisis" says something not just about the methods, but about how few people actually did the sustained, unglamorous years-long work (recapitulation especially) that's required before anything shows. Most people quit long before that point, regardless of method.
Speaking from my own experience, I can say it's hard to keep going alone — when you don't see results and have no certainty whether they'll ever come. That uncertainty itself is exactly where the strength lies; that's how the will gets tempered. And if you don't see results in others, maybe it's because not everyone is willing to spend their life pursuing a freedom that might not even exist. That's why only small groups ever set out on this path at all — the ones who could actually endure the hardships of the teaching.
I'm not saying your practice doesn't work. It's just not entirely clear where it actually leads a person, especially a newcomer to this. And in my view, it pushes into the background a teaching that's over eight thousand years old and through which people have achieved freedom. In my opinion, abandoning it in favor of a method that hasn't yet been proven over time isn't the wiser choice.
What this community is trying to do has never really been attempted before. For thousands of years, sorcery existed within lineages. Today we're dealing with independent practitioners, so the situation is different for everyone.
If you believe the traditional methods are just as effective, I invite you to show a community anywhere on the internet consistently producing the advanced results described in Castaneda's books—not better dream recall or subjective psychological changes, but seeing with open eyes, interacting with inorganic beings, visiting other worlds, or consciously moving the assemblage point.
Those are exactly the same standards Darkroom Practice uses. "Visible magic" isn't an arbitrary criterion; it's what the classical practices were always supposed to lead to.
If you're convinced your approach works better, then organize practitioners, document their success, and help save this knowledge instead of arguing against the only method that has produced consistent public results. Otherwise, you're just defending a theory without comparable evidence.
Before responding to the substance — I want to point out something underlying this demand.
You're asking for a community that consistently demonstrates seeing with the eyes open, interacting with inorganic beings, consciously shifting the assembly point. Fair enough — but can you demonstrate this yourself, after all these years of practice and, by your own account, real apprenticeship? If not, then it seems no one meets this standard, including the person who's setting it. Which raises the question: is this actually a working standard, or just a way to avoid accountability for the lack of results by shifting the burden of proof onto everyone else?
Honestly, there's something that sounds like hypocrisy in all of this. First, meditation and yoga are declared "false teachings," supposedly because they don't lead to real freedom — only Castaneda's path can do that. And then it turns out that Castaneda himself — or rather, his core practices: recapitulation, stalking, dreaming — are also pushed aside, in favor of your own method. So the standard of truth keeps shifting depending on whatever needs justifying at the moment, rather than being something consistent.
One more thing bothers me. This community is built around Carlos Castaneda's name, yet his own teaching gets pushed into the background in favor of your method. That means the name is being used, but the teaching itself isn't. If that weren't the case, there'd be no need to hold onto Castaneda's name at all — you could simply share your own method separately, and whoever was interested could try it, without needing to borrow someone else's authority.
I also don't fully agree with the claim about the thousand-year-old tradition built around lineage and transmission of knowledge from a nagual. A great deal can be achieved alone — and the books themselves are a form of transmitting that legacy, just not through the physical presence of a living teacher. Someone seriously practicing from the books isn't "alone" in the sense of having no transmission of knowledge at all — that transmission is simply happening differently, through the text rather than through physical proximity to a nagual.
It's remarkable how far you've drifted from the original discussion. Instead of addressing the point about methods and results, you've switched to criticizing the community, questioning motives, and making assumptions that could have been avoided with five minutes of research.
You clearly haven't taken the time to learn what this forum is about, who developed and promotes Darkroom Practice, or even my posting history. Had you done so, you'd know that its main advocate is a direct student of Carlos Castaneda from his private classes—a readily verifiable fact.
At this point, it honestly feels like you're arguing against an imaginary version of this community rather than the real one. If Darkroom bothers you that much but you aren't willing to understand it before criticizing it, then perhaps this simply isn't the place for you. There are plenty of other communities that align better with your views. I'm not interested in wasting time debating objections that disappear after a few minutes of basic research.
I want to name something directly, because I think it matters more than the methodology debate.
Encouraging people—especially newcomers, some of whom may be isolated, searching for meaning, or going through something difficult—to sit alone in the dark for extended periods, suppress inner dialogue, and interpret whatever hypnagogic or dissociative phenomena arise as contact with "inorganic beings" or a shift in reality, is not a neutral technical instruction. That combination (sensory deprivation, sustained isolation, suppression of ordinary reality-testing, framed as spiritual progress) is a known recipe for destabilizing people psychologically, not just producing "results."
Castaneda's own books describe this risk directly—the warning that an unprepared person meeting "the nagual's blow" gets destruction rather than freedom isn't a footnote, it's a central caution. A practice that markets itself as faster and more reliable than the classical foundation, while skipping the years of grounding work that foundation exists to provide, is structurally more likely to produce exactly that harm—not despite being popular, but because it's optimized for producing something dramatic and visible quickly.
One more thing: you've cited being a direct student as your credential, but that raises a fair question — if that apprenticeship gave you real access to what Castaneda describes, why hasn't that translated into demonstrating the same results you're asking others to prove? Lineage isn't a substitute for the evidence you're demanding from everyone else. If it is, that should be shown, not asserted.
I'm not saying this to accuse you of intending harm. I'm saying it because if this sub is genuinely about serious practice rather than recruitment, that risk deserves to be addressed head-on—what safeguards exist for someone who has a bad experience alone in a dark room, and how are those cases tracked, rather than only counting the successes.
The stated purpose of this subreddit is to aid in restoring the reputation of Carlos Castaneda and the knowledge he imparted, by pragmatically applying that knowledge IN PRACTICE. This means that we are sticking to what really works, as proven by direct experience by long-practicing members. We need to make clear our intent to move away, as a community, from the mistakes others have made. Content that is at-odds with this purpose will, upon review, be removed.