The history of hypnosis that Western practitioners learn begins in the eighteenth century. Franz Anton Mesmer. James Braid. The Nancy School. Charcot. Freud. Milton Erickson. This is a lineage of approximately two hundred and fifty years, rooted in European medical culture, and it has produced the evidence base that makes clinical hypnotherapy credible today.
There is another lineage. Older, less documented in Western academic terms, and entirely capable of standing on its own clinical and philosophical merits. It is the tradition from which Dr. Maruti Sharma draws his Eastern training — and it changes the character of his clinical work in ways that the Western lineage alone cannot account for.
The Atharva Veda and Sammohan Vidya
The Atharva Veda — the fourth of the Vedic texts — is among the oldest documented collections of human knowledge, with scholarly dating placing its composition between 1200 and 1000 BCE. It contains an extensive body of healing practices, mantras, and psychological technologies that have no direct Western parallel.
Among these is Sammohan Vidya — literally, the knowledge of fascination or enchantment. The word Sammohan derives from the Sanskrit root moh — in Buddhist-Vedantic contexts, the term carries the precise sense of delusion or confusion: the suspension of ordinary, grasping cognitive engagement with reality. In clinical application, Sammohan refers to the deliberate induction of a state in which this ordinary cognitive grasping is suspended — and awareness becomes open to reorganisation.
This is, structurally, identical to what Western practitioners call hypnosis. The mechanisms described — focused attention, reduced critical faculty, heightened responsiveness to suggestion, the use of sound, rhythm, and specific verbal patterns to deepen the state — are functionally the same processes that Braid described neurologically in 1843 and that modern neuroscience has now mapped to default mode network activity and thalamic gating.
The Eastern and Western traditions did not arrive at the same place by coincidence. They arrived at the same place because they were mapping the same territory — the territory of the mind in altered states. The maps look different. The territory is identical.
The Tantric Traditions
The Tantric traditions — Anuttara Yoga Tantra, Trika Shaivism, Kaula Tantra, and the Natha Siddha lineage — developed sophisticated psychological technologies over many centuries. Their concern was not merely religious attainment but the transformation of consciousness — the systematic cultivation of states of awareness that ordinary life does not produce.
Within these traditions, the practitioner works with specific maps of the psyche — maps that distinguish between gross, subtle, and causal levels of mind, and identify the precise points of intervention that produce lasting change at each level. The gross mind responds to cognitive and behavioural approaches. The subtle mind responds to what the Western tradition calls hypnosis and the Eastern tradition calls trance states of various kinds. The causal mind — the level at which core identity structures are organised — responds to what both traditions, in their different vocabularies, call transformative experience.
The Mohana Karma within the Tantric Shatkarmani tradition is particularly relevant here. In this Tantric framework — distinct from the cleansing practices of Hatha Yoga that share a similar name — the Shatkarmani describes six specific ritual-psychological acts: drawing out, calming, immobilising, attracting, causing confusion, and the dissolution of ego structures. Mohana — enchantment or fascination — is the act of drawing awareness inward in such a way that it becomes receptive to reorganisation. Applied clinically, this is precisely what hypnotic induction accomplishes.
Classical Yoga and the Contemplative Sciences
Both classical Hatha and Raja Yoga address, in different registers, the same questions that clinical hypnotherapy addresses: what is the relationship between body and mind? How does attention function? What are the conditions under which habitual patterns can be interrupted and replaced? How does the breath regulate the nervous system?
The eight limbs of Raja Yoga — as documented by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras — describe a progressive technology of attentional training. Dharana (concentration), Dhyana (meditation), and Samadhi (absorption) are recognisably related to the stages of hypnotic induction: focused attention, deepening, and the fully absorbed hypnotic state. The continuity is not metaphorical. The Yoga Sutras are a clinical manual for working with altered states — one that predates Western hypnotherapy by nearly two millennia.
The Internal Arts — Tai Chi and Qi Gong
The inclusion of Tai Chi and Qi Gong in Dr. Sharma's Eastern lineage reflects an understanding that the body is not merely the substrate for psychological processes — it is an active participant in them. Both internal arts develop what the Chinese tradition calls song — a quality of relaxed readiness that is neither tension nor collapse — which is functionally identical to the somatic condition that maximises hypnotic responsiveness.
The attention training embedded in Tai Chi and Qi Gong practice — sustained, proprioceptive, non-grasping — develops exactly the quality of awareness that the MTP framework depends upon. A practitioner trained in these arts understands, in their body, what they are guiding clients toward.
Vajrayana Buddhist Psychology
Dr. Sharma's doctoral research focused on Vajrayana Buddhist Psychology — the psychological dimensions of the Vajrayana or tantric Buddhist tradition, as distinct from its religious and ritual dimensions. In Dr. Sharma's doctoral assessment, this tradition has developed, over fifteen centuries, the most detailed phenomenological map of mind, experience, and transformation available in any human culture — a claim that the breadth of the Abhidharma literature, the Mahamudra texts, and the Dzogchen tradition of direct recognition makes difficult to seriously contest.
The Vajrayana understanding of mind is not dualist. There is no hard separation between the observer and the observed, the therapist and the client, the normal and the pathological. Suffering arises from a specific misapprehension — the grasping at a fixed, separate self — and the therapeutic project is the progressive relaxation of that grasping. This is not merely a philosophical position. It has direct clinical implications for how one structures a therapeutic relationship, what one is working with in trance, and what "change" actually means.
Why the Eastern Lineage Matters Clinically
The Eastern lineage is not decorative. It is not a way of distinguishing Dr. Sharma's practice by adding exotic elements to a fundamentally Western framework. It is a genuine clinical resource — a body of knowledge about mind, attention, altered states, and transformation that the Western tradition is only beginning to recognise.
The practical implications are significant. A practitioner trained in both lineages has access to a wider range of induction techniques, a more nuanced understanding of the depth dimensions of trance, a more sophisticated phenomenology of what clients are experiencing, and a broader set of interventions for the resistant or complex presentation.
More fundamentally, the Eastern lineage provides a philosophical framework within which the Western evidence base makes complete sense — not as a technology applied to a passive patient, but as a collaborative exploration of the mind's own capacity for transformation.
This is what the dual-lineage training produces. Not a practitioner who knows twice as many techniques, but a practitioner who understands, at a deeper level, what they are actually doing — and why it works.