Developing a powerful hypnotic gaze — a gaze that can bring a person into trance, or fascinate them — is a matter of simple training, and anyone can develop it easily when guided. The gaze is the oldest instrument of hypnosis, the least explained, the one missing from the manuals. Long before scripts and inductions, the old hypnotists and magnetisers simply worked eye to eye, in silence, and they hypnotised quickly and deeply. That once-secret branch of the tradition has a name — fascination — and it is the living centre of the Mesmerismus® of Prof. Dr. Marco Paret. Its mysteries were never published: they passed from master to student, through the eyes.
Have you ever talked with someone who was looking you straight in the eyes? Then you have felt the subtle power of the eye — two people in love know it well. Everyone has felt a version of it. A person looks at you and something intimate shifts — the room narrows, your inner commentary stops for a moment, you find you have already agreed. We are taught to call this charisma, and to leave it there, as if it were a gift some people have. Animals feel the gaze too, and any animal trainer will tell you that animals are controlled through the eyes — and animals cannot be talked into anything. It is a set of skills, and they can be learned.
What is the hypnotic gaze?
A simple definition: the hypnotic gaze is a way of looking that changes the state of the person receiving it. There are two gazes. The purely hypnotic gaze blocks: it paralyses and stops the other person in an instant, like the gaze of the snake that freezes the little bird. The magnetic gaze — some call it hypno-magnetic — fascinates and attracts: it is steady, soft and wide, and in it the operator holds his own state and lets the other person settle into it. Nothing is asked. Nothing is said. The change is visible from the outside — the face relaxes, the breathing slows and drops, the blinking becomes rarer — and it is felt from the inside as a pleasant emptiness, an unusual quiet, and a persistent interest in the person who is looking at you this way. It is closer to the look that fascinates and draws you in.
How is it learned? It is like tuning an instrument next to another one that is already in tune: no one instructs the second string, and it finds the note anyway.
In our School this is a discipline with degrees, not a knack. The operator learns to produce a precise state in himself first — here lies a great secret, a part almost everybody skips because they do not know it — and only then to direct it. The gaze carries what you actually have. That is why the training works on the person before it works on the technique.
Where does the tradition come from?
For the Egyptians the eye was central. The tradition of Medusa is a tradition of fascination in which the subject is held motionless. Franz Anton Mesmer, in eighteenth-century Vienna and Paris, worked with passes, with the magnetic touch, with human energy and above all with a fixed and steady look that his patients described as the strongest part of the treatment.
In the nineteenth century the method was named. Donato — Alfred-Edouard D’Hont, born near Liège in 1845 — worked on healthy volunteers, in an instant, in public demonstrations that divided the physicians of Turin in April 1886, and he called what he did fascination[1]. From Donato the line runs in Italy through Erminio Di Pisa and Master Virgilio Torrizzano, who initiated Prof. Dr. Paret into hypnotic fascination. Our School is the current link in that chain. The full history is on the page devoted to the history of mesmerism, and the esoteric side of this teaching is described in the secret power of the hypnotic gaze.
James Braid, who renamed the whole field hypnotism in the 1840s, began his method with a fixed gaze on a bright object held slightly above eye level[2].
Why does the gaze work when words do not?
Why do the eyes reach a level that language does not address? The first thing a newborn does is look for its mother and turn towards her eyes. Research on eye contact converges on this: a direct gaze is processed by dedicated mechanisms and changes attention, arousal and self-awareness within a fraction of a second[3]. Live eye-to-eye contact between two people is accompanied by measurable coordination between their nervous systems — synchronisation across frontal, temporal and parietal areas that does not appear when the same faces are watched on a recording[4].
There is the neurological level, best described today by polyvagal theory: the face, the eyes and the voice belong to a system that signals safety or threat below any conscious decision, and the state of one person regulates the state of the other. And there is the energetic level, which the tradition has always described in terms of what is felt — warmth, tingling, pressure, presence — and which the fluidist current, the line of researchers who hold that a real energy passes between people, has never stopped investigating. The two accounts are not rivals. Anyone who has practised knows they arrive together.
The hypnotic side of this is now visible in the laboratory: high-density EEG shows induction unfolding as a progressive reorganisation of attention networks, with parieto-occipital alpha giving way and theta rising[5]. What the old masters produced with a look, instruments are finally able to watch.
What is trataka, and what does it train?
Trataka is the fixed gaze of the yogic tradition — steady attention on a single point, classically a flame or one’s own reflection. It is also an ancient Western tradition, thousands of years old, and not an oriental import. Prof. Dr. Paret uses the mirror version in training, and it is the exercise we give first, because it trains the operator rather than the subject.
What it develops is not a “power in the eyes”. It is the capacity to hold presence while remaining relaxed: to keep the eyes open without effort, to let the inner commentary fall silent, to stay present without pushing. It is like learning to hold a full glass steady — the skill is not in the arm, it is in stopping the small unnecessary movements.
The change is in you, and the other person meets it. That is the whole logic of non-verbal work.
How do you begin tonight?
Stand in front of a mirror and look at yourself between the eyes, without blinking. Notice the changes in your own sensations. That is the entire instruction, and it is enough to start: the exercise every practitioner of this lineage has passed through.
Do not force the eyes and do not turn it into a competition with yourself. What you are looking for is not an ability to outlast your blink — it is the moment when the effort drops away and the looking becomes easy. Then watch the practical demonstrations on our YouTube channel, where this work is shown rather than described.
What can be learned from a page, and what cannot?
The history, the principles and the exercises are on this page. The transmission is not, and no honest school will tell you otherwise. The state passes from the person who has it to the person who does not, through the eyes, in the room — that is, through a precise teaching. The gaze does not travel in books.
This is the reason our teaching is done live, and the reason a few days of guided practice do what months of solitary reading cannot. What you receive is not information: it is the state itself, and a correction of your own that nobody can give you at a distance. The complete path is in the Mesmerismus® training; the related practices are magnetic presence and the mental void.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the hypnotic gaze the same as staring?
No, and the difference decides everything. A stare is hard, narrow and effortful, and it produces resistance: the other person feels pushed. The hypnotic gaze is steady, soft and wide, and it produces settling. The eyes are similar; the state behind them is not.
Can anyone learn it, or do you need a gift?
Anyone can learn it. What is often mistaken for a gift is simply someone who already holds a stable state without knowing how they do it. The skill divides into parts that can be taught: your own state first, then the quality of attention, then direction.
How long does it take?
The first perceptible change comes in a minute of mirror practice, tonight. Working with another person reliably, in an instant and in ordinary conditions, is a matter of guided practice — which is why the training exists, and why it is done in the room.
Is it dangerous or manipulative?
The technique produces a state of receptive absorption. In our School it is taught as an art of self-knowledge, communication and presence, with the ethics of the tradition attached: what you can produce in someone else, you first learn to produce in yourself — and it is taught only to people who promise to use it for the good.
In the Mesmerismus® of Prof. Dr. Marco Paret this heritage is taught as an art of self-knowledge, communication, wellbeing and personal growth. It is not a medical treatment and makes no therapeutic claims.
Notes and References
[1] Alfred-Edouard D’Hont, known as Donato (Chênée, Liège, 1845 – Paris, 1900); his fascination demonstrations at the Teatro Scribe in Turin, April 1886, were widely debated in the press and among physicians.
[2] Braid, J. (1843). Neurypnology; or, The Rationale of Nervous Sleep, London — visual fixation as the method of induction.
[3] Senju, A. & Johnson, M. H. (2009). «The eye contact effect: mechanisms and development». Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(3), 127–134; Hietanen, J. K. (2018). «Affective eye contact: an integrative review». Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1587.
[4] Hirsch, J. et al. (2017). «Frontal, temporal and parietal systems synchronize within and across brains during live eye-to-eye contact». NeuroImage, 157, 314–330; Palumbo, R. V. et al. (2017). «Interpersonal autonomic physiology: a systematic review». Personality and Social Psychology Review, 21(2), 99–141.
[5] «Decoding hypnotic consciousness: neural and experiential insights into induced and ideomotor suggestions» (2026). Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2026(1), niag019; Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory, Norton — the social engagement system of face, eyes and voice.
If someone has ever held you with a look and you have wondered what exactly they were doing, the answer is not charisma and it is not a trick. It is a tradition, it has a name, and it is still being taught.
