The Minds and Credentials of Proclaimed Gurus – The James Ray Side of the Story
-Part 2-
When James Arthur Ray steamed three people to death, the central theme of his spiritual treat had been death and rebirth. He even crept quotes and ideas from Bushido and made 55 of his followers watch The Last Samurai in preparation to die metaphorically. He also played a game of death with them days before, where he dressed in a pure white Japanese rope and acted as God. He stalked the retreat and would declare people dead as he touched him with a finger, like a perverse game of tag. They would have to lay motionless on the ground, sometimes for hours.
James also encouraged them to shave their heads to rid themselves of vanity. He told them to meditate for 36 hours in the desert without food and water. He told them in no uncertain terms, “You are not going to die. You might think you are, but you are not going to die.” Then when they gathered his homemade windowless dome, which he called The Sweat Lodge, James told them all, “Today is a good day to die.” Then he ordered hot rocks to be added to the pit to bring the temperature up in the dome and he would continue adding them as people screamed in the steam, vomited, and lost consciousness. Three of his followers would die in a sweat lodge, 18 out of 55 would be hospitalized, and James himself would flee the compound before police could show up, and he would be across the Arizona border before they could arrest him.
In all his self-help teaching, James had always preached, “playing full-on.” His followers, mostly successful middle-aged business folk, came to him because he made their lives exciting. Again, they were educated, affluent, and established and paid James to give them extreme life-changing experiences. They wanted James to help them achieve enlightenment and asking him to remold their lives just like James’s father had done as a Tulsa preacher.
James Ray has emitted as a self-help guru that he lacked the qualification to run the sweat lodge - the sweat lodge that effectively cooked his followers, but after serving two years in prison for negligent homicide, he was ready to begin coaching again. He's ready to turn his followers’ deaths into a unique lesson for you, the consumer, and into more book royalties. And for just $15.95, you can purchase James's latest book, The Business of Redemption. One Amazon review by Brittany E. says, “Using the deaths of his followers to pedal more crap.”
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On last week's episode, we talked about the Spirit Warriors who paid for a meditation retreat in Sedona back in 2009 and were cooked to death in a steam lodge by their guru. Specifically, we asked some fundamental questions about being human – questions like how far would we go to achieve self-actualization and how does a reasonably educated person agree to be cooked? In today's episode, we are looking at the opposite side of the Spirit Warriors case. We want to know, under the exact same circumstances, could we convince ourselves to steam a tent full of people, people who are literally asking for extreme experiences. We will start that by addressing the following three myths:
Myth 1: James Arthur Ray was a Minister's son, and he grew up seeing the positive effects of spiritual guidance. Could rising Samurai worships, creating sweat lodges, and using appropriation of Native American myth actually be a step in the right direction spiritually?
Joe: In the last episode, we laid out a bit of a monster. We went through what James did with the steam lodge, and I almost feel after that - there's no turning around and looking at James Ray in a new light. So, how do we perceive James Ray in a way that isn't just "look at this monster."
Todd: I see what you're saying. This isn't like a few affairs or stealing a million bucks. Cooking people to death is on a different level.
Joe: It's going to be very hard for me to see a normalized person that you and I could have been after this.
Todd: Well, Arthur Ray is a lights-out public speaker, and his father was a Tulsa, Oklahoma preacher. He would sit in the front row and listen to his father's sermons. That was a big influence on him. When his young boy, one of the very famous quotes he heard from the Bible was, "It is easier to for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." He described how angry he was about how that biblical verse made him question his own family situation and God himself. Now, His parents didn't have any money; they lived on the same property as the church, as many pastors do. This is what he concluded: “Here's what I know; it is a sin to be poor," and that belief stayed with him.
Joe: We're not really humanizing with that quote.
Todd: What is even funnier is that the story of him being a nerdy, outcasted kid was an outright lie. He was confident, popular, and his family made more money than most people.
Joe: I just looked up what a pastor's salary is in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it’s more than I make. It’s 78k to $120K a year. So that does not sound like ‘be angry about how poor you are kind of poor.
Todd: Now, James started out in sales and worked for AT&T. He just sold services and equipment. He later got promoted and managed the stores. From there, he became a trainer at the AT&T School of Business, Atlanta.
Joe: Okay, this does not to me sound like the trajectory of a life coach. I would think the life coach would have to start out learning how to hike through nature, how to mentor people, etc. and eventually work their way into spiritualism. This does not sound to me like the route to self-actualization. This does not feel right to me.
Todd: Right. Well, from there, he started working for best-selling author and motivational Guru Steven Kobe. That's when James really got his taste for self-help. Then he worked for Stephen Covey for a while, and then he started his own Consulting Group. But then he realized the real money is in keynote speaking. To James, it was all about the bucks.
James Ray gravitated toward placebos. We talked in the last episode about how the bitter pill effect is one of the strongest Placebo effects out there, and it actually worked. James Ray took real things and tried to turn them into an anti-aging placebo bitter pill – anything that he could get his hands on to make people feel like they were getting results. So, the first question I want to address is whether there is a real purpose and benefit to the things he was tapping into. Why do people crave these sorts of tests for themselves in the first place? After all, those people wanted to go to the sweat lodge.
That, much like extreme sports like skydiving, acts as an effective placebo in your life because it almost is like a celebration of life. You have to train your mind and be conscious of the now to live in it. I remember listening to a documentary about memory. And basically, the reason why you want to travel and change your environment a lot is because your memory slows down to absorb more if you ever feel like you go on vacation and go somewhere new. It feels like time is slowing down, and it's because your brain is absorbing more. Knowing this, James would take Bushido tenants from The Last Samurai and reinterpret it. Or he would take Native American teachings and sweat lodges, and he would extremophiles them. So, if we want to talk about real benefits from doing these things, they force you to re-examine and reaffirm your core values.
Now, we have had episodes where we've talked about the power of writing about your values for 15 minutes a day. And this is this has been proven by multiple studies to work well. This means you can journal for 15 minutes a day, or you can have James Ray touch you and tell you you're dead to re-examine your values. I might argue that journaling is a slightly healthier option. But if tough love is what you need, that can be effective, too. The need for camaraderie is also a benefit there too. I mean, nobody wants to talk with each other about how they journaled for 15 minutes. But if you survive something extreme together with value, that is a social group that truly bonds.
Lastly, another reason why this might be a good step in the right direction is because of the focus on meditation and breathing. If you breathe slowly as if you are calm, it will signal neurons to become calm, and your brain registers it. So, if you ever wonder if there is real value to meditation, aside from taking 15 minutes to examine your personal values, just the part where you breathe slowly actually does calm down your brain. Your hormones will adjust, and your cortisol levels will go down.
Myth 2: Gurus rely on something called ‘performative success.’ They drive expensive cars, move in powerful circles, and pack their books with endorsements by celebrities. But without an actual trade, how do they do it? Is it just public speaking all the way to the bank?
Joe: Is there actual trade or a vocation to being a guru? You had a great phrase in our notes, Todd; You put in performative success. Could you talk a little bit about what that means to you?
Todd: Performative success means, to me, building up a brand image of yourself and selling that you can help take people further than they've ever been before.
Joe: So, as a life coach, people see that I'm driving a Bentley and my nice house on Instagram and think this guy has it together. But in reality, the car is a rental and that is a friend’s house.
Todd: Yeah, exactly. It's just a picture, but it sparks the question of what is their actual trade? What topic do they have their Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours in to be an expert? Usually, it's just very general and spammy.
Joe: Believe it or not, there is actually a life coach vocation and a life Coach Federation. As I ripped apart skeptical things, I found an actual International Coaching Federation and they are very reputable. I also looked up how much their coaches make and how respected they are in the business world and the answer is shocking. First off, what it takes to be a coach is many certifications and 60 hours of training, and 100 or more experience hours. This isn't mastery, but this offers a little bit of comfort rather than just a guru. This is the legit version of what James Ray was claiming to be.
Real life coaches do not coach people with mental illness. That is something I found to be not upheld by other gurus. For example, James Ray does not distinguish between people who need a therapist and who need life coaches. Whereas a life coach will work with a client, and they recognize they're not a health care professional. Their job is to ask you what your goals are, what you want out of life, and help you aim for them.
To summarize this, the skills of an actual life coach are much more extensive than gurus like James Ray. They rephrase. They reiterate. They use affirmations. They use interjections and clarifications. They basically make you reflect. So, the takeaway to me is that these gurus pretend to have spiritual enlightenment, but real qualified life coaches seem to be geared toward reinforcing your values and helping you to set goals. And if you're ever wondering how much life coaching earns, they make on average $62,000 a year, and it goes up from there. On the other side, James was in this for the big bucks, and that was basically it. Remember, he charged middle-aged $10K to be cooked alive.
Myth 3: Could James Ray have thought he was doing his followers a service when he poured water over hot rocks? Ultimately, this is a question that the jury had to answer. Was James a murderous huckster or a legit spiritual leader who made a simple miscalculation?
Was there something real behind what James Ray is doing or his intent? When you see a guru, or you see in the news about a cult leader, does it make you think that he is less or more spiritual? Less spiritual to us. Would it surprise you to know that an actual spiritual advisor, not a cult leader, but a person who has schooled themselves in it, makes between $40K-$166k a year? Overall, the average is about $75-$80K a year, depending on where you live. I think that's a legitimate trade. I think that it can be a good way to help others legitimately walk through their problems because you don't have to be a psychologist to do that. In short, I think just having somebody to guide you spiritually is actually not that bad of an idea. So, we are going to put ‘spiritual advisor’ in its own slot. That is another profession James Ray pretended to be when, in fact, he was just good at sales.
Let’s talk about how to make ourselves into a guru. First, let's pick professions. Do you want to be the spiritual advisor, or do you want to be the life coach? I'm going life coach, so I'm going with goal setting. If you chose a spiritual advisor, you would focus on spiritual healing. Now, this comes from a Forbes article called How To Become A Guru In Four Easy Steps. It's joking but does have good advice. The first piece of advice this writer gives is to become a magus. This means to look the part you are trying to play – try to look like a life coach. The next one is writing a bible. It doesn't have to be huge or thick. But if you have something that you have written, even if you are a scholar, that's your Bible.
Next was to start a church that reflects your teachings and values to draw others in. Lastly, the fourth step is to start a war. Not an actual religious war, but human beings like to rally around something and go to battle for it. So, tell your followers that there's going to be something they will have to face, like a sweat lodge. You're going to take them on an extreme hike, and you're going to need them to defend their values and morals at some point.
Todd: Have you ever watched his documentary called Enlighten Us on CNN?
Joe: No, I haven’t.
Todd: It talked about James getting out of prison and having all this damage from the past and trying to start over with such a horrible reputation. I had a quote from James from this film, and I'm going to read to you: “On October 8, 2009, I was involved in a terrible accident, and I lost three friends - people I really care about.” And then he started to cry.
Joe: I have problems with that sounding like he was in a car accident, and it wasn't his fault.
Todd: Like he was the victim of all this. In the documentary, he whined about the expenses of his old speaking business. He talked about how he had to put all this money into it but never once talked about how much he made at the end. It was millions.
Now, he's still speaking, but his crowd has gotten much smaller. Even more, his latest book came out, March 14th, 2019, called Harmonic Wealth - The Secret To Attracting The Life You Want. It only has a small number of reviews comparatively, so he is no longer a New York Times bestseller. I watched this documentary again, and I just squirmed the whole time. It was just making me angry and angrier. Joe, imagine how the victims’ families felt.
Final Thoughts
Nobody should aim to become a guru. Tony Robbins is not a job title, and anytime you blend life goals, financial advice, and spiritualism, you are flirting with cult leadership hard. However, if you really want to brand yourself as a leader of men and women or you if want to find professional life advice without using a therapist, there are respectable professions out there.
Spiritual Advisor is a real title, and that is something we tend to forget as the word ‘guru’ rears its head. The two are not the same. A qualified spiritual advisor won't charge you $10K for a week's worth of starvation and watching Tom Cruise movies. A good spiritual advisor will cost about $20-$120 an hour depending on the flavor of spiritualism, and they can offer real perspective and wisdom for your internal self and spirit.
On the other hand, life coaches cost a little more - typically about $100-$300 per hour. But a good life coach will help you set tangible goals and will give you some ladder rungs you might be missing. A certified life coach will check on you personally three to four times a week to ensure you're on the road to achieving what you set out for yourself. But most importantly, a good life coach will share their qualifications upfront, and they'll be open to the scrutiny of both their action plans and credentials.
Nobody has all the answers. Nobody is both a spiritual sage and the perfect financial planner. There are qualified people you can hire to help chart a life course. But if you meet a convincing charismatic intellectual who claims to have the secret to self-actualization and the cure to the human condition, stay far away from them and their torture tent.