The article has been updated now. A third person died and all three deaths are being treated by the police as homicides.
Some other articles on Ray.
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http://www.kansascity.com/news/nation/story/1514193.htmlSweat lodge deaths cast negative spotlight on guru
By FELICIA FONSECA and BOB CHRISTIE
The Associated Press
SEDONA, Ariz. | James Arthur Ray led a group of more than 50 followers into a cramped, sauna-like sweat lodge in Arizona recently by convincing them that his words would lead them to spiritual and financial wealth.
The mantra has made him a millionaire. People routinely pack Ray’s seminars and follow the motivational guru to weeklong retreats that can cost more than $9,000 per person.
Ray’s self-help empire was thrown into turmoil this month when three of his followers died after collapsing in the makeshift sweat lodge near Sedona and 19 others were hospitalized. A homicide investigation that followed has cast a critical spotlight on Ray’s company.
Critics are citing the sweat lodge deaths as evidence that Ray is a charlatan who is not to be trusted. A relative of one victim accused Ray of recklessly abandoning the safety of participants.
Dedicated followers said they fully trusted Ray to lead them through exercises that greatly improved their lives.
Ray, 51, has become a self-help superstar by packaging his charismatic personality and selling wealth. Those who first attend his free seminars hear a motivational mantra that promises that they can achieve what he calls “Harmonic Wealth” — on a financial, mental, physical spiritual level.
But his technique is not just motivational speaking. It’s a combination of New Age spiritualism, American Indian ritual, astrology and numerology. The sweat lodge experience was intended to be an almost religious awakening for the participants.....
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A very caustic critique.
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http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2009/oct/18/sweat-test-tragedy-drips-injustice/Logan Jenkins
Sweat-test tragedy drips with injustice
By Logan Jenkins
2:00 a.m. October 18, 2009
A ton of hot bricks — the Sweat Me a River award — to James Arthur Ray, the Carlsbad-based Elmer Gantry of wealth and happiness.
Listen to the smarmy pitch on his Web site:
“Just like the harmony created by each unique and important instrument in an orchestra causes your emotions to soar (like an eagle rising on an invisible thermal), complete harmony in your life causes your level of happiness, wealth and success to soar.”
Mining the you-can-have-it-all vein of Terry Cole Whittaker, San Diego's high priestess of affluence in the 1970s, Ray evidently rakes in the smackers from the credulous.
Well, that's capitalism. A sucker yearning to embrace his “spiritual warrior” is born every minute. More power to the New Age flimflam artists. If you can make a living peddling enlightenment, more power to you.
What Ray's disciples at a recent retreat were not told, however, was that the sweaty festivities after fasting (saves on meals, one imagines) would coincide with two physical deaths in a Sedona, Ariz., sweat lodge Oct. 8.
Imagine a 415-square-foot room crammed with somewhere between 50 and 60 hot and heavy breathers straining for satori via a communal draining of body fluids.
In this vision of hell that, I suspect, would have terrified Dante, two acolytes died, four were hospitalized and others dangerously dehydrated.
As reported, this wasn't the first time Ray's humid high jinks at the Angel Valley Spiritual Retreat Center caused a health emergency. In 2005, paramedics were called to treat a man who blacked out during one of Ray's sweat tests.
Though you'd think he would have been ashamed to show his handsome face, Ray appeared at a seminar last week where he told the faithful that “I'm as frustrated and confused as others are” by the decidedly un-harmonic convergence.
Maybe so, but this much seems as clear as Sedona crystal:
If Ray is not charged with manslaughter — and thrown in an Arizona prison, the mother of all sweat lodges — his future retreats should be titled:
“Beating the Heat: How to Soar Like an Eagle When the Rubes Are Dropping Like Flies.”
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And a psychologist pointed out in an older interview on CBS that the whole premise of Ray's The Secret is also dangerous and gibberish.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWfmkh7eN-4&feature=related
