Thursday, June 23, 2011

New Age "Sweat Lodge" owner found guilty of 3 counts of Negligent Homicide for Sedona deaths

UPDATE AND CORRECTION:  The "conviction" was for "NEGLIGENT HOMICIDE."  That is a lesser included offense to the more serious charge of manslaughter for which James Arthur Ray was originally charged.  

The wealthy New Age "transformation" promoter of Sweat Lodge techniques was charged with three counts of Manslaughter but was convicted of the lesser crime of "negligent homicide" in the Arizona courts.  The judge presiding over the case denied the prosecution motion to take him into custody immediately.  Ray is now awaiting sentencing.  You can read more of the details here in this Associated Press article carried in a London online newspaper account.



In the past, James Arthur Ray has been a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show.  Guests paid $9500 for the "privilege" of being tortured in a "transformational technique" Ray himself described as "hellacious."

That it was!  Two people died at the scene and another 19 were injured in his 64 person sweat lodge "experience."  Another victim, one of the injured 19 persons, died after a week of being comatose.

If that's what they call "higher consciousness," I for one definitely DO NOT WANT IT!

Stay tuned!

CONSTANCE

22 comments:

Anonymous said...

This POS should be given the chair for ritual murder. Instead he'll be awarded the 33rd Degree of the Scottish Rite. Such is the way of our world today.

Christine Erikson (aka Justina) said...

two problems. The new age thing in
itself, though I don't know if this
version involved any self is god crap
or not, and the way it was done. This
was not how a traditional sweat lodge
procedure is done, you don't get
Indians dying from sweat lodges. Very
dangerous style. As far as its okay
to die, that has its points, if it is
a matter of overcoming fear in general
so you can be more competent and less
distracted by fear, so that you are
therefore less likely to die in the
first place, or to prep for being
persecuted as a Christian.

I can't agree with the post that this constituted ritual murder, since the
purpose supposedly was not to cause
any deaths, and it was the first time
his routine resulted in this. The
possibility that this was an accident
on purpose to feed some entities or
his own energy manipulation to some
purpose scheme is another matter.
In which case it would be ritual
murder, but damn hard to prove as such. a ritual murder is very
deliberate and involves obviously
lethal actions to the person which
are invariably lethal, not some crap
shoot where once in a long time
somebody dies.

Constance Cumbey said...

BEWARE, BEWARE, BEWARE of a man called "Peter Zarcone" who has a ministry called "Pursuit of Truth." He is definitely MANIFEST SON OF GOD, anti ISRAEL'S right to exist, teaches we never leave this planet, "Heaven" does not exist as a "real place," etc., etc.

He follows my program Tuesday and Thursday night on www.themicroeffect.com.

For background on the MSOG Movement, please pull down the free copy of my book in pdf form on the "presentations for downloading" link and go to the chapter "A SECRET KINGDOM" and there is a significant subchapter on THE MANIFEST SONS OF GOD.

Absolutely required reading. This man originally sounded great to me when I listened and then I wen to his website and was shocked.

I called into his program and he freely and proudly admitted his association with the Manifest Sons of God leaders.

I first learned of this group from a New Age publication I was handed in 1983 BRAGGING about how they were working their doctrines in the Christian community through what the author (Ernest Ramsey) called "NeoPentecostals."

Constance

Anonymous said...

This reminds me of the sickness some people get from doing New Age/Eastern meditation. I became sick from it in a manner very similar to that described by Gopi Krishna in his book "Kundalini." (the name of the book was later changed by his agents, I believe). The difference between me and him in the after-effects was that he thought he had become enlightened and I knew I had become sick. I did everything to undo the effect of this meditation, and I succeeded. I NEVER took it up again.

The goal of advanced yogic meditation in some sects
is to push the soul as far as possible from its connection to the body. Yogis in the far east train a long time in order to be able to do this without harm. It is one reason they remain celibate; they can't be married or have sexual relations and do this
successfully. And they need to be in a secluded environment because peace and quiet is needed to do this without harm. So that's why they sit in caves.

For someone to try to do this and also "go to work" or have a normal social life is not possible.

One could go on all night about this.

Anonymous said...

Oh, yes, I forgot to sign my name at the end of the last post. I post as Anonymous because I can't make the signup program work.

I am never Anon to be Anon, just can't make the computer stuff work.

Mariel

Anonymous said...

what is scary to me is the fact that people get brainwashed to self-destruct. On DSTV Crime the other evening Heavens-gate was featured (the Final Report)and eventually the suicides were orchestrated and willingly followed through by the participants to meet the `higher space brothers of the next plane`. Also on the History program; `Apocalypse Island 2012` the Mayan. so they say embraced the end of ther 5ooo y cyle or buhtan by just willingly `vanish`? The documentary even called it the `the vanishing` Thanks Constance for this info-it is always tragic to hear how the New Age operates at the cost of the participants souls. In the end that is what is at stake. Is it not ironic that this guy James was mentioned in Rhonda Byrns `The Secret`? How is `the Secret` working for him? I believe he is a billionaire? How will his katjing work for him?
Regards
Melinda

Texmom said...

They covered this right after it happened on 20/20 or Primetime...one of those shows. I remember one of the people who had been there saying maybe it was supposed to happen because it was the right time for those people to be leaving us. Several said they would pay and do the sweatlodge again. Unbelievable.

Anonymous said...

Mariel,

I always enjoy your comments.

Anonymous said...

Hello Anon 2:14. I wish I could master the computer.
I write lines which don't end at the margin and I cannot
be anything but Anonymous on the Choose an Identity
machine. I do not choose to be Anonymous, but Big Brother computer system makes me be Anonymous.
I can't twitter or tweet or Youtube or any of those things.

I have known lots of people who said they benefitted from these "transformational" ordeals such as the sweat lodge. They were well educated people who chose the fringe. Some were divorced women who had been encouraged in their divorces by a church which urged them to "self-actualize". Some of them committed suicide when their actualization didn't happen the way they hoped. One went to prison for six months for a "sit-in". One nearly starved to death in a "commune" run by some followers of Maitreya, where she was the baby sitter until the babies grew up and she got sick from eating mostly lettuce and sprouts, and had to be rescued by her son. But the woman rescued by her son, whom I knew very well (knew many of these people well), was a Maitreya follower all her life and meditated at the prescribed time for the world-wide group meditation. These were people from the Unitarian
Church, that I got into because my parents were in it. I met my husband there, but we both left the church after four of our friends committed suicide in one year. We never had close friends again--the price one sometimes pays for standing up for what is right.

I have some close friends online, including many Christian friends, but no 3-D friends. A big price to pay.

Mariel

Christine Erikson (aka Justina) said...

"The difference between me and him in the after-effects was that he thought he had become enlightened and I knew I had become sick. I did everything to undo the effect of this meditation, and I succeeded. I NEVER took it up again."

Please share what you did to undo this.

I will share something with you. somehow I picked up a symbiote, a kind of spirit that instead of simply
parasitically vampirising you, works with you, but i didn't know what was going on, until something happened and i started looking closer at some things turning up in my mind.

I got rid of, it took about 3 days.
The knowledge of what to do was so immediate, that I think God helped me
directly on this one.

I kept thinking at it, "I am I and you are you," and "it is okay to be flesh and blood, because Jesus Christ became flesh and blood."

the reasons for this was in the first matter, to undo the illusion that the thing was just some part of myself, to disguise itself, and to persuade me thereby to consider becoming it.
(This identification of self with target is also what was described in some East Indian story about a sorceror who moved into a king's body for several years and enjoyed his harem and so forth. Especially distateful and immoral.)

second part, was to reject the temptation that one can or should or should want to become something "above" "mere flesh and blood," superhuman and all that crap.

Of course I did a lot of prayer, and avoiding the not occult, and apparently innocuous but perhaps
partaking of some kind of vainglory that had brought it on or made it possible.

ILLUMINATION AS DISEASE - an unqualified yes to that assessment.
I first realized this back in 1982, when I was talking with a young woman who was into this stuff, and was also a bit unstable. I suddenly thought while looking into her eyes, that the stuff the eastern philosophers think is illumination is what our psychiatrists without a religious bias of the wrong sort, recognize as schizophrenia or something along that line.

THE UNITARIAN CHURCH and Unitiarian Universalists, especially the latter, have been host to wicca rituals and groups using their grounds for meetings, incl. other pagan groups and a disguised as such worst case scenario satanist group which fronts as pagan.

James 4:3 said...

"Ye ask, and receive not,
because ye ask amiss, that
ye may consume it upon
your lusts."

Anonymous said...

To Christine @ 2:36 AM:

Thank you for sharing your first hand experience with us. It is only by hearing from one who has 'been there and done that' that we can truly be alert to the dangers of what to look for....and to be able to recognize it if/when it happens to someone else.

Anonymous said...

Christine:

Would you still agree that there are many legitimate cases of Schizophrenia out there that have nothing to do with the New Age process of 'illumination'?

Also, how does one tell the difference?

Dorothy said...

Nothing much is going on here these days, so I'm going to share something I wrote for my email list. It might help someone understand the New Age movement. It's in several parts.

I've tried to explain the New Age movement to several people recently. I ended
up looking foolish and not making a dent in their thinking. Could this be the
explanation?

Trying to explain the New Age movement to people is like trying to explain water
to fish if fish had any sense of the world in which they live. Water surrounds
fish. It's the environment around them, all they know. Depending on where they
are, a fish tank or the ocean, the water world can be simple or complex. Fish
breathe it in and out, unable to analyze it, just taking it for granted.


There are human equivalents to this. On a simple level someone raised in a
Muslim world, in Chicago, in a communist country, in a Mormon cult may never
have the ability to compare the world that surrounds them with other types of
community. Everything they believe is seen through the eyes of the world they
know if no other information comes to them which allows them to compare the
world they are living in with other environments. They are to the world they
know as fish are to water. I say this with no disrespect. We do not choose
the environment we are born into. Someone outside of those environments can see
them with different eyes. We all live in the intellectual environment we have
been taught exists.


The New Age movement is the intellectual soup that surrounds us just as water
surrounds a fish. For over a hundred years the movement has been shaping what
we learn and what we believe is the world around all of us. We absorb their
ideas from school, from television, from newspapers, magazines books and from
friends and family. The New Age networks have led people to think alike, shaped
their worldview, determined their goals, gradually moving huge numbers of people
to live in the intellectual soup called group think. Just as fish live in
water, we live in the intellectual soup called groupthink.

Dorothy said...

Generally the New Age networks are composed of the self-described elite. They
don't care very much about taking public credit for their manipulations as long
they are known to one another and respected by one another. They give each
other financial rewards, honors, promotions, invitations to the most prestigious
seminars and think tanks. Unless you are invited into their high achieving
world, you will never be told who they are. To become part of their world you
must think as they do, globally, have power, be high achieving. One way to
become high achieving is to have a following which gets many everyday people
living New Age beliefs.


If you've ever looked at the Encyclopedia of Associations in the reference
section of any library, you will learn how many ways of possibly influencing
your thinking there are. We all absorb information from these organizations,
few checking where the information is coming from. There are a number of
websites showing how networks and individuals are linked, but who checks on
them? All of the information forms the intellectual soup we live in.


Now here I come along saying there is a network that has been operating for over
100 years to create that intellectual soup that influences politics, culture,
religion and education on an international level, the intellectual soup that we
breathe in and out, that we take for granted just as a fish takes water for
granted. A network that has managed to stay behind the scenes, that can pull
our strings with ease. A network whose organizations can be named, whose
leaders can be pointed to. It's much easier to believe that no such thing can
exist rather than check it out. Oh well.

end of commentary

Anonymous said...

otherwise known as herd-poisioning. hi dorothy, tony in vt/God be with you

Craig said...

Anon 11:41:

I an article I wrote a while back on my blog [ http://tinyurl.com/286bb2j ], I reference the following quote from a pro-kundalini practitioner:

“Kundalini rising is sometimes a violent experience, radically changing one’s subtle energy field (making it much less subtle!) and consciousness and perception of energy. The experience can be (and often is in the West) mistaken for insanity (usually acute schizophrenia) or emotional or physical breakdown on a fairly large scale.”

http://tinyurl.com/6lfp6tr

Knowing nothing about this sort of thing, I don't know if schizophrenia is present without a spiritual component. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) has also been associated the kundalini arousal as noted in the article as well as my blog post.

Anonymous said...

Craig (11:20 PM):

I can't thank you enough for posting those links and providing this valuable information. It has helped me understand so much better. Everything is a lot clearer now.

May God bless you.

Craig said...

Anon 4:02AM:

You're quite welcome! I have to say I was dumbfounded when I initially read that article on kundalini in general and that quote specifically.

Christine Erikson (aka Justina) said...

"Christine:

Would you still agree that there are many legitimate cases of Schizophrenia out there that have nothing to do with the New Age process of 'illumination'?"

yes. In fact in Luke somewhere, it is written that Jesus healed those who
were sick with diseases, lunatick, and those who were possessed.

A clear distinction is made between the latter two categories, and
apparently a lot of people especially Luke the physician knew they were distinct categories.

However, the two are hardly mutually exclusive, and a less than possession but still involving demons can operate when schizophrenia is present, as a cause of the schizophrenia, or as using the schizophrenia to its advantage.

"Also, how does one tell the difference?"

oog. I don't know exactly, that it is detectable as different is clear
since some psychiatrists have been known to call in exorcists, and exoricists usually use psychiatrists to eliminate all non supernatural explanations.

Google can probably get more details.
i hate to make hard and fast rules, and some people who are just dropping the mask and showing their real nature, who are charming psychopaths, might not be possessed, just good at
pretending to be normal.

Constance Cumbey said...

Last Poster:

I have to agree with much of what you said. Dave Hunt played an interesting game in the 1980s and I'm not fully sure what his real motives were, but he said repeatedly and publicly "there's no such thing as mental illness." I KNOW he knew better than that! There clearly is MENTAL ILLNESS. I've spent too much time on the court's mental health docket to know better than that.

Constance

Constance Cumbey said...

On the other hand, all should know that when I first discovered the New Age Movement (1981) they were making wide ranging statements that SCHIZOPHRENIA WAS A BREAKTHROUGH TO HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS. The co-founder of Esalen suffered from schizophrenia. The use of drugs in the Movement was viewed with approval because it helped people get THERE.

Constance