Yesterday I wrote at 2 die, 19 sickened at Sweat Lodge in James Arthur Ray’s Sedona Spiritual Warrior Retreat: SEDONA, Ariz. – A sweat lodge became the scene of a police investigation when more than 20 people became ill and two later died. Self-help author James Arthur Ray (who appeared in The Secret) rented the facility as part of his Spiritual Warrior Retreat.
Today’s news: Sweat lodge victim’s family says she was in shape. I notice a few things that seem out of place in the story, but since I wasn’t there, I can only go on what the media reports (uh oh).
Ray and his staff constructed the temporary sweat lodge with a wood frame and covered it with layers of tarps and blankets… The sweat lodge — a structure commonly used by American Indian tribes to cleanse the body and prepare for hunts, ceremonies and other events — was 53 inches high at the center and about 30 inches high around the outer edges. I’ve never seen one with a wooden frame, they were always natural saplings sharpened to be stuck in the ground and bent over to form the lodge. They were then covered by layers upon layers of dense but breathable fabric.
Between 55 and 65 people were crowded into the 415-square-foot space during a two-hour period. That’s 20 feet by 20 feet. I’ve never seen a sweat lodge that big. Mine were about 8 feet in diameter and held up to a dozen people in close quarters. I can’t imagine having that many people safely in an enclosed space like that. I wonder where, in relation to the entryway, the deceased participants sat, and how much illumination was inside the enclosure, so those in charge could keep watch for signs of medical distress.
Nineteen other people were taken to hospitals, suffering from burns, dehydration, respiratory arrest, kidney failure or elevated body temperature. I’m not sure how anyone got burns unless they used river rocks, which explode when heated. I can’t imagine how anyone would get a burn, but there’s lots I don’t know.
The sweat lodge has been dismantled. I imagine that means after authorities gave permission to disturb the scene. Certainly no one meant for this to happen, no matter who is judged to ultimately be legally at fault (likely the deepest pocket). But anyone who has ever watched a police drama knows to leave the scene intact so that it can be accurately assessed. It could be that organizers or attendees began dismantling the lodge simply to get into the fresh air quicker at the time of the crisis. At issue is certainly what was covering the lodge: how many layers of what and placed down in what order? Even as a layman I know it has to allow breathing. Perhaps the sheriff’s office took the necessary photos and video so they already had that at the time of the dismantling.
So the question is how did James Arthur Ray , one of The Secret teachers, attract this? In Steve Pavlina’s James Ray Interview in 2007, Ray stated: The results you have in the third dimension are a reflection of who you are in the spiritual realm. Read that again because it’s critical.
Ray so clearly knows how crucial it is to realize that the results we have in the real world – the third dimension – are a reflection of who we are in spiritual consciousness, that he says Read that again because it’s critical. Ray goes on to say the law of attraction “guides and creates every single result I produce…”
So how did Ray attract a situation like this? I mean, if he knows The Secret and all. As Abraham-Hicks so clearly explains, it’s always ever only one reason: Whatever we are experiencing, we experience because we are in vibrational resonance with it. We are vibrationally in tune with it.
And where we are vibrationally attuned can change in every moment with the change of every thought.
And we can train ourselves to keep our thoughts focused on particular things we wish to attract.
And we know when we have tuned in successfully, because we then have that experience.
But what about the things we don’t want to experience? James Ray did not want to have that experience at the sweat lodge. He probably never considered it, thought about it, pre-paved it or visualized it. So how did he attract it? Like little kids that die: they aren’t contemplating bad things happening to them, so how do they attract it?
We attract it when we don’t have a strong focus on what result we want and where we want to be. We attract it when we get wrapped up in the stories and concerns, real or imagined, of those around us. When you’re in a sweat lodge of just a dozen people, you are in the midst of a large vortex of emotional energy. Whether you believe it or not, your own body and mind will tend to go in the direction the majority are going. If there are 60 people in that small a space, everyone’s body gets affected. Everyone’s mind gets affected. Everyone’s emotions get affected. So even people with good intentions, like James Ray likely is, can get caught up in it and lose focus, and attract something he doesn’t want.
I went to the James Ray website for the first time yesterday, although I’d seen him in The Secret. I find his site typical hard-core-marketing and hype of the sort I find a turn off. But that style appeals to the masses, and if he has a multi-million dollar empire, it is because he knows how to sell something that people are asking for. And he knows the language that will draw them in and convince them to buy and to attend and to experience.
Booksellers these days have a whole new way of marketing themselves, and that includes getting up front and personal with their readership via workshops and retreats. Establishing an emotional connection with them. That works whether you want to gain someone’s trust so you can help them, or so you can gain a steady customer base. But does that make them responsible when one of their students suffers as a result of one of their practices?
Words are powerful. People whose job it is to know how powerful words are have a responsibility to use them wisely. Teachers have a responsibility to correctly assess whether a student is prepared to take their teaching. Not just financially able.
Many people who go on spiritual retreats do so out of a sense of desperation, desperate to leave the life they’ve been living and desperate to find something meaningful.
Ray says Desperation is a self-fulfilling cycle of doom guaranteed to create more of the same.
It must be hard to not get caught up in that.
Maybe not for a spiritual warrior.
Update from NPR on this matter
10-22-09: James Ray urged sweat lodge participants to stop prescription medications
Link to updated info on this matter in chronological order
The End of Death As We Know It
,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ :¦:- Visit www.horizonsmagazine.com