@Christa
There is certainly a sadistic God-complex power-mad aspect to James Ray.
There is a lot of truth to the idea its not just about the money ONLY, as many other LGAT Gurus just focus on bringing in the bucks, and keeping those seminar-junkies at arms length.
James Ray is utterly obsessed with making money for himself.
But James Ray also likes to get personally involved in his superiority mind-games with his seminar followers. So yes, he clearly needs that admiration, and he appears to need to dominate them to the most extreme degree possible.
But EVERY LGAT guru knows that people get seriously injured at their seminars, and that some of them die. Usually not AT the seminar, but perhaps on a break, or in-between LGAT seminars from the terrible STRESS the seminar puts on them, many go into psychoses.
That is a FACT.
Why do some other LGAT's also have a serious injury and Death Clause in their waivers? Because they know people get injured and even die related to the seminar quite frequently.
Injury, death, psychoses clauses, Landmark Forum, PSI seminars, Byron Katie, James Ray [
forum.culteducation.com]
But in many cases they are not setting out to kill people, its a side-effect of the dangers of the terrible techniques in the seminar that trigger trauma and PTSD and psychoses and mental breakdowns in people.
The LGAT seminar Guru knows many people get hurt, that has been proven.
What they do is they treat it as a business cost, and FIGHT and CRUSH the person and their family and try to bankrupt them if they try to sue them. If the person who got hurt won't give up, they give them a minimum payout and sign them to GAG orders.
Its the cost of doing business, and a tax write-off.
This is why they hide their assets, they know people get hurt, and frankly they don't care. They depersonalize their followers, they are just objects to them.
Why do car companies measure cuttings costs against injury/death claims? To make more profit.
Same with the LGAT leader. They treat injuries and deaths as the cost of doing business.
The LGAT companies go through hundreds and often THOUSANDS of customers every year, they are just numbers on a page to them to make money from. They don't know them, and don't want to know them. Its a huge business involving millions of dollars a year.
Do they get away with people getting injured and dying? Of course they do. Even in this forum, there are many reports of suicides and psychoses from these LGAT seminars, and they ALWAYS get away with it.
After all Colleen Conaway died DURING a James Ray seminar, and in California the San Diego police appear to have NOT done a damn thing about it, not even questioning. It was pointed out in this forum October 14, 2009 Conaway, Colleen Marian (1963 - 2009) [
forum.culteducation.com]
So James Ray & Co got away with the death of Colleen Conaway DURING his actual seminar, and he kept rolling into Sedona.
So why should James Ray NOT think he can't get away with deaths happening at his seminars before Sedona? They did.
In their minds, they sometimes use the story along the lines of climbing Mt Everest, where about 1/10 people die climbing it, about 10%.
As a matter of fact, this is the type of thing James Ray posted on his website, that people signed a waiver that said they could DIE at his seminar.
So of course James Ray knows people could die at his seminar, they wrote the waiver saying people could die.
Now of course, everyone knows these waivers are spin-doctored, and contradicted verbally, and given to people at the last minute, signed in a rush and people don't read them, people are actively DECEIVED in the LGAT seminar environment about the risks.
So why should the LGAT Guru not think he can't get away with people dying and getting seriously injured at his seminar? They get away with it almost every time.
When they move into these Wilderness seminars, which are really wilderness LGAT seminars, then people are going to get killed as human lives are being risked.
Why do they do it? Greed, cost of business. And in more extreme cases, a perverse God-complex phantasy of holding the power of life and death over humans? That seems to be the pattern.
And yes, they do think they can get away with people dying and getting horribly hurt at their seminars for good reason. Because they do get away with it.
Believe it, at this point they think they are going to get away with it, as a type of "accident" like someone falling on a wilderness adventure hike.
Obviously, that was not what happened here, but that is up to the courts.
This was bound to happen. People have been getting hurt, burned, broken bones, broken legs at many LGAT's like this.
And that is not even the worst.
The WORST are the ones like Byron Katie and others, where they actively take people with untreated serious trauma in their past, and they trigger and magnify their PTSD, and the person completely falls apart, gets all their money stripped from them, and then is kicked to the curb, usually literally. As in, when they start to flip-out and have a mental breakdown, they literally kick them out of the seminar into the street on the spot.
[Byron Katie (the Work) and PTSD suicide attempt rates] [
forum.culteducation.com]
Traumatic PTSD is a suicide machine. If someone ever was able to get the names of seminar attendees, and count up the suicides, it would be carnage.
But the LGAT Guru just says they had nothing to do with it. The blame the victim.
James Ray's own reckless and malignant personality just made him go further than the others. But there are many other wilderness LGAT's doing very extreme techniques as well.
If Sedona would have happened in California, would the authorities have done anything at all?
How many LGAT seminar leaders have been prosecuted or even investigated in California for injuring or having people die at their seminars? Can anyone think of even one?
California has a terrible record in this area.
Jonestown children [
forum.culteducation.com]
James Ray's media cheerleaders and business partners have also walked away without any questions at all. Who has asked Oprah why she promoted James Ray on her TV show, when her own Oprah message boards had SERIOUS COMPLAINTS about James Ray BEFORE he appeared on her TV show, about people being injured...people getting ripped off 10K, and lots of people burning their feet in his "fire-walk" and not being allowed to go to the hospital. [
forum.culteducation.com]
No one in the media will ask Oprah that, the networks won't touch it.
The LGAT gurus are generally much more clever than they make themselves appear in the media, and they know all these things of course, and have bigshot legal teams and millions in a warchest to keep them in business.
So they do it, because they get away with it, and have gotten away with it for decades.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/25/2010 02:31PM by The Anticult.