The direct rebukes of James Ray's bullshit on Twitter is very interesting.

In (real) cognitive therapy, a crucial part is called Disputing, where a person directly and often strongly and powerfully disputes irrational and false reasoning.
In a sense, what is going on on Twitter are some former JAR followers and victims families are getting a chance to directly confront and rebuke James Ray's disgusting bullshit directly, in real time, face to face.
Before the internet, and before Twitter, that could never happen.

But here are citizens directly and powerfully confronting and rebuking the perp, using critical thinking, and explaining precisely what bullshit he is spewing, in real time.
That is an amazing and psychologically healthy thing.

Twitter: Realtime results for jamesray OR JamesARay
[search.twitter.com]

The software robots are still marketing James Ray.

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010

And yet he continues his blathering. It's like if he keeps acting like things are normal, people will eventually give up or start questioning their sense of reality. I've know people like that in my own life, they'll keep up a lie and completely ignore all evidence to the contrary and get you to start wondering if maybe it's you and not them. He's probably done this to people successfully in the past. It may work better in one-on-one relationships but I don't think it's going to work for a public figure like JR.

'He's probably done this to people successfully in the past.'

Its the one area where he has a proven track record, overwhelming all others who disagree simply because his bullshit is more relentless and more one-pointed to his own agenda.

In a face to face situation it is more immediately apparent, I think, but in such a situation we are all still vunerable at times. Death Ray has the eye of a salesman and will be used to picking up cues from the demeanour of his mark, cues that show tiredness, distraction, lack of attention--times when he can plant a seed.

We all vacillate constantly between such states and our own directed, concentrated attention, even JAR, though he would die before admitting it as his performance relies on his positioning himself as the omniscient. He has just learned to keep a very beady eye on his own agenda whenever he is 'performing'.

I should imagine that JAR sees himself as 'performing onstage' whenever he is with others, as he has a need to be always in top dog position. That in itself is a dreadful burden to impose on oneself and will have ongoing deleterious effects on the psyche.
Len Oakes book, Prophetic Charisma, charted this downward spiral of functionality in about 20 small-time guru-types, Death Ray is in a much more exposed position.

I hope that the YCSO are aware of the recorded comments on the Oprah board from 2007.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/12/2010 04:59PM by Stoic.

I did want to make one point that I think is important.

Anyone coming fresh to this will probably find this convoluted talk of NLP and hypnotic manipulators quite overwhelming and frightening in the potential scope for scoundrels to exert control over others.

Houdini was a professional magician who became interested in exposing spiritual fakes and had the professional knowledge to see through a lot of the scams.

His considered opinion was that these scammers would never be eradicated as one of the major functions is as entertainment, and many of them are entertaining to a degree.
However in his book 'The Miracle-Mongers and their Methods' he does make the point that it is unnecessary to understand how these scams are conducted, just to recognise them and avoid the scammer is sufficient:

"The yellow thread of exposure seems to be inextricably woven into all fabrics whose strength is secrecy...."

houdinis-lament

If you spot something that does not seem right to you, listen to that voice and walk away. Many of JAR's participants report feeling uncomfortable with some of his tactics but allowed his slick presentation to override those feelings.
Those feelings are the first alarm signals that something is not right, its the first sign of the yellow thread of exposure and should be taken seriously. How you can best spot a scammer is by being aware of the variety of scams, not necessarily by studying up on NLP and hypnosis.

The surest guide is the gut-level intuitive feeling that something is not right. After you walk away you can follow the yellow thread and figure out exactly what the scammer was trying to pull, if you are so inclined.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/13/2010 04:38AM by Stoic.

When I said he's probably done this successfully to people in the past, I meant more in his personal relationships. He has proven to successfully manipulate people in his professional life, obviously. I'm sure narcissists and sociopaths get emboldened when they find these techniques work in one-on-one relationships with people and then decide to take it to the next level and try it on a mass audience.

Sorry, I kinda feel out of my league here. I'm just a recovering new age chick trying to articulate things as best as I can...I don't have much experience with writing about these things.

Quote
Stoic
'He's probably done this to people successfully in the past.'
Its the one area where he has a proven track record, overwhelming all others who disagree simply because his bullshit is more relentless and more one-pointed to his own agenda.



In a face to face situation it is more immediately apparent, I think, but in such a situation we are all still vunerable at times. Death Ray has the eye of a salesman and will be used to picking up cues from the demeanour of his mark, cues that show tiredness, distraction, lack of attention--times when he can plant a seed.

We all vacillate constantly between such states and our own directed, concentrated attention, even JAR, though he would die before admitting it as his performance relies on his positioning himself as the omniscient. He has just learned to keep a very beady eye on his own agenda whenever he is 'performing'.

I should imagine that JAR sees himself as 'performing onstage' whenever he is with others, as he has a need to be always in top dog position. That in itself is a dreadful burden to impose on oneself and will have ongoing deleterious effects on the psyche.
Len Oakes book, Prophetic Charisma, charted this downward spiral of functionality in about 20 small-time guru-types, Death Ray is in a much more exposed position.

I hope that the YCSO are aware of the recorded comments on the Oprah board from 2007.

Gotta totally disagree with that!
Things have progressed by light-years since Houdini was dealing with cold-reader spiritualists.
The LGAT seminar and NLP persuasion experts are now able to engineer how people make decisions in that seminar environment. They do that extremely carefully, just read their disclaimers where they talk about how everything done in the seminar is "voluntary" and not coerced.
They put that in the disclaimer due to the lawsuits where people say they were tricked and coerced!

So unfortunately, precise education is the only way to counteract the nightmare.
Gut feelings are NOT reliable, as they know how to over-ride those feelings and reprogram them from before you are even aware of it. Byron Katie does that right from the beginning, and Stever Robbins talks about Innoculations to take care of that problem.
So they make your gut feelings the very thing to draw you to them.

People wonder why those people stayed in the death lodge, and this thread is telling people why. Its not a mystery when you know the techniques in use.

The only real simple solution is to just stay away from ALL seminars that start costing hundreds and thousands of dollars. But they lure people in with a free-cheap seminar, then go to work on them. By then its too late.

So why try to move away from one of the few threads, if not the only thread where these ideas are being dissected?
Education is the key, and hopefully some of the bignames in the field will grow a conscience one day and write some books for the general public which explains what is happening.

So of course people are going to do what they think is best for them.
But why try to move away from learning the precise techniques, when the public has ZERO knowledge of them?
Eventually some writers and reporters will do investigations and the body of knowledge will grow and be easier to understand.

But its more accurate to say you actually CAN'T trust a gut-feeling with this area of covert persuasion, as they engineer those feelings in using rapport techniques. If anything, it seems one has to use their analytical mind and critical thinking to the maximum.
Its a very tough problem, no easy solutions.

Quote
Stoic
I did want to make one point that I think is important.

Anyone coming fresh to this will probably find this convoluted talk of NLP and hypnotic manipulators quite overwhelming and frightening in the potential scope for scoundrels to exert control over others.

Houdini was a professional magician who became interested in exposing spiritual fakes and had the professional knowledge to see through a lot of the scams.

His considered opinion was that these scammers would never be eradicated as one of the major functions is as entertainment, and many of them are entertaining to a degree.
However in his book 'The Miracle-Mongers and their Methods' he does make the point that it is unnecessary to understand how these scams are conducted, just to recognise them and avoid the scammer is sufficient:

"The yellow thread of exposure seems to be inextricably woven into all fabrics whose strength is secrecy...."

houdinis-lament

If you spot something that does not seem right to you, listen to that voice and walk away. Many of JAR's participants report feeling uncomfortable with some of his tactics but allowed his slick presentation to override those feelings.
Those feelings are the first alarm signals that something is not right, its the first sign of the yellow thread of exposure and should be taken seriously. How you can best spot a scammer is by being aware of the variety of scams, not necessarily by studying up on NLP and hypnosis.

The surest guide is the gut-level intuitive feeling that something is not right. After you walk away you can follow the yellow thread and figure out exactly what the scammer was trying to pull, if you are so inclined.

TAC, I wasn't suggesting people walk away from this thread, just pointing out that showing this amount of tech ranged against the unknowing participants may be overwhelming to begin with. The thread to walk away from was Houdini's yellow thread when you spot it.
My aim in my post was to try to avoid the reaction eg from Penelope, that this is all over peoples heads and far too convoluted to try to figure out. It is convoluted and might be initially off-putting to those who need it most.

People have to start somewhere. A general awareness that these techniques are in use, not just in seminars but in sales, business workshops, spiritual circles and alternative therapies, just about everywhere, coupled with a bit of suspicion of the motives of the presenter seems to me like a good place to start.

One of the reasons people fall for this rubbish is because they have never learned or have forgotten to take note of their own inbuilt BS detector. The 'feelings' are chemically generated in the body and are a far faster reaction than thought. Everyone has gut feelings but we have been largely civilised to ignore or downgrade them. When you face danger or a scary switchback ride, your body registers those feelings instantly and the thought 'I am scared' comes after.
I am not suggesting that those feelings are 100% reliable, they need to be evaluated by critical thought, but they can become a good, swift rough guide if we take notice of what they are telling us. The system evolved over thousands of years to alert us to danger, we are fools if we disregard it and rely solely on the thinking process. The thinking process is too slow to deal with an operator like JAR while he is working his scam.

TAC, very few people will be able or interested enough to aquire your grasp of this subject. Recognising the danger and moving away from it has to be the first step. Puzzling this stuff out, making sense of it and putting it together so it is coherent can only be done after the fact, from a place of safety.


Penelope, I don't have much experience writing these things either, although I have spent a great deal of time thinking about them. Sorry if I have not been as clear as I could have been. I doubt you are out of your league as there is no league, just people who have experienced these scammers trying to make some sense of them. Sometimes making sense is not that easy.

I just wanted to pop in and say I think this is an excellent thread, one of the most educational discussions I've seen about James Ray and the larger problem of manipulative techniques, coercion, etc. I've sent many folks to this discussion, via my blog and private communications. Even if you don't read every comment, Penelope, I think you've come to the right place if you're "a recovering new age chick." I was once one of those myself. :-)

Everyone of course is going to have to try and figure this stuff out as best they can.
And of course people should walk away as soon as they see questionable behavior. With training, a person can spot what James Ray was doing in seconds.

But some people don't walk away. There are even people who are still supporting James Ray, even though they are keeping their heads down, as if they say anything on Twitter they can get criticized. There are still plenty of people locked into James Ray.

But the persuasion info in this thread is not convoluted, and if people want to understand how these groups operate its going to take some research.

But the sad reality is that gut feelings are NOT reliable for many people when dealing with advanced covert persuasion like this. The persuaders have taken that into account, and move to manipulate gut feelings from first contact, using RAPPORT.
Hell, the gut feelings about NLP expert Robert Dilts even from a trained person are positive! He is no James Ray of course, but guys like that are experts in rapport, and make people feel at ease.

This thread is explaining how James Ray was able to get so many people to risk their lives, and pay $10K-$30K for it. And some of them PAID 10K to work for James Ray AND risk their lives in the moment and risk their lives by lying for him and possibly going to jail.

There are people on twitter who got ripped off from James Ray for 20K and are rightfully angry about it. They should also try and figure out exactly HOW James Ray did that to them.

What is going on?
Hopefully this thread can explain some of the advanced covert persuasion techniques.
It was only proven for sure very recently that James Ray was trained in all of the NLP based persuasion and conversational hypnosis techniques. That is an important fact.
The public needs to learn about these uses of metaphor in conversational persuasion, or pay the price.

But it goes beyond those as well of course. James Ray also studied-copied the "cult" techniques which allow cult leaders to do what they do to people.
Things should not be over-simplified. James Ray had been underestimated by basically everyone, from Oprah to the media to his followers.

This is probably the only thread on the internet looking into the specific advanced persuasion techniques used by James Ray, and certainly the only one looking at the NLP based hypno-persuasion material.
It really is a terrible mistake for anyone, any adult conscious person to not try to understand these techniques. Its not that tough to do. Teenagers would be able to learn how they work if it was taught correctly.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/13/2010 02:52PM by The Anticult.