A few closing thoughts on the James Arthur Ray story are in order, because he is likely to disappear amid the 24 hour news cycle and the ADHD mindset of our mass media. There are some crucial lessons to be learned from this tragedy; I think that if we overlook those lessons, the next James Arthur Ray will be among the public all the sooner.
Ray might have had some marginal talent for connecting with troubled people, with the kind of folks who become psycho-spiritual seekers and are ready to pay $9,000 to go to Sedona or some other New Age Mecca to "re-birth" themselves. But Ray's primary gift was as a salesman, a self-promoter. He shilled himself and his vapid ideology until it was picked up in the superstar channels of the New Age movement, and finally by the great Oprah herself. Incidentally: when will someone in the media call Oprah out for her utter idiocy in sponsoring plagiarist, crooked authors and corrupt, demonic spiritual teachers? She's certainly got the money and the organization to do some close background checking on these people before she places the crown of wealth and fame upon them -- what's her excuse, then?
An even more important point relates to the "bad apple" phenomenon. Watch in the days and weeks to come as the entire New Age movement -- practitioners, students, marketers, and the Oprah crowd -- shakes its head, mutters some pabulum about "one bad apple," and goes right back to the shill and fame game, with no further questioning or inward-turning on the matter. What they forget is exactly what the talking heads of the Bush administration and the Pentagon forgot when we heard repeatedly of "bad apples" in Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Gitmo, and the various crooks, liars, and Brownie-type miscreants of that lost decade in American domestic and foreign policy: all these people forget what that proverb about bad apples actually says. It says that it is the bad apple that poisons or spoils the entire barrel, that taints or destroys everything around it.
In other words, the bad-apple proverb is not a dismissal; it is a stark warning. If they are to be true to themselves, New Agers are going to have to stay with the story of James Arthur Ray, because his crimes stain all of us who practice self-development, in either the psychological or the spiritual realm. If we are to grow at all, if we are to transcend the depredations of Ray, then we had better study what they have done to all of us who practice in this arena.
Thus, the primary lesson of Ray's criminally negligent homicide (and I'm being charitable with even that charge) is not about a bad apple that can be cast aside, dropped into prison and forgotten as we rush into the next exciting seminar and compete with one another to be the next featured Oprah guru. The lesson of Ray's story is more about what enabled him, what made him prominent, famous, wealthy, arrogant, and, in the end, fatally dangerous to his followers.
That brings us to the cult of fame, the poisonous cult of inner, and often outer, death. You could fill a community's cemetery with the bodies of rap stars who sought to grasp the brass bling of fame, who were ready to kill and be killed for that garish light of celebrity. The bad apple here is not a person or a practice, but the system that permits and actually drives the depredations that occur in places like Abu Ghraib and now Sedona. And when I mention system, I am talking far less about an organization or institution than I am about a juggernaut of corrupt consciousness whose wheels are Power, Wealth, and Fame, and whose engine is Fear -- the fear of being left off the lust-boat, of missing one's shot at the big brass bling.
We can't expect the likes of George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld to have the insight and the will to examine themselves and their connection with the demonic consciousness that brought us the horrors of Abu Ghraib and the criminally negligent homicide of New Orleans; but as teachers and students in the self-development community, we had better be capable of this level of self-searching, because if we cannot lead here, then who can?
One of the lessons of the Ray story -- perhaps its primary lesson, I would argue -- has to do with a phenomenon for which we lack a truly representative word in English. You might call it fate, that is, if you can discard the mythological and passive associations with which that term is riddled in our culture. It basically comes down to this: as free actors in society, our personal choices create inevitable consequences, and there are almost certainly laws or principles governing such a dynamic of choice, action, and consequence that are as yet unknown to us as scientific or intellectual theories. But my experience, both in personal self-examination and in my work with clients, has been that this dynamic can be sensed, felt, intuited; and that this form of presentiment can be trusted as one of the many instruments of self-growth and healing.
I am not talking here about the doctrine of karma, which has more to do with the consonance of past and present lives and their actions. Karma is an excessively mystical and blurry notion that tends to incite simplification and, even worse, denial, toward a phenomenon which affects us all and urgently demands our deepest attention and regular reflection. We cannot afford to be muddled or superficial about a matter which cries out, in virtually every human life, for clarity and penetration.
Ray wanted fame, glory, wealth; and to that end he was ready to sacrifice his talent, his professional ethic, his plain human sense of morals which both spiritualists and atheists agree exists. He was ready to sacrifice any other life that got in his way or that could be made the slave of his power-lust, solely to attain his ruling place in the charnel house of Fame. His choices, his priorities, his actions rebounded on his victims; now they are rebounding upon him. For that, as I have said earlier this week, he deserves not a scintilla of pity; but I think that we who are his colleagues in the self-development movement owe his victims a careful self-examination of our understanding and our teachings on fate.
When I think about fate, I try to bring it down to the level of lived experience. This is where the ideology, the mythology, and the passivity that typically muddle our thinking about fate can be successfully penetrated. Thus, if you were to ask me for a metaphor on fate, I would offer the image of an untended septic tank backing up all over the lawn. This points to both the danger of ignorance and the potential for awareness when it comes to fate: if we tend to our "fate-tank" regularly, through meditation, self-examination, and other means such as the interpretation of dreams and even the ordinary events of daily life and relationship, we give ourselves the opportunity not merely to perceive the roots of our errors and our adversities, but to expel them, to cleanse ourselves of fate's psychological seeds and thereby forestall or bring an end to each individual fate that might befall us. The cost of ignoring the messages of fate, however, is incalculable: that ignorance may leave us with a failed marriage, a midlife crisis, or some other personal adversity. Or it may drag us into a swamp of power-lust, conflict, and yes, even criminality, as it did to James Arthur Ray in his ignorance.
I suspect that fate is a primary blind spot of the entire New Age/self-development movement. We're going to have to learn to use events like the Sedona tragedy to burn away those cataracts of denial and ignorance within us, both so that criminals like Ray will not easily come again in our midst, and that we will be better servants to the people we work for, and learn to provide them and ourselves a better, more practical, visionary, and ethical guidance. For if we fail in this, the bad apple will have truly spoiled the entire basket.