A fatal vision

What we must keep in mind is that the master embraces pain and pleasure in the pursuit of his or her vision and intention. An easier life is a fantasy. When we create our dreams, there’s always going to be some part of the creation that isn’t quite what we prefer.

— James Arthur Ray

The morning of the sweat lodge, Ray’s followers returned to their small cabins at Angel Valley. They’d spent the night fasting, scattered alone in the desert — Ray called it a "vision quest." Many had not eaten for days; many had gone overnight without sleep or water. They showered and changed clothes before sitting down to a celebratory breakfast of vegetarian food. Ray explained that vegetarians are "not very grounded" because of a lack of protein. "However," he said, "I don't want you grounded here. I want you off-balance … I want you out of your traditional patterns."

They’d been taken out of their traditional patterns, having persevered through four days of physical challenges: the fasting, the Samurai Game, the head shavings. Ray had led similar activities at the annual Spiritual Warrior event at Angel Valley since 2003. But this time participants were not told beforehand what to expect. When Ray revealed the sweat lodge ceremony — which he described as "hotter than hell" — many were surprised.

Many cultures have sweat lodge rituals, and Ray claimed to have modeled his after Native American practice. Traditions vary, but in all of them tribal elders monitor sweat lodge leaders for years before they’re permitted to conduct ceremonies; the training covers spiritual demands, but also basic safety. High temperatures can impair judgment, causing participants (and untrained leaders) to make poor decisions. Accidents can happen even to trained leaders. Amateur sweat lodges have caused a handful of deaths in the past, whether from heatstroke, suffocation, or smoke inhalation.

The ceremony is a communal experience, usually involving meditation and a leader’s spiritual guidance. A "round" might consist of 15 to 40 minutes inside a densely humid room at 150 to 180 degrees Fahrenheit, followed by a cool-down outside. A typical ceremony might involve two to three rounds.

Ray’s sweat lodges disregarded much of this tradition. Instead, he created a kind of endurance test. In 2009, the temperature approached 200 degrees Fahrenheit; maybe hotter, since no one had a thermometer. A typical lodge might hold 5-10 people who would share a collective experience. Ray demanded Angel Valley allow a lodge big enough for 75 people. (The man Ray asked to design the lodge, David Singing Bear, later claimed to have doubts about its size. His qualifications for designing such a lodge have also been questioned.) Few of the attendees even knew one another’s names, but they would be thrust together in the heat and darkness under the dome.

Outside Ray told them they were about to have an experience unlike any other. According to several attendees, he said, "You are not going to die. You might think you are, but you're not going to die." Each attendee should listen to his or her body, he said. Anyone could leave if necessary, but those seeking a higher level of consciousness would complete the experience. No one knew how many rounds that might be. Ray told them they "needed to surrender to death to survive it." Then they entered the lodge.

Problems began almost immediately. Those farthest from the door had trouble breathing. With each round, Ray had more heated stones added. He’d asked for 100 stones to be readied; the next-hottest lodge, according to the fire-tender, had used 30 stones. Typically sweat lodge leaders use a ladle to apply water to the stones; Ray dumped water straight from the buckets. (He also used water from the buckets to cool himself.) As the prosecution later argued, the high temperature and overwhelming humidity made it impossible for the participants’ bodies to cool themselves. As the rounds wore on, people began exhibiting signs of heatstroke: confusion, nausea, and loss of consciousness.

Debbie Mercer was hired by Ray to pass heated stones into the lodge. She stood outside the door and thus saw everyone exiting and entering. After the first round, 12 people exited. From inside, Ray encouraged them to return; one woman cried that she was "disappointing James Ray," but couldn’t bring herself to re-enter the lodge. Ray’s employees placed their hands on her back and began pushing her toward the entrance before Mercer intervened. Others collapsed at the entrance and had to be dragged away from the door. People inside began to lose consciousness; they too had to be dragged out.

"It’s a good day to die!"

One longtime Ray follower received severe burns after falling into the rocks used to heat the lodge. Another began screaming repeatedly, "I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!" and calling out the names of his two children. Ray seated by the exit closest to the only source of oxygen, remained calm. One witness heard him mutter, "Buddy, you need to pull it together," before jubilantly saying "It’s a good day to die!" — apparently referencing his claim that followers would be "reborn" during the event. One participant testified that even as she passed out, her thoughts echoed James Arthur Ray: "It's a good day to die."

Why did so many people subject themselves to such deadly conditions? At trial, many witnesses seemed ashamed, unable to fathom their own actions. They spoke of assuming they were in capable hands; Ray had told them they might pass out, and that was okay. They’d paid more than $10,000 for the experience, making it hard to back out of many of the activities. They were isolated, both from other sources of authority and from one another — despite being a group, they were very much alone. And they were afraid of disappointing Ray. Whenever someone would challenge him about extreme heat — or ask him to let them out of the lodge — he’d respond with "you’re more than that" and "you can do this."

By the end of the eighth and final round, the event had devolved into chaos. Kirby Brown was airlifted to the Verde Valley Medical Center in Cottonwood, Arizona, and pronounced dead on arrival. James Shore, a 40-year-old father of three young children who practiced therapeutic medicine and played drums in a band, was found beside her in the lodge, holding her hand. Witnesses said he’d dragged out a fellow participant, saving her life, before going back in. He too was dead on arrival.

When authorities tried to question Ray, a note on his door said he would be unavailable because he was in "prayer and meditation." Investigators later said he had showered and was eating dinner when police finally reached him. After preliminary questioning, he flew back to California.

Nine days later, Liz Neuman — a longtime devoted follower of Ray's who had spent more than $100,000 over seven years at various James Ray International gatherings and who had fallen into a coma in the sweat lodge — died of organ failure. By then, Ray was already giving another seminar. On the day of Kirby Brown’s funeral, he conducted a seminar for the World Wealth Society — a members-only group of his most devoted followers, which cost as much as $90,000 per year to join. Connie Joy, an attendee, wrote that Ray told people to dance to the Black Eyed Peas as a way to "shake loose the sadness." Word came to him onstage that Liz had died; according to Joy, he showed no emotion.

How did so many seemingly intelligent people follow James Arthur Ray into the sweat lodge that day? "Many times in my work, people will say to me, ‘What kind of person gets involved in this stuff?’" responds Rick Ross, a cult-intervention specialist. "My answer is, ‘It could be anyone.’" He says Ray uses "large-group awareness training," or LGAT, where a single leader trains a large group in a particular worldview. Leaders like Ray, Ross suggests, see themselves as more than trainers. "They all have this kind of zealous, almost evangelical view of their philosophy as being an end-all and a cure-all for the participants," Ross says. And if something goes wrong, it’s not the leader’s fault.

In Ray’s case, things had gone wrong before. As far back as 2000, those close to him had voiced concerns about his overzealousness, likening his seminar style to a strength competition rather than a self-help talk. He encouraged participants, regardless of physical brawn or training, to break plywood with their fists, or to bend rebar using only their necks. Predictably, this led to injuries.

His previous sweat lodges had also caused problems. In 2005, Daniel Pfankuch turned irrational and violent after spending almost four hours in the lodge — confusion is a symptom of heatstroke. Ray refused to call 911, and argued loudly with the Angel Valley owner when she did so. Pfankuch went to the hospital, where he received IV fluids for hours. Afterward, he believed he’d had an out-of-body experience from which he’d never fully returned. He went from a six-figure income to being unemployed, unmarried, and homeless. Asked by detectives in 2009 whether Ray realized that the sweat lodge could be dangerous, Pfankuch replied, "He certainly knew afterwards. He told me that his ego got in the way and he needed to sit down and learn from this."

At trial, the husband and wife hired to manage Ray’s sweat lodges testified to what they’d seen. Debbie and Ted Mercer described participants vomiting, collapsing into the mud, and acting disoriented. In 2008, Ted Mercer had helped subdue an apparently delusional man who tried to remove his girlfriend from the lodge; irate and raving, the man later remembered nothing of the incident. Debbie Mercer recalled a woman in a pink bathing suit who, even 45 minutes after leaving the lodge, could not remember her own name. And in 2009, she said, she told Ray that three people had stopped breathing and that she needed a cell phone to call 911. Ray shrugged. Later, when Debbie Mercer returned from her house after calling emergency services, she saw James Ray talking on his cell phone. There is no record of his having called 911.

Ray had instructed his participants to pretend they were homeless

The reluctance to contact authorities also fit a pattern. As part of a two-day seminar just a few months earlier, Ray had instructed his participants to pretend they were homeless. Soon after, one attendee, 46-year-old Colleen Conaway, jumped to her death from the fourth floor of a shopping mall. A yet-unsettled lawsuit in San Diego claims that Ray knew Conaway had gone missing, but ordered the group to leave the mall without her. He and his employees did not contact police until six hours after Conaway’s death — and after leaving concerned-sounding messages on her cellphone, which she’d turned over to Ray’s staff before the homelessness exercise. She’d also given up her driver’s license, which led authorities to label her a Jane Doe until Ray’s people eventually faxed over a copy of her ID.

Yet whatever went wrong, Ray’s authority among his followers remained virtually absolute. Much of that authority came from his charisma — his image as a tanned, handsome, and articulate alpha male. He worked hard to maintain that persona. When police searched his suitcase in Sedona, they found a large collection of medications, including testosterone, human growth hormone, steroids, and Propecia, typically used to treat an enlarged prostate or to fight male pattern baldness.

But most of his authority came from his business success and his spiritual credentials. Under scrutiny, however, many of his qualifications withered. He claimed initiation in three shamanic traditions in Peru, each of which could have taken a decade. In actuality, he’d been "initiated" into all three at once, along with a number of United States tourists; his much-vaunted spiritual mentor was a tour guide. He said he’d been initiated into Huna, a Hawaiian spiritual tradition (and itself a target of criticism over its dubious authenticity). He’d taken four classes, then begun teaching the material, much to the consternation of his instructor. He had a similar degree of training in Neuro-linguistic Programming. He joined the Rosicrucians through a correspondence class. His Samurai Game was copyrighted by someone else; the originator of Holotropic breathing told Ray to stop using it. And he had no apparent training in running a sweat lodge.

Because of several court rulings, the jury heard only some of Ray’s problematic history with sweat lodges. It was not enough to find him guilty of manslaughter, but after 10 hours — and four months after his trial began — the jury returned a verdict: guilty on three counts of negligent homicide, a lesser charge. He was sentenced to serve two years in prison, but was released after 18 months in July, 2013.