We’re interviewing a man who has enjoyed great success in the corporate arena and then followed his passions to the far corners of the globe to learn the wisdom of the most ancient cultures in the world.

James Ray spent five years as one of AT&T’s top sales managers, four years as a personal and business-growth expert with AT&T’s School of Business, and four years working with best-selling author, Stephen Covey.

He left the corporate world to study the wisdom of the ancients in Peru, the jungles of the Amazon and the deserts of Egypt.

Today, he is CEO and president of James Ray International, and his Journey of Power Program shows participants how to bridge the gap between real-world success and spiritual fulfillment.

I met James through Jack Canfield, co-creator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series. James and I are both members of the Transformational Leadership Council, founded by Jack several years ago.

James is a man of great integrity who communicates some of the most fundamental truths of life with power and skill.

It’s also a great honor to have my other friend, Bill Harris, the founder and director of Centerpointe Research Institute, and another member of the Transformational Leadership Council, as co-host for this interview.

Bill Harris: I’ve known James for a while now and he is a really remarkable person. I think it would behoove everybody to listen very carefully to what he has to say and take it very seriously, because this guy really has it together in a wide range of areas.

I know, James, that one of the things that’s really remarkable about you is that you started off in the corporate success-oriented world and moved into the more metaphysical, spiritual world, in terms of the stuff you teach.

Then you found a way to combine both of these in a very seamless way. A lot of people segment these two areas of life. Tell us how you did that and how you see those things being combined?

James Ray: One of the things we find in a lot of ”spiritual” traditions is that they tend to believe that, to want a nice home, a fine suit, to want a beautiful body, or to be attractive is not “spiritual,” and that’s a profound “ignore-ance,” in my opinion. The reason that is hyphenated means “ignore-ance” of the unity of one.

Every great spiritual tradition teaches us that all things come from a single source. Every great scientific tradition, even current quantum physics, tell us that everything comes from the same source.

Whether you call that the zero-point field in quantum physics, or whether you call that God in spiritual traditions, the source is the same.

What I realized a long time ago is that any time you damn any part of creation, you damn God. That really pushed against my programming, growing up in very traditional religious upbringing, but I’ve kind of always pushed against my programming, and realized that that’s important to do.

I started questioning when I was really young, Bill. I was kind of a weird kid.

Bill Harris: You’re still a weird kid.

James Ray: I am, and that’s why we like each other! When most kids were out running to parties, going to movies and doing things that young people do, I was home trying to figure out how the universe works.

I started studying Buddhism in a strict, Christian household when I was 18 years old, which is kind of bizarre.

I can’t remember a time, really, when I wanted anything more than to understand the laws of the universe, how they worked, and how they applied to every area of life.

So when I went into a traditional business arena, as you mentioned, AI was very successful there. One of the people I studied with, whom I’m a fan of, and he’s a friend of yours as well, is Ken Wilber. Wilber says, “As you evolve, you have to transcend and include.”

What that means to me, from a practical standpoint, is that as I evolve and grow, I don’t suppress or let go of the things that are of a physical nature, to soar into the realms of spirit. I firmly believe that the practical mystic is a person who can soar into the mystical realms, but come back and ground that as a physical plane. That’s why I believe we’re here.

Bill Harris: I find people who are so “spiritual” that there are a lot of parts of the world and of life that are not okay, to be very dry and brittle. It’s not a lot of fun to be around them. A lot of people who are really serious about the spiritual path go through a phase where they do that.

Hopefully, they come out the other end where they realize, like you said, that you need to transcend and include, and that it’s not money and possessions that are a problem, really—it’s attachment to them.

James Ray: You’re right. I study with some really enlightened people. By the way, I believe we have this misnomer about enlightenment. I think that, if you look at the prefix “en-,” from Latin, it means “to be.”

So enlightenment is to “be light.” Well, quantum physics tells us that every single thing in our universe, every single manifest entity, is 99.99999% light.

So you’re already enlightened. When we talk about enlightenment, we tend to think, in many circles, that we have to wear white robes, eat a lot of legumes and talk in a soft, harmonious whisper and never have sex.

Bill Harris: That’s the way I do it, except for the last part.

James Ray: Well count me out, because if that’s enlightenment, I don’t want any part of it, and I don’t think you do either, Bill, quite frankly.

Bill Harris: This is mostly because you don’t like beans, right…or you do like sex?

James Ray: Yes, both of the above. But here’s the thing. Any time you damn any part of creation, you damn God, because it’s all the same stuff, if you will.

That’s another reason why I firmly believe that Eastern mysticism is never going to play to a large audience in the Western world, because Eastern mysticism, by and large—and of course, I’m generalizing here to some degree—is about turning away from sitting in one space and jumping into God.

That’s one thing you can do, there’s a time and place for that, and you’re right. I went through those phases where I thought I didn’t want any material possessions, I just want to have a spiritual experience, and I had profound meditative experiences at one time, I thought, “I don’t want to come back,” because this is really way cool.”

I quote Pierre Teilhard de Chardin quite frequently. A long time ago, he said, “You’re not a physical being having a spiritual experience; you’re a spiritual being having a physical experience.”

Bill Harris: It’s interesting that you would bring this up, this idea of having such profound experiences that you don’t want to come back. One of the things I’ve always taught is that people are creating a reality with their minds.

The reason they’re not seeing the reality that’s talked about by mystics—the idea that it’s all one energy and so on and so forth—is because the reality you’re creating with your mind, which essentially chops up the oneness into all these pieces, conceptually, because these pieces don’t really exist in reality, as long as you’re focused in this reality you’re creating with your mind, you miss the other reality.

So the first stage of spiritual growth, if people get that far, is one where they begin to actually experience the fact that there is a reality created by their minds, but it isn’t the reality, and they begin to experience and perceive that reality.

A lot of times, people think, especially at first, “I don’t want to come back.” A higher level, in my opinion, is when you go back into the world created by the mind, but this time you realize that it is something you’re making up, but you can go back into it and play.

James Ray: That’s a heck of a lot of fun.

Bill Harris: It is a heck of a lot of fun, and that’s when you have the ability to create whatever you want in the world. If you’re not going to play in this world, there’s no point in being here.

James Ray: Why did you even come here? Going back to your spiritual being having a physical experience, from Chardin, my addendum to that is, “Please remember, you are having a physical experience,” so there’s a reason why you’re here.

A lot of people who are spiritual aspirants may want to argue with me on this, but keep open minded.

I have never once met an individual who is in a non-dual state all the time. You can’t function in the third dimension in a non-dual state.

You’re absolutely correct, Bill, this reality we create with our minds is what we’re experiencing in the third dimension, and here’s now I differentiate them—I say reality is the third dimension, but actuality is beyond the third dimension.

They’re different. Reality is only what you create in a dualistic plane. One of the laws in our universe, in the third dimension, is the law of polarity.

For there to be up, there has to be a down; for there to be in, an out—and that’s also called duality. It cannot be any other way. That’s reality in the third dimension, and you tend to look at reality with your eyes and react to reality.

However, when you actually tap into actuality, which is above the dualistic plane, then you can act, and that’s a big difference. If we want to merge quantum physics here with what we’re talking about, with mysticism, a photon is timeless, spaceless, massless and chargeless. It does not exist.

Everything comes from photons of light. A photon does not exist in the third dimension because it’s timeless, spaceless, massless and chargeless. That’s what I would call actuality. Then that photon divides for manifestation purposes, into a positron and electron.

A positron has a positive charge; an electron has a negative charge. That’s duality and that’s where reality is created by our minds, and is through the observation of saying, “This is good, this is bad.”

Bill Harris: Which are all distinctions we create conceptually and aren’t really intrinsic to reality. There’s something added by the mind.

James Ray: I would say, for my terminology, that they are intrinsic to reality; they’re not intrinsic to actuality.

Bill Harris: Okay. It depends on what you mean by reality. I meant Reality with a big R, which is what you’re calling actuality.

James Ray: Which kind of makes it a little easier to differentiate for me.

Bill Harris: Let me circle around here for a minute because the whole purpose of this series is the idea of passion. You definitely sound very passionate about all of this, and I can tell by your history that, even as a child, you were very passionate about all of this.

What role do you see passion playing in this whole thing? We’re talking about a certain amount of archean stuff, rather than day-to-day problems that people are experiencing. How does this stuff apply? Why should somebody be passionate about this and why are you passionate about it?

James Ray: It’s my life. To answer your first question about what role passion plays, it’s the primary driver. Inspiration, or passion, is what motivates you, long term, to continue to act.

When you’re inspired or when you’re really passionate about something, no one or no thing outside of you needs to provide motivation. That inspiration or passion comes from inside of you, and you pursue this because it’s your love.

Your work becomes your love, made manifest through action. I believe the person who really understands these concepts understands that to pursue your passion, the individual who is really (who I call) the practical mystic, or the passionate individual pursuing their dreams in life and creating their reality, must understand that you have to embrace pain and pleasure in the pursuit of your passion or purpose.

Those are going to occur in a dualistic plane. If you understand, from a quantum physics standpoint, that for every positron, which is positive, and let’s say it says you make $100,000 a year (or whatever your goal is), and you say that’s positive, then in duality, there has to be a corresponding “negative.”

The master is the individual who understands that and embraces both the pain and the pleasure in the pursuit of his or her passion.

Bill, you run a big business and so do I. I can reflect back on the day when I was a solo act in my business and there were a lot of things about those days that are really attractive now when I start to think about all the business, employee and legal issues, et cetera, that I must embrace now to run a multi-million-dollar business,.

That’s just part of it. We have this Pollyanna, lopsided perception of what reality is supposed to be. Therefore, we become disempowered and under enthusiastic in what we’re pursuing. Does that make sense to you?....

This is an excerpt of a longer article at

Healthy Wealthy nWise

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