Bersabeh Ray
speaker
50 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Bersabeh Ray’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Glad to be here.
Let's see, the formative years, it was full of violence. One of my first childhood memories is bombs being dropped in our neighborhood. Imagine you go out in your street, count five houses down and having a bomb drop on it. And it was missiles dropping or missiles being shot out or gunshots or people being killed.
And it was around the same time, close to, that the whole so-called revolution happened in Iran. where the Islamic Republic took over. And so when they took over, they started giving a very hard time to people who were Baha'is, Jewish, Christians, throwing them in prison, raping the women, killing people. I mean, it was a horrific scene. And given we couldn't...
The military kicked down our door and took my father and threw him in prison. And the prison sentence there is that you may not come out. It's a death sentence. My mother was raped by the guards there. I was also experienced sexually abused by the same system. Parents are not there. So that environment, not only because of everything I just described, on top of that, women don't have any rights.
You can't work. You can't get an education. You couldn't go to school. So all of that led us to leave the country. There's no life for a human being to have any sovereignty there. And the way you got out was you had to find people to smuggle you out of the country. So you had to escape. And we found some people that we had to pay and they smuggled us out of the country.
And then at night, through the desert, at the risk of being killed, we made it out and we had to live in Pakistan for almost two years to be able to get our visas, our legal visas. Aliens to be able to come to the States. And when we came to the States, given that parents had to work full time jobs, they weren't never there and the we didn't have a very good income.
So the neighborhoods we lived in were there were bad areas. And given that I was raised by the television and my environment, I got into gang behaviors and so forth. So I went down the wrong paths of doing drugs and drinking and so forth. And the time, and I'll fast forward just a bit, when I met James, he had just recently gotten out of prison.
So when I met him, he had just gotten out of prison. And the way that happened is interesting. I had just gotten out of a horrible divorce and I was living in Belgium at the time, got the divorce, moved back to the States. And I had no idea what had happened with James and his whole story because it was all over the media.
And I had gone into some, I was trying to rebuild my life and get back into creating, making some money and so forth and finding a new career. A friend of mine had invited me to a network marketing event. I went to one meeting one time. And at that meeting, they said, we're going to have a special guest speaker from The Secret.
They didn't say who, but I thought, oh, that's interesting because I had watched it. And there's a story behind that, too. I'll tell you in a minute. So I had watched it and I thought maybe I'll go because I was at a low point in my life as well, trying to rebuild everything on top of everything else that had occurred in my earlier childhood and so forth.
I went to that meeting and he happened to be the keynote speaker there. And he had just recently gotten out of prison. He came in at the time they were filming a documentary on his life, Enlighten Us with CNN. So they come in and he comes in. He's got this long hair and goatee. And I did not recognize him. I was looking at him. I thought he wasn't in the secret. Who's that guy? Right.
and i was looking at him and he turned and looked and smiled and i was like oh it's the genie guy your witch is my command she recognized the smile i recognize the smile so he got up on stage and i'll let him tell his story but he told his story and given where my background is john i listened to his story and later that night i went and googled him which you don't want to do
google's not my friend sure i went and googled him and the story didn't match the person that i saw on stage because when you meet someone in person you can feel that person's presence and that presence didn't match what i was reading online because they make him look like a villain or a cult leader and so forth he's been called so many different names
And given, because of where I grew up, I knew, I grew up with the idea that, hey, your government is not your friend. They're not for you. The people are for each other. And authority, normally, they don't have your best interests at heart. And for that reason, I started working for him.
I reached out to him and started working for him at first and going to... Without pay, by the way, because I was $20 million in debt and homeless. Well, maybe I'll let you tell that story.
Great question. Okay, so I'll start with the most important thing. The biggest first step that I took in doing that was taking absolute responsibility for my life. And that meant everything that even what happened to me in my past in my childhood, all the way up to my adult years. Because after my divorce, I was in a horrible relationship, which was physically abusive, verbally abusive.
It was just a horrible relationship. And it pushed me to a point to go, okay, what am I doing that I keep creating these situations in my life? I'm the one who chooses to pick up a cigarette and smoke it. I'm the one who's choosing to have a drink. I'm the one who's choosing... this kind of a person to be in a relationship with. As soon as I did that, then your world starts to shift. Why?
Because you're no longer in victim mode. You're no longer in, oh, it's my parents' fault. Or, oh, it's because this happened to me in my childhood. Or I've experienced these traumas, therefore I'm going to be this way and I'm broken and I can't do anything about it. But the minute you take responsibility, you sit in the driver's seat.
And when I started working with James and being around him, one of the things that drove me, one, was because I saw the injustice that was done during his court cases and his trial and so forth. And the fact that three people died is a big deal, right? I mean, he has to live with that for the rest of his life.
Imagine going into a retreat and you're wanting to help individuals and they end up dying on your watch. It's the exact opposite of what you were trying to do for them. Those things that drove me to work with him, to help him. And also, I wanted to start being around individuals that look at life from a perspective of, I want to do better. I want to live in the image that God created me in.
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