James Arthur Ray (November 22, 1957 – January 3, 2025) was an American self-help businessman, motivational speaker, author and convicted felon who was found guilty in 2011 of causing three deaths through negligent homicide.

A former telemarketer, Ray taught Stephen Covey motivational seminars while employed at AT&T and claimed he later worked two years for the Covey foundation; however the company has no record of him as an employee or contractor. In 2006 he appeared on CNN's Larry King Live and was one of several narrators in the film The Secret. He also appeared on the Today Show and Oprah.

In October 2009, three participants died while taking part in a ritual, led by Ray, at one of his New Age retreats. Ray was arrested in 2010, and in 2011 convicted of three counts of negligent homicide. He served two years in Arizona state prison and was released under supervision on July 12, 2013. Following his release, Ray re-launched his self-help business.

Ray was born in Honolulu on November 22, 1957, while his father was stationed there in the U.S. Navy. He grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his father was a preacher at the Red Fork Church of God. Ray described his childhood as impoverished, claiming that, "The hardest part of my childhood was reconciling how Dad poured his heart into his work, how he helped so many people and yet he couldn't afford to pay for haircuts for me and my brother," in his 2008 book Harmonic Wealth. A classmate of Ray's recalled that, "Ray always dressed well and knew he'd make something of himself."

He dropped out of junior college in 1978 and eventually started working at AT&T, initially as a telemarketer, later as a sales manager and trainer. He started his own seminars and motivational speaker events in the early 1990s, launching his first company in 1992. Ray set up the now defunct James Ray International, Inc. in Las Vegas in 2000.

Ray was an advocate of the pseudoscientific Law of Attraction; his teachings have been described as "including a mix of spirituality, motivational speaking, and quantum physics". In an interview, Ray answered about personal responsibility, "I fully know, for me, that there is no blame. Every single thing is your responsibility ... and nothing is your fault. Because every single thing that comes to you is gift ... a lesson."

Ray advocated for the New Thought belief that positive thinking can heal physical ailments, and claimed to have used willpower to stay free of all illness. Writing for The Guardian, Andrew Gumbel described the pseudoscientific claims as "quantum flapdoodle", "because it claims to be rooted in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and other tenets of modern physics".

Concerns were raised starting in 2000 regarding the safety and soundness of his methods.