I wouldn’t say Soryu and I are friends. But there are some similarities to our respective paths, probably some degree of mutual respect.
We are about the same age, we both come from areas of the country that were ‘last touched’ by modernity’s transformation towards the post-modern sense of self. So we were among the last to see the great tidal wave of self-obsessed humanism break over the land. We both saw the responsibilities to the future we expected vanish. We both declined the opportunity
I’m embarrassed. The idea that a guy gone 7 mos a year runs a cult is absurd on its face. Even worse an absurdity is the idea that a monastic experience aimed at awakening is not going to be psychologically challenging. There are over 2500 yrs of history on awakening. None of it is documented as easy. In fact it’s the opposite, awakening is absolutely brutal, and it’s in the history
Soryu and his band of monastics are the only people I’ve found who are attempting to address the advance of xenobacillus glossophagii (voice in your head pretending to be you) in a modern context at scale. I dislike this piece they published because it takes the mental formations of this epistemological mind virus and turns it back on itself. I appreciate the effort it took to even attempt to do so cleanly. It shows a true honoring of those they are addressing. But it’s never going to be enough
Of course they recognize this as well
May they receive the funds so they can do the job that actually needs to be done
I wanted to respond to Kyle's post directly but then I found it was really challenging to really listen. To listen means to empty your mind and be open.
I care deeply for this community and I noticed I was getting a bit defensive and emotional. This means I was not able to really engage with that post using the mind, the language the audience there respects.
It takes a certain type of mind to be objective and lay out all the claims, trace the assumptions, steel man your opposing side and sincerely try to assist in truth seeking. I admire the rationalists who practice this and these accusations are active in that part of the internet where the standard for what is true is based on how transparent are the parties, do they seem logical in how they trace the causal chains of the events, are they engaging with critique in good faith, have they shown epistemic humility to update or are they holding onto some position as if its load bearing for their identity, what is the track record for their predictions, is the analysis comprehensive, and I could go on
This is based on a trust that it is a weakness to be attached to any position, to care emotionally and rather trust the process. Debate, argue and the "true" position will win.
This can be true if we have a container like a courtroom where we have systems in place to make it more likely that happens but on the internet it becomes mob justice. I do not think most groups have great epistemic standards.
So it takes time and effort to respond in this manner and the stakes are high here, this is a organization trying to some very difficult things, this affects maple's reputation. People are giving up their time, attention, trusting the container to train at this academy and if they are being harmed that is also a very serious matter.
I found it and still find it hard to speak up on a comment thread because I know how it is like to scream into the internet, how easy it is for your words to be taken out of context and used against you and the values you cherish.
That objective mind can deal with the internet, it can decouple well, draw boundaries and be impersonal. It helps to be precise and careful, slow and methodical. But then that would be hypocrisy to use that mind unskillfully to defend a community that showed me the dangers of letting that mind optimize without limit.
If there is one thing I sorta learned from my experiences visiting as an AI fellow at MAPLE and even doing a month of training is that that mind is the emissary and not supposed to be king. Another thing is that direct experience is a better standard to judge someone/something than hearsay so you can visit and see for yourself who the people are and talk to them, make up your own mind.
I would advice taking it slow and really being careful with the commitments you make because you can hurt yourself if you don't take spiritual training seriously.
I have direct experience of being with this community. Friends of mine have visited MAPLE on my recommendation and I have talked to people who have trained there. If you who is reading this wants to get on a video call with me and ask me questions I am happy to give you my time and promise to be honest.
I would rather help people while staying in relationship because that is how we survive these difficult times. There is no simple story that I can craft that can do justice to the raw complexity of reality that you would experience.
I take epistemics quite seriously, which is why "how do I know what I know" is not answered in any single way.
To say the rationalists have a "very narrow answer" seems to me to be an absurd thing to say about what is, ultimately, an ongoing collaborative effort available for anyone to read and participate in, at any time, for free.
From my admittedly outsider perspective, MAPLE's "better way" seems to be "come dedicate a massive chunk of your time and give up some autonomy to experiencing it yourself, or else just trust us and disregard what anyone who has been here says if it is negative."
What am I missing, here? Where is the "better way," and how can I learn about it without blind trust that I won't be wasting my time, and yours, by going to MAPLE myself?
I would say I enjoy holding beliefs lightly, I see the complex web of dependencies between views and it still fascinates me how it can form these memeplexes
If I could offer some perspective on how I think MAPLE's way is different from the rationalist way, it would be my own grappling with how to show up in this online space authentically
The old me took pride in having a small identity, and this meant not having stakes. I was so commited to the "truth" that I believed it would hold me back to also notice the interconnectness of my action
Even this comment, if I really really slow down and pay attention. I am influencing your life in subtle ways, many people online will read this and to quote a message I sent a friend
"I struggled a lot because I am used to not having stakes when it comes to arguing. It is painful to imagine the costs this is having on the org, on its ability to help cyborgs, the karmic effects on the cyborgs that practice attacking a potential teacher, my own inability to rise to the challenge and defend maple, my uncertainty and doubts around if there is spiritual bypassing going on, and not being able to do anything but having to do something and live with the consequences. So it was and is easier for me to often not choose consciousness and escape."
I don't think MAPLE has some sort of copyright on this view of awareness, mindfulness being important. I spend time in monastic containers around India and this importance of facing this web of relations is implicitly communicated here
But MAPLE does seem to take on the task of trying to reach out to a specific class of humans who are deeply integrated with technology who could really use this teaching
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The word epistemics itself seems to frame reality as if you can swap beliefs in a modular manner. But the key shift with maple is that it's not some idea you hold but a living practice that you actually do.
So you do justice to having a belief only by actually acting in the world as if its true and paying attention to the consequences
In this frame it's not just useless but actively harmful to say intellectually recognize that veganism is "moral" or "reasonable" but act against it. Because the more your actions are inconsistent with your beliefs you grow more fragmented. You lose confidence that you can cultivate integrity where your beliefs, intentions, speech, action are all aligned.
So overall it's this decoupling that rationality offered that I think made it easier for me to seek the truth in the short run, I respect it because it's tractable. If you demanded I only hold true beliefs if I live by them then I would just give up because it's too hard when I had limited slack, dealing with many addictions.
So good epistemics back then meant that I held high resolution details maps of reality in my head but struggled to actually integrate them into my daily life. This is where therapy, art, community, friendships, many spiritual traditions are worth experimenting with to try and pursue integrity, a new goal for me.
Coming to discourse online there are limits to sharing this way through text but I appreciated reading your comments elsewhere in post and I could send the sincerity with which you are asking hard questions and refusing to settle for answers that do not satisfy you.
I think you are better able to bring the kind of mind I wish to cultivate online quoting something I told a friend
"It is hard for me to imagine how to engage with people online with the kind of mind maple is trying to cultivate. To bring that mind of attention, being open, compassionate even when I am alone, sitting is hard, its hard with friends and family, and with strangers and with groups of strangers. Now to keep that mind when you are connected to strangers on an interface that was designed to summon the opposite kind of mind, to dehumanize, to exclude, to consume, to forget the consequences of your words, to be apathetic, cruel, hedonistic, etc."
To be kind doesn't mean to enable their bad behaviour like you said you would call soryu aside and see if he was ok. Or you recalling your friendship with renshin and giving this post your attention and time, sharing how it landed for you. Not everyone would be giving maple as much benefit of doubt as you have.
So then I am curious if you would agree with my characterisation of rationalistics taking on this frame of instrumental and epistemic rationality which creates portable maps that offer free power to people who was to optimize for arbitrary ends. This means they are not truth seeking but power seeking.
Unless you define truth as that which offers predictive power over nature to extract resources, manipulate reality in a way where you stand apart from it.
Thank you for your thoughtful effort in trying to clarify things for me. There's a lot I can say, but I'd like to start by asking some questions first to test my understanding of your words so far.
1) Is the idea you're gesturing at concerning only beliefs that seem to hold some "compulsion," some "shouldness?" Or is the issue you're gesturing at with epistemic rationality also about the fundamental distinctions of legibility, or objective reality vs subjective at all?
2) What do you mean by "manipulate reality in a way where you stand apart from it?" I consider humanity part of reality, animals that evolved as a result of a natural process of billions of creatures attempting to predict their environments and extract value from it for their own benefit. I say this in a neutral way, not one meant to imply that there can never be moral lens through which to judge actions. But while there are distinct methods and results that come from the intelligence and coordination humans can bring to the task, I'm not sure what the alternative frame you're suggesting is, and whether it is implicitly assuming that the correct way to live is one in which humans deliberately avoid predicting their environments better, or deliberately avoid extracting resources, or something else.
3) Is your example about veganism meant to indicate something like, "beliefs that you intellectually agree with but feel some emotionally disagreement with are dangerous to your sense of self?" If so, I think I partially agree, but would consider this a problem of undervaluing the implicit, not of attempting to "create portable maps."
I consider emotions a form of embodied and distilled information, sometimes even implicit knowledge that's actually true even if it cannot yet be made legible to yourself and others.
That doesn't make emotions always correct in what they're pushing or pulling against, but it means that I consider someone who is struggling with a "rational" belief vs an emotional one to be someone who has overly privileged one over the other, rather than knowing how to better listen to both and either integrate their separate sources of knowledge, or seek what's missing in the gaps or apparent contradictions. Each map can be useful without necessarily being true, and I'm not sure what aspect of the rationalist view of maps is being gestured at by the word "portable."
Thank you again for your engagement; if this is too many questions at once, feel free to pick the one that is most salient to you to answer.
People get what they put into the training. Some people go deep within ~2 weeks. Does that count as a massive chunk of time? I wouldn't say so personally. But also, such people do tend to be coming in with very positive qualities that make it possible for them to throw themselves in more fully to the endeavor.
The more attached to personal intelligence someone is, the harder it can be for them. I count myself in that category. So I've made slow progress. You strike me as similarly (to myself, from before) attached to intelligence, reasoning, explication, theorizing, etc. And of course, an unwillingness to even /try it out/ is part of what makes it take much, much longer... you could easily die first.
Why do you believe it's on other people to convince you that you're wrong on the internet? That strikes me as an entitled position.
I gave my life to seek the truth, and I've been on that journey my whole life, including my time with the rationalists. No one at MAPLE sold me on anything before I came. It's just one more step on a very long truth-seeking journey, and I am fortunate that I have been in a position to seek it out so fully and without compromising.
If I'd settled with the rationalists and their version of 'truth-seeking' I would have died without even a glimmer. But I wasn't satisfied with their meager (and in fact net-negative) practices, most of which are impoverished versions of tried and true methods.
There are 1,001 different retreats, workshops, seminars, etc that each claim to have some uniquely valuable thing to teach or impart. Many of them do, perhaps even most of them do to someone, but I think it's pretty reasonable for people to want some information or understanding before dedicating the time and effort.
I live a fairly privileged life in that I am happier than basically anyone else I know and self-sufficiently self-employed, but yes, 2 weeks is a pretty massive ask when there's nothing to indicate what I will actually gain from it but vague platitudes. I like experimenting with new things and exploring new ideas or states of mind. I've done 5 day communication courses that were incredibly insightful for me even after a master's degree in family therapy. A single weekend with the right Alexander Technique teacher taught me a new skill that I can use to great benefit in the rest of my life, and each subsequent lesson helped strengthen the skill or my understanding of it. I do not think I am opposed to trying new things, or overly skeptical that they are worth the time.
What I am skeptical of is this style of mystique-wrapped sneering, like it's just *beneath* MAPLE to try to make itself more legible, because the only possible way anyone can get anything from its supposedly unique insights is to come in person to experience it. I don't doubt that this may be true for some people, and maybe you're one of them.
But as for "entitlement," I honestly don't know what you mean, and expect that you're letting some sense of defensiveness (understandable given things I said above) override clarity. You were the one to bring up rationalists and denigrate their epistemics and close-mindedness; I'm not asking you convince me of anything you didn't jump to asserting first.
I don't think you're able to, and I take that inability as a sign that MAPLE is not actually teaching something universally true and valuable. My model is it's providing a very particular kind of environment that is helpful for a very particular kind of person, and harmful for many others who either bounce off quickly, and some mix of helpful and harmful for those that stay for longer than they should.
And this would be fine if MAPLE were more self-aware of that, and able to predict what sorts of people are likely to be which. Not the least because then *I* could maybe understand which category I'd be in. But from what I've heard from people who left, and the original post, and your responses here, I don't see that self-awareness at all.
I am welcome to make claims online without needing to further explain to you why I'm making them. I might call it entitled if someone believed I did need to further explain myself and then balked when I did not. It's okay to say True Things, plainly and simply and let it be that. There's no need to prove oneself Right on the Internet. It's not a good use of time.
You're right that not everyone is a fit for MAPLE and that not everyone should come here. Based on what you've shared, you are not our audience, and that is perfectly fine. But I think this conversation has been helpful in a number of ways. I appreciate this chance to share more!
I'm not going to argue over the definition of "sneering." You made a number of unflattering assumptions about me that were false, and you denigrated rationalists and their epistemics in a way that made it clear you were not just talking about your own experience of it, which would be entirely your right and inarguable, but as absolute judgements.
Call it what you want; either way, I find it an unbecoming response to someone asking for clarification and understanding.
I can't peer into your soul and I abhor psychoanalysis. If my guess that you were responding defensively was wrong, so be it. I brought it up in case it would be helpful for you to take a step back and see if it was true.
But I don't have an alternate model for why you responded the way you did to my simple questions when you could have either answered substantively, or just ignored them if it is truly not a "good use of time." To say "there's no lack of self awareness at play here" is not something I really know how to respond to, and will make due with just letting your own earlier words sit in contrast.
And all that is before even getting to your framing here, which I continue to find needlessly antagonistic:
"I am welcome to make claims online without needing to further explain to you why I'm making them. I might call it entitled if someone believed I did need to further explain myself and then balked when I did not. It's okay to say True Things, plainly and simply and let it be that. There's no need to prove oneself Right on the Internet. It's not a good use of time."
True, you do not "need" to do anything. I never implied you did.
You are welcome to say your words; I am welcome to say mine, and ask honest questions.
You call that "entitlement," as if my words require something of you. Why not instead just ignore them? I demanded nothing of you, laid no claim on your time or attention, and am not injured at all if you choose not to respond.
I will continue to ask questions if people say things that seem false or confusing to me, and if that compels you to respond with personal attacks or denigration of others, that is your choice.
Finally, I don't know what you mean by "balked," that's not a use of that word I recognize in this context, but the frame seems to be that I somehow made an issue of you not answering my questions. I did not: I simply pointed it out and my thoughts about it.
I did that because it was a True Thing, and as you rightfully pointed out, people can say True Things, plainly and simply.
I came across this website recently: https://omnicide.exposed/ . I wonder if Kyle's critique meets the author's criteria for legitimate:
"A legitimate critique would include, at minimum, one concrete and independently verifiable claim — submitted either publicly or through private channels — that the author, having spent years in residential training at MAPLE and having investigated these matters in depth, could not in good conscience dismiss."
Hard to know anything in these he said she said days of internet insanity.
Well I really wish I saw this before I started any engagement. This discussion on has succinctly captured the issue that has stormed my being in every which way, why am I internally arguing myself over nothing? From here, I move towards avoidance.
The question (a trap itself!!) is why is all of the information, answers, and responses so difficult for any person navigating this topic so difficult to collate and make sense of? I have even used Anthropic’s Claude research modules multiple times to pull in so much information. (Discount biases, while itself being biased towards whatever weight, find claims, find answers.) The stuff that lands is usually within videos, links, or any other materials not already indexed by search engines.
For me to have made sense of this, I had to have gone through all of the research, visiting, and read everything, and, as a letter to the reader, I think that’s a welcome call to notice if you’re just really struggling with this and are avoidant. Maybe you haven’t gone to a retreat or doing any of any spiritual journey. The marketing for wellness events likes to sell them as deeply relaxing and healing stuff, but I think it’s best stated as a colonizing tool to get people doing bad things to feel better to do more bad things. Spiritual healing fucking sucks, so you don’t have to go here, but know going to MAPLE sucks and could be quite fruitful.
Another source with strong bias: https://awful.systems/post/9514912, you can use AI to fact check or practice discernment, but I found this to be an excellent resource to have collected a good chunk of claims to investigate.
This “he says, she says” shit is tiring, because I think we’re all in on multiple scams and it’s just so exhausting and difficult to parse for all reasons mentioned on the video (9m on 2x, worth the listen).
I’ve spent the last two hours juggling worries, fears, concern for and against, and it’s a fucking wild ride well worth riding. Thank yall, and I wish you find a way to find justice that serves you, Kyle, and all others mentioned in the links above. (Ha, easy for me to say from the sidelines.)
It’s astounding to me that there are people like Kyle who waste this precious life slandering others, especially when they’re slandering people who have been and continue to be kind and loving to them and others.
I have trained with Maple and have known Soryu and others there for many years. I know this community to be impeccably honest, caring and high integrity.
Modern society, especially in this country, is so distrustful, so suspicious of anyone different, and so eager to blame anyone else for one’s own ignorance, failings and projections. It’s no wonder this country is rampant with violence, racism, poverty and abuse on all levels.
How sad is it, that when a Buddhist community rises above this and with scrupulous care, love and dedication is able to create a place that offers light and hope to the world, and it is attacked by mentally unhealthy persons who climb onto the internet soapbox to spew their reprehensible falsehoods?
I dearly hope such persons find the healing that they desperately need, so they can live a healthy, happy life and stop causing harm to others in this way.
As for anyone who has a sincere interest in working on solutions to the hate and destruction that humans are wreaking on each other and the planet, rather than reading nonsense on the internet all day, I recommend that you arrange a visit to Maple and see for yourself. I have traveled and lived in many countries, and explored many communities over decades. I know of no other community that does a better job than Maple at facing the enormous existential challenges the world faces, with such grace, love, skill and wisdom.
In many ways I feel sympathetic to this document and the people who wrote it, because I also am part of organizations that have involved hundreds of people over many many years, and so of course I know what it's like to feel kind of stuck in limbo when someone has grievances you think are not justified, however true they feel to them, but which you have no way to disprove. I also know what it's like to be part of a team of close-knit people who pour our hearts and souls into our project and actively spend tons of time going over our strategies, our conduct, our goals, any critiques we get or generate amongst ourselves, just to make sure we're actually doing the right thing, and would love to get real, grounded feedback on how we can be better.
So seeing that sort of language in this document makes me split-and-commit, as usual: there's the world in which every word here is true, and the world where it's all a bunch of people wearing a reasonable-and-humble-person-who-nevertheless-has-self-respect skin suit to just sound reasonable and humble while dodging all accountability, and I do not know where in reality we are between these two extremes .
But there are some tells, for those reading closely, that make me not optimistic. Rather pessimistic, really.
"The student has power over the teacher" is one of the most artful and absurd dodges of responsibility for potentially abusive practice I've ever seen, similar to saying "No one can have power over their romantic partner, because everyone chooses their partner and whether to listen to them or not, and can just leave at any time." True in theory, but reality doesn't work that way and it would be exceedingly naive to believe that it does. It presumes that no teacher-student relationships can have any power imbalance in the teacher’s favor, and wording it like this makes me think the people who wrote this either know that this is absurd and wrote it that way anyway, or they honestly cannot see abuse happening in front of them because they will say "well the person can just leave," both of which would be major red flags of different kinds.
See also the "is Soryu abusive" section. That's bad, folks. There were specific claims made in the accusation document, and to dodge all of them by pointing to “formal definitions” of abuse that you don't even specify while shrugging it all off indicates to me that you know exactly what he does that people would call abusive, and have internal justifications for why it's not abusive. What, so he's not hitting people or driving anyone to commit suicide or restricting their access to money or sexually assaulting them? Cool, none of that was in the accusation document. Good legal defense, but a terrible social one.
And just to pick one more, you keep pointing to how "relatively flat" the hierarchy is and how Soryu doesn't have meaningful power over everyday stuff, especially when he's not there. But the one example you gave where the whole board(?!) did something he disagreed with resolved by everyone apparently just entirely backing down so as not to take on the "financial responsibility of the organization?" Listen, I get it if a person realizes they aren't on the same page as the rest of their org anymore and they decide to part ways. And of course it makes sense that he would stop using his own funds or efforts at fundraising if he doesn't agree with the direction everyone else wants to go.
But if Soryu is the one single-handedly propping up the org with his own money or something, then the obvious conclusion is that the hierarchy is not "relatively flat," it may be relatively flat beneath Soryu but what everyone else decides doesn't matter, because Soryu's veto is the final veto and his approval is the final approval. If people didn't know that before that incident (which by the way sounds fascinating and I imagine a lot more indicative of the sorts of things the accusations against MAPLE were pointing at than MAPLE wants to admit) they certainly should know it after.
All of which is to say, I may not know where exactly in the continuum between extremes MAPLE sits, but whatever I was hoping for from this response, it did not come, and I am now both more wary of MAPLE rather than less, and less convinced it contains people of real competence to point out these issues in its communication strategy, let alone the organization’s day to day.
First, for a little context, Kyle was given a year and substantial funding to write his document. We had no funding for our response, and had only 3 weeks to write it at a time when there is a lot of important work that we are doing. Furthermore, Kyle’s document seems to be heavily AI generated, while ours is not. These are some reasons why this initial response is comparatively so basic. We currently plan to continue expanding our response over time.
Regarding your point about the power dynamics in student teacher relationships, see my response to Helen. In summary, the student has most of the power in the type of student-teacher relationship that we practice at MAPLE, given that the role of both the teacher and the student is to be in service to the student’s spiritual path and highest aspiration. As I said to Helen, a good teacher should have some power in the relationship, but that power is used for the benefit of the student in a similar way to how a good parent uses power for the benefit of their child. The teacher does not receive personal benefit from this dynamic, on the contrary, the teacher sacrifices tremendously.
You criticized our lack of responding to specific claims of abuse made in Kyle’s document. We are not going to go through and respond to every one of Kyle’s claims without adequate resources for such an endeavor. However, if there are any specific claims that are of particular interest or concern, feel free to let us know.
Regarding what you brought up about hierarchy and the example from the question of whether Soryu threatened to leave the organization, I will give you more backstory on the situation.
The board had just demanded that we formally commit to being a Buddhist organization. Soryu was not in favor of that, though he didn’t oppose it. Their point was that you either need to be formally a Buddhist organization that uses other practices or you formally need to be a non-sectarian organization that uses Buddhist practices. They recommended being Buddhist, and after long discussion with everyone in the org, some seeing it one way, others the other, we agreed that we should be explicitly Buddhist. Soryu then left for a time, and the leadership that was supposed to be responsible for the board’s decision took a different route. They were not being malicious; they were simply doing what they thought was right without appropriately taking the direction of the Board. Furthermore, they weren’t willing to take any responsibility, financial or otherwise. When we say “financial,” we mean the general well-being of the community. In particular, we mean responsibility over fundraising. Soryu does not by any means “prop the organization up with his own money.” This is an absurd suggestion. Someone needs to take responsibility for fundraising. Soryu has been willing to do this tiresome work, and at that time, others were not.
And regarding the final section of your comment:
The only way that people can know what happens at MAPLE is through their own direct experience, not through reading claims online, Kyle’s or ours or anyone else’s. Otherwise we are just discussing a conceptual framework of MAPLE and the people here, and conceptual frameworks are not truth. We encourage you to come in person to see for yourself, and welcome your most challenging questions in relationship.
"We had no funding for our response, and had only 3 weeks to write it at a time when there is a lot of important work that we are doing"
I took all that into consideration when I picked the specific things I pointed out as being negative updates from your post. They were not things that I think more time and effort would have helped with; they are things I have trouble imagining being generated from benevolent + competent people on any timescale.
"Regarding your point about the power dynamics in student teacher relationships, see my response to Helen."
I have just done so and I find it continues to present deeply flawed model of human psychology or power dynamics. Yes, of course taking a role of teacher to others, even when asked or "begged" to do so, gives power over the student. The power is evident in the begging; it is actualized into something that can easily be felt as "debt" once acceded to. And to say "the teacher does not receive personal benefit from this dynamic, on the contrary, the teacher sacrifices tremendously" is aggrandizing nonsense.
Teachers absolutely do personally benefit from teacher-student dynamics. Even if unpaid, all good teachers gain respect, status, and influence among their students, at the very least. A benevolent and conscientious teacher is *aware of that* and goes out of their way not to abuse those things; they don't deny or obscure it, and they definitely don't play up some grand narrative about how much they're sacrificing.
Quite frankly, that sounds like a classic guilt trip tactic to get people to feel indebted. Any sacrifice a mentor may be making is their own choice; if they do not find they are being fairly compensated, either in money or respect or whatever, they are free to choose not to teach, and unlike the student, they are not compelled by their own deep emotional needs... unless, of course, they are, which it sounds like Soryu is.
I have taught hundreds of people over the past decade, young and old, and while yes, this involved some sacrifice in many instances, these sacrifices need not be tremendous, and should not be in a healthy dynamic... and before you attempt to reframe what healthy means by a different set of values, I am explicitly calling out any dynamic that leads to your students leaving after years and saying "wow that place was actually kind of abusive" as a strong signal of "unhealthy." Kyle was not the only person to say this about MAPLE, as you well know, just the most recent and thorough.
This is an example of where I doubt you could write a better defense with 100 hours and funding; your beliefs, as you're stating them, reveal a deep misunderstanding of human psychology to me, and clearly support the model where MAPLE leadership is, at best, unaware of how unhealthy the dynamics they foster are.
"You criticized our lack of responding to specific claims of abuse made in Kyle’s document. We are not going to go through and respond to every one of Kyle’s claims without adequate resources for such an endeavor. However, if there are any specific claims that are of particular interest or concern, feel free to let us know."
A simple "No, Soryu doesn't scream at or insult students, or engage in collective punishment, or guilt-trip people who attempt to leave" would be helpful.
If you do not say that, my presumption is it's because you know that it would be very easy to corroborate Kyle's side of those accusations, and MAPLE just believes for some strange reason that Buddhist-drill-instructor-with-a-fragile-ego is what the pinnacle of a loving and skillful teacher devoted to his students' growth looks like.
"Soryu does not by any means “prop the organization up with his own money.” This is an absurd suggestion. Someone needs to take responsibility for fundraising. Soryu has been willing to do this tiresome work, and at that time, others were not."
Yes, I mentioned fundraising as an alternative, and as I said, in either case that is entirely reasonable.
But to repeat, what matters is that it seems pretty clear that his absence is not something MAPLE leadership is capable of or willing to endure, which means that, again, he effectively has final veto over any decision, and his preferences are the preferences that ultimately matter most.
If you have a different example of Soryu disagreeing with the board about something and not getting his way, that is what I would consider actual evidence of a "relatively flat" hierarchy. Obviously Soryu might not have deep thoughts or feelings about any given decision, let alone personally weigh in on all of them, but the defining measure of your hierarchy at this point seems to be "what happens if everyone else in the leadership pushes in one direction and Soryu pushes in the other."
"The only way that people can know what happens at MAPLE is through their own direct experience, not through reading claims online, Kyle’s or ours or anyone else’s. Otherwise we are just discussing a conceptual framework of MAPLE and the people here, and conceptual frameworks are not truth. We encourage you to come in person to see for yourself, and welcome your most challenging questions in relationship."
While it's true that there's no replacement for direct observation, I consider first-hand testimony more than mere conceptual frameworks, and reserve my right to lightly hold tentative models of others based on such claims.
And I appreciate the invitation, but to be honest, just as you have said that responding as thoroughly as you would like to would require funding to make it worth your while, I cannot imagine the sum that it would take to get me there to be within your budget, nor, frankly, would I trust my experience there to be representative.
At risk of being overly combative, honesty compels me to say I also just do not think you would find me a "good student," if anything like what Kyle described is true. While reading Kyle's report, I felt a visceral sense of aversion to the environment described, where one man can apparently make such demeaning and childish demands as Soryu apparently has, and not immediately be laughed out of the room or lose all power and status in the organization. In a more empathetic frame, if a colleague or friend of mine did something like that, I would take them aside and ask them if they were okay, and figure out what led to such a response... something that doesn't seem to be common, there.
Again, if you would like to claim that Soryu has never done things like make everyone stare at his face for over an hour because someone nodded off during one of his lectures, now is the time to do it. Otherwise, no thank you; my life is pretty great, and if there's spiritual growth I still need to undergo, I trust I can find it among people who demonstrate they are even better than I am at integrating my emotions, not absurdly worse.
As a final note...
"Kyle’s document seems to be heavily AI generated"
I'm not going to go into this, but for transparency's sake I want to note I consider it a bizarre accusation to make, and pretty obviously untrue. Again I find myself being forced to wonder at MAPLE's competence vs it's maliciousness; I know it's not a top priority in all the other things mentioned, but if you have any reason to believe this you should explain or present it, otherwise I'm going to take it pretty straightforwardly as an attempt at slinging whatever mud you can at the wall in the hopes that some of it sticks.
If it turns out it was "heavily AI generated" I will offer a sincere and deep apology. Until then, this sort of thing is really not helping your case.
I appreciate the more direct claims, regardless of veracity, but want to note that the last example is once again very much not evidence of a relatively flat hierarchy, and I’m confused about what makes you think it would count as evidence in favor of that rather than against it.
Most Westernized modern people have a deeply flawed model of human psychology and power dynamics because they haven't actually experienced, for themselves, what is possible. But it's not MAPLE's role to correct everyone's opinion. That's not the mission we've signed up for.
Kyle's description of what it's like here is not to be remotely believed. So your 'visceral sense of aversion' is to a false imagination that has nothing to do with reality. Your insistence that there is something wrong anyway, based on your analysis of this response, is also not based in reality. /You don't know./ And it seems like further you don't know what you don't know.
Your life is precious. Please don't waste your life on mere mental exercises.
Hard as this may be for you to believe, I am in fact holding quite easily the possibility that everything Kyle said was misrepresentative in some way, or even outright lies. "I don't know" has never been a hard thing for me to notice, or admit.
But please do not high-horse me on "human psychology and power dynamics" when I call out MAPLE for saying things like this:
"In the teacher-student relationship at MAPLE, the student has the primary power. The student chooses the teacher and chooses how much or little to follow the teacher’s teaching."
I’m open to arguments and explanation, but I absent them I think it’s entirely reasonable to note things like that as evidence to me that what Kyle was pointing at in his post may in fact have some truth in it.
I consider you a friend, if a distant one from years ago, and would have thought the you I knew from years ago would have immediately noticed the flaws in what that quote implies.
If I'm wrong about what you would have said ~7 years ago to a statement like that, or if you have changed your mind about it, I would love to hear you explain why MAPLE holds this position, or what I'm wrong about in considering it a demonstrably false presumption about human nature, and one that can easily blind someone to harms going on around them.
Hm... What's the demonstrably false presumption about human nature? I just want to be sure in what you're referring to.
Sure, I used to hold views about human psychology and power dynamics that were similar to others at CFAR, to other rationalists, or to modern Westerners in general. At the time, I felt my views were quite sophisticated, actionable in their precision, and made good predictions. I have since been overwhelmed by evidence that they are wrong on many levels. Again, mostly due to not actually experiencing what is possible.
The possibility of a good and proper teacher-student relationship has been largely destroyed in the West. This is why the West doesn't believe it exists. Instead the West believes whoever is in the position of leadership has power, and whoever isn't is in a weaker position, a potential victim that must be protected from authority.
This view has been trained into people, beaten into them, over many centuries of abuse and corruption and manipulation.
There are barely any glimmers of another way, in Western literature or story-telling or historical memory. But it is all subtle propaganda to promote a certain set of false assumptions.
But for millennia, Eastern traditions have carried on a totally different set of assumptions and practices. For even much, much longer than that, indigenous tribes all over the world have a much more diverse set of practices and ways of being. The Western mind has very sophisticated immune responses against updating from these, over millennia of inoculation and immunization. Due to the high level of sophistication of this ideological defense, I don't expect a set of posts or comments on the INTERNET to make a dent. In fact, your even asking for it as though it were viable to convey here is part of the system that is making it impossible for Western assumptions to make any meaningful update.
So yeah, spending years in a monastery was worth it to me to truly investigate those assumptions, directly for myself, just like unschooling is totally a thing that takes time and effort on the part of each person and isn't just a simple matter of spreading around a new set of assumptions. It's about unraveling the existing ones. This is not a simple matter of conceptual explanations.
Your argument relies on the premise that I must have those Western assumptions, but I don't in fact believe teacher-student has to be about power or potential-victimhood. I'm fully on board with the idea of teachers and students having complex relationships than that, and being equals in many ways.
What confuses me is the blithe assertion of the original post that the students are the ones with the power over the teacher. I can stretch my imagination to think of some situations where this is true; for example, a teacher who is extremely poor, and needs to take any paid opportunity available, or some system where student reports can make or break a teacher's career.
But the idea that this is the default is just not how society works, by and large, and I am extremely skeptical it's how it works at MAPLE, maybe particularly for Soryu, given the amount of prestige, status, and power he wields in the institution.
The power to walk away is a good power to have. I don't mean to discount it, or infantilize those who go to MAPLE as students. But the reality I have observed throughout society is that those who go to places like MAPLE are going with something in their life that they deeply desire to fix or some greater purpose they deeply desire to be part of, and this IS a position of vulnerability, and someone who claims to have the answers to healing/empowering them IS, definitionally, in a position of power over them.
This may not be true for any individual person. I am fairly confident I can go to MAPLE and walk away if I find the teachings not to my liking, or degrading in some way.
But I do not believe this is true for most people who go there, and whatever you wish to insist about Western society, the fact is you are IN Western society, and most people who enter MAPLE are products of that society, and have spent their whole lives having teachers hold power over them.
So I am left still waiting for some actual explanation of what it actually *means* for MAPLE to say this fairly obviously untrue thing. Not a lecture about Western society or some mind-reading or psychoanalysis about what I must believe, from your perspective; what I hope to hear are some examples or understandings of MAPLE life that helps students actually feel empowered to challenge MAPLE teachers, or its teachings, or to walk away in good spirits if it is not to their liking, rather than feel shamed, pressured, or criticized for desiring, say, more food or sleep than the teachers insisted was the necessary amount for them to have (this is from accounts besides Kyles, that were far less criticizing of MAPLE as a whole).
Man, that “the student has power over the teacher” section’s a neat trick. Does the teacher have power over the student, or is that only applicable in every *other* teaching dynamic that has ever been?
Thank you for your significant question. It is important to investigate this closely.
Those of us in the modern world who have gone through the modern educational system have likely experienced a teaching dynamic where students are in a classroom getting bullied by some people, humiliated by others, told that they are wrong by the teacher, and not allowed to leave. It would be sad to believe that this dynamic is both normal and universal.
In indigenous cultures, children often beg adults to teach them; to tell them a story, or teach them a skill. Responding to this ask for teachings does not give the adult power over the student.
It is common for us to give power over our lives to others. An example is the way that parents, out of love, give their lives to their children. Parents put themselves in that position knowing that they are not perfect but that they will do what needs to be done.
A true teacher loves so completely that their life vanishes. The true and highest aspiration of the student must be supported and realized, and that is the measure of the teacher. In order to support their students in this way, the teacher should have some power over them, but that is still love.
“It would be sad to believe that this dynamic is both normal and universal.” Sure would, if one did! Strawman argument.
A child requesting instruction does not establish that the instructor lacks power.
The parental analogy is confused. Parents plainly hold power over children and, of course, parental abuse and manipulation of varying degrees is common.
“A true teacher loves so completely that their life vanishes.” Setting aside whether this statement is true… how many people need to say “Soryu has not vanished into the teacher role and it had effects A, B, and C” for you to reconsider the notion that he fits into this definition? What proof would you require to change your stance, and is that standard of proof achievable?
“But that is still love.” Love is beautiful, and I don’t doubt it is present at MAPLE. Does the presence of love mean it’s impossible for power imbalances to develop?
Again: Does Soryu have power over his students, or does it only run one way?
I wouldn’t say Soryu and I are friends. But there are some similarities to our respective paths, probably some degree of mutual respect.
We are about the same age, we both come from areas of the country that were ‘last touched’ by modernity’s transformation towards the post-modern sense of self. So we were among the last to see the great tidal wave of self-obsessed humanism break over the land. We both saw the responsibilities to the future we expected vanish. We both declined the opportunity
I’m embarrassed. The idea that a guy gone 7 mos a year runs a cult is absurd on its face. Even worse an absurdity is the idea that a monastic experience aimed at awakening is not going to be psychologically challenging. There are over 2500 yrs of history on awakening. None of it is documented as easy. In fact it’s the opposite, awakening is absolutely brutal, and it’s in the history
Soryu and his band of monastics are the only people I’ve found who are attempting to address the advance of xenobacillus glossophagii (voice in your head pretending to be you) in a modern context at scale. I dislike this piece they published because it takes the mental formations of this epistemological mind virus and turns it back on itself. I appreciate the effort it took to even attempt to do so cleanly. It shows a true honoring of those they are addressing. But it’s never going to be enough
Of course they recognize this as well
May they receive the funds so they can do the job that actually needs to be done
Thank you for sharing this.
I wanted to respond to Kyle's post directly but then I found it was really challenging to really listen. To listen means to empty your mind and be open.
I care deeply for this community and I noticed I was getting a bit defensive and emotional. This means I was not able to really engage with that post using the mind, the language the audience there respects.
It takes a certain type of mind to be objective and lay out all the claims, trace the assumptions, steel man your opposing side and sincerely try to assist in truth seeking. I admire the rationalists who practice this and these accusations are active in that part of the internet where the standard for what is true is based on how transparent are the parties, do they seem logical in how they trace the causal chains of the events, are they engaging with critique in good faith, have they shown epistemic humility to update or are they holding onto some position as if its load bearing for their identity, what is the track record for their predictions, is the analysis comprehensive, and I could go on
This is based on a trust that it is a weakness to be attached to any position, to care emotionally and rather trust the process. Debate, argue and the "true" position will win.
This can be true if we have a container like a courtroom where we have systems in place to make it more likely that happens but on the internet it becomes mob justice. I do not think most groups have great epistemic standards.
So it takes time and effort to respond in this manner and the stakes are high here, this is a organization trying to some very difficult things, this affects maple's reputation. People are giving up their time, attention, trusting the container to train at this academy and if they are being harmed that is also a very serious matter.
I found it and still find it hard to speak up on a comment thread because I know how it is like to scream into the internet, how easy it is for your words to be taken out of context and used against you and the values you cherish.
That objective mind can deal with the internet, it can decouple well, draw boundaries and be impersonal. It helps to be precise and careful, slow and methodical. But then that would be hypocrisy to use that mind unskillfully to defend a community that showed me the dangers of letting that mind optimize without limit.
If there is one thing I sorta learned from my experiences visiting as an AI fellow at MAPLE and even doing a month of training is that that mind is the emissary and not supposed to be king. Another thing is that direct experience is a better standard to judge someone/something than hearsay so you can visit and see for yourself who the people are and talk to them, make up your own mind.
I would advice taking it slow and really being careful with the commitments you make because you can hurt yourself if you don't take spiritual training seriously.
I have direct experience of being with this community. Friends of mine have visited MAPLE on my recommendation and I have talked to people who have trained there. If you who is reading this wants to get on a video call with me and ask me questions I am happy to give you my time and promise to be honest.
I would rather help people while staying in relationship because that is how we survive these difficult times. There is no simple story that I can craft that can do justice to the raw complexity of reality that you would experience.
Reach out to me at adityaarpitha@gmail.com
The debate here as at the level of epistemics - how do you know what you know?
The rationalists have a very narrow answer to that, and MAPLE is trying to reveal a better way to determine what is true.
I take epistemics quite seriously, which is why "how do I know what I know" is not answered in any single way.
To say the rationalists have a "very narrow answer" seems to me to be an absurd thing to say about what is, ultimately, an ongoing collaborative effort available for anyone to read and participate in, at any time, for free.
From my admittedly outsider perspective, MAPLE's "better way" seems to be "come dedicate a massive chunk of your time and give up some autonomy to experiencing it yourself, or else just trust us and disregard what anyone who has been here says if it is negative."
What am I missing, here? Where is the "better way," and how can I learn about it without blind trust that I won't be wasting my time, and yours, by going to MAPLE myself?
I would say I enjoy holding beliefs lightly, I see the complex web of dependencies between views and it still fascinates me how it can form these memeplexes
If I could offer some perspective on how I think MAPLE's way is different from the rationalist way, it would be my own grappling with how to show up in this online space authentically
The old me took pride in having a small identity, and this meant not having stakes. I was so commited to the "truth" that I believed it would hold me back to also notice the interconnectness of my action
Even this comment, if I really really slow down and pay attention. I am influencing your life in subtle ways, many people online will read this and to quote a message I sent a friend
"I struggled a lot because I am used to not having stakes when it comes to arguing. It is painful to imagine the costs this is having on the org, on its ability to help cyborgs, the karmic effects on the cyborgs that practice attacking a potential teacher, my own inability to rise to the challenge and defend maple, my uncertainty and doubts around if there is spiritual bypassing going on, and not being able to do anything but having to do something and live with the consequences. So it was and is easier for me to often not choose consciousness and escape."
I don't think MAPLE has some sort of copyright on this view of awareness, mindfulness being important. I spend time in monastic containers around India and this importance of facing this web of relations is implicitly communicated here
But MAPLE does seem to take on the task of trying to reach out to a specific class of humans who are deeply integrated with technology who could really use this teaching
----
The word epistemics itself seems to frame reality as if you can swap beliefs in a modular manner. But the key shift with maple is that it's not some idea you hold but a living practice that you actually do.
So you do justice to having a belief only by actually acting in the world as if its true and paying attention to the consequences
In this frame it's not just useless but actively harmful to say intellectually recognize that veganism is "moral" or "reasonable" but act against it. Because the more your actions are inconsistent with your beliefs you grow more fragmented. You lose confidence that you can cultivate integrity where your beliefs, intentions, speech, action are all aligned.
So overall it's this decoupling that rationality offered that I think made it easier for me to seek the truth in the short run, I respect it because it's tractable. If you demanded I only hold true beliefs if I live by them then I would just give up because it's too hard when I had limited slack, dealing with many addictions.
So good epistemics back then meant that I held high resolution details maps of reality in my head but struggled to actually integrate them into my daily life. This is where therapy, art, community, friendships, many spiritual traditions are worth experimenting with to try and pursue integrity, a new goal for me.
Coming to discourse online there are limits to sharing this way through text but I appreciated reading your comments elsewhere in post and I could send the sincerity with which you are asking hard questions and refusing to settle for answers that do not satisfy you.
I think you are better able to bring the kind of mind I wish to cultivate online quoting something I told a friend
"It is hard for me to imagine how to engage with people online with the kind of mind maple is trying to cultivate. To bring that mind of attention, being open, compassionate even when I am alone, sitting is hard, its hard with friends and family, and with strangers and with groups of strangers. Now to keep that mind when you are connected to strangers on an interface that was designed to summon the opposite kind of mind, to dehumanize, to exclude, to consume, to forget the consequences of your words, to be apathetic, cruel, hedonistic, etc."
To be kind doesn't mean to enable their bad behaviour like you said you would call soryu aside and see if he was ok. Or you recalling your friendship with renshin and giving this post your attention and time, sharing how it landed for you. Not everyone would be giving maple as much benefit of doubt as you have.
So then I am curious if you would agree with my characterisation of rationalistics taking on this frame of instrumental and epistemic rationality which creates portable maps that offer free power to people who was to optimize for arbitrary ends. This means they are not truth seeking but power seeking.
Unless you define truth as that which offers predictive power over nature to extract resources, manipulate reality in a way where you stand apart from it.
Thank you for your thoughtful effort in trying to clarify things for me. There's a lot I can say, but I'd like to start by asking some questions first to test my understanding of your words so far.
1) Is the idea you're gesturing at concerning only beliefs that seem to hold some "compulsion," some "shouldness?" Or is the issue you're gesturing at with epistemic rationality also about the fundamental distinctions of legibility, or objective reality vs subjective at all?
2) What do you mean by "manipulate reality in a way where you stand apart from it?" I consider humanity part of reality, animals that evolved as a result of a natural process of billions of creatures attempting to predict their environments and extract value from it for their own benefit. I say this in a neutral way, not one meant to imply that there can never be moral lens through which to judge actions. But while there are distinct methods and results that come from the intelligence and coordination humans can bring to the task, I'm not sure what the alternative frame you're suggesting is, and whether it is implicitly assuming that the correct way to live is one in which humans deliberately avoid predicting their environments better, or deliberately avoid extracting resources, or something else.
3) Is your example about veganism meant to indicate something like, "beliefs that you intellectually agree with but feel some emotionally disagreement with are dangerous to your sense of self?" If so, I think I partially agree, but would consider this a problem of undervaluing the implicit, not of attempting to "create portable maps."
I consider emotions a form of embodied and distilled information, sometimes even implicit knowledge that's actually true even if it cannot yet be made legible to yourself and others.
That doesn't make emotions always correct in what they're pushing or pulling against, but it means that I consider someone who is struggling with a "rational" belief vs an emotional one to be someone who has overly privileged one over the other, rather than knowing how to better listen to both and either integrate their separate sources of knowledge, or seek what's missing in the gaps or apparent contradictions. Each map can be useful without necessarily being true, and I'm not sure what aspect of the rationalist view of maps is being gestured at by the word "portable."
Thank you again for your engagement; if this is too many questions at once, feel free to pick the one that is most salient to you to answer.
People get what they put into the training. Some people go deep within ~2 weeks. Does that count as a massive chunk of time? I wouldn't say so personally. But also, such people do tend to be coming in with very positive qualities that make it possible for them to throw themselves in more fully to the endeavor.
The more attached to personal intelligence someone is, the harder it can be for them. I count myself in that category. So I've made slow progress. You strike me as similarly (to myself, from before) attached to intelligence, reasoning, explication, theorizing, etc. And of course, an unwillingness to even /try it out/ is part of what makes it take much, much longer... you could easily die first.
Why do you believe it's on other people to convince you that you're wrong on the internet? That strikes me as an entitled position.
I gave my life to seek the truth, and I've been on that journey my whole life, including my time with the rationalists. No one at MAPLE sold me on anything before I came. It's just one more step on a very long truth-seeking journey, and I am fortunate that I have been in a position to seek it out so fully and without compromising.
If I'd settled with the rationalists and their version of 'truth-seeking' I would have died without even a glimmer. But I wasn't satisfied with their meager (and in fact net-negative) practices, most of which are impoverished versions of tried and true methods.
There are 1,001 different retreats, workshops, seminars, etc that each claim to have some uniquely valuable thing to teach or impart. Many of them do, perhaps even most of them do to someone, but I think it's pretty reasonable for people to want some information or understanding before dedicating the time and effort.
I live a fairly privileged life in that I am happier than basically anyone else I know and self-sufficiently self-employed, but yes, 2 weeks is a pretty massive ask when there's nothing to indicate what I will actually gain from it but vague platitudes. I like experimenting with new things and exploring new ideas or states of mind. I've done 5 day communication courses that were incredibly insightful for me even after a master's degree in family therapy. A single weekend with the right Alexander Technique teacher taught me a new skill that I can use to great benefit in the rest of my life, and each subsequent lesson helped strengthen the skill or my understanding of it. I do not think I am opposed to trying new things, or overly skeptical that they are worth the time.
What I am skeptical of is this style of mystique-wrapped sneering, like it's just *beneath* MAPLE to try to make itself more legible, because the only possible way anyone can get anything from its supposedly unique insights is to come in person to experience it. I don't doubt that this may be true for some people, and maybe you're one of them.
But as for "entitlement," I honestly don't know what you mean, and expect that you're letting some sense of defensiveness (understandable given things I said above) override clarity. You were the one to bring up rationalists and denigrate their epistemics and close-mindedness; I'm not asking you convince me of anything you didn't jump to asserting first.
I don't think you're able to, and I take that inability as a sign that MAPLE is not actually teaching something universally true and valuable. My model is it's providing a very particular kind of environment that is helpful for a very particular kind of person, and harmful for many others who either bounce off quickly, and some mix of helpful and harmful for those that stay for longer than they should.
And this would be fine if MAPLE were more self-aware of that, and able to predict what sorts of people are likely to be which. Not the least because then *I* could maybe understand which category I'd be in. But from what I've heard from people who left, and the original post, and your responses here, I don't see that self-awareness at all.
I am not sneering, nor am I being defensive.
There is no lack of self awareness at play here.
How can I put it? I'm not taking the bait.
I am welcome to make claims online without needing to further explain to you why I'm making them. I might call it entitled if someone believed I did need to further explain myself and then balked when I did not. It's okay to say True Things, plainly and simply and let it be that. There's no need to prove oneself Right on the Internet. It's not a good use of time.
You're right that not everyone is a fit for MAPLE and that not everyone should come here. Based on what you've shared, you are not our audience, and that is perfectly fine. But I think this conversation has been helpful in a number of ways. I appreciate this chance to share more!
I'm not going to argue over the definition of "sneering." You made a number of unflattering assumptions about me that were false, and you denigrated rationalists and their epistemics in a way that made it clear you were not just talking about your own experience of it, which would be entirely your right and inarguable, but as absolute judgements.
Call it what you want; either way, I find it an unbecoming response to someone asking for clarification and understanding.
I can't peer into your soul and I abhor psychoanalysis. If my guess that you were responding defensively was wrong, so be it. I brought it up in case it would be helpful for you to take a step back and see if it was true.
But I don't have an alternate model for why you responded the way you did to my simple questions when you could have either answered substantively, or just ignored them if it is truly not a "good use of time." To say "there's no lack of self awareness at play here" is not something I really know how to respond to, and will make due with just letting your own earlier words sit in contrast.
And all that is before even getting to your framing here, which I continue to find needlessly antagonistic:
"I am welcome to make claims online without needing to further explain to you why I'm making them. I might call it entitled if someone believed I did need to further explain myself and then balked when I did not. It's okay to say True Things, plainly and simply and let it be that. There's no need to prove oneself Right on the Internet. It's not a good use of time."
True, you do not "need" to do anything. I never implied you did.
You are welcome to say your words; I am welcome to say mine, and ask honest questions.
You call that "entitlement," as if my words require something of you. Why not instead just ignore them? I demanded nothing of you, laid no claim on your time or attention, and am not injured at all if you choose not to respond.
I will continue to ask questions if people say things that seem false or confusing to me, and if that compels you to respond with personal attacks or denigration of others, that is your choice.
Finally, I don't know what you mean by "balked," that's not a use of that word I recognize in this context, but the frame seems to be that I somehow made an issue of you not answering my questions. I did not: I simply pointed it out and my thoughts about it.
I did that because it was a True Thing, and as you rightfully pointed out, people can say True Things, plainly and simply.
I came across this website recently: https://omnicide.exposed/ . I wonder if Kyle's critique meets the author's criteria for legitimate:
"A legitimate critique would include, at minimum, one concrete and independently verifiable claim — submitted either publicly or through private channels — that the author, having spent years in residential training at MAPLE and having investigated these matters in depth, could not in good conscience dismiss."
Hard to know anything in these he said she said days of internet insanity.
This "he said she said" phenomenon is explicitly brought up at the beginning of this video - https://share.descript.com/view/kSzWrrxOmir
Well I really wish I saw this before I started any engagement. This discussion on has succinctly captured the issue that has stormed my being in every which way, why am I internally arguing myself over nothing? From here, I move towards avoidance.
The question (a trap itself!!) is why is all of the information, answers, and responses so difficult for any person navigating this topic so difficult to collate and make sense of? I have even used Anthropic’s Claude research modules multiple times to pull in so much information. (Discount biases, while itself being biased towards whatever weight, find claims, find answers.) The stuff that lands is usually within videos, links, or any other materials not already indexed by search engines.
For me to have made sense of this, I had to have gone through all of the research, visiting, and read everything, and, as a letter to the reader, I think that’s a welcome call to notice if you’re just really struggling with this and are avoidant. Maybe you haven’t gone to a retreat or doing any of any spiritual journey. The marketing for wellness events likes to sell them as deeply relaxing and healing stuff, but I think it’s best stated as a colonizing tool to get people doing bad things to feel better to do more bad things. Spiritual healing fucking sucks, so you don’t have to go here, but know going to MAPLE sucks and could be quite fruitful.
Another source with strong bias: https://awful.systems/post/9514912, you can use AI to fact check or practice discernment, but I found this to be an excellent resource to have collected a good chunk of claims to investigate.
This “he says, she says” shit is tiring, because I think we’re all in on multiple scams and it’s just so exhausting and difficult to parse for all reasons mentioned on the video (9m on 2x, worth the listen).
I’ve spent the last two hours juggling worries, fears, concern for and against, and it’s a fucking wild ride well worth riding. Thank yall, and I wish you find a way to find justice that serves you, Kyle, and all others mentioned in the links above. (Ha, easy for me to say from the sidelines.)
It’s astounding to me that there are people like Kyle who waste this precious life slandering others, especially when they’re slandering people who have been and continue to be kind and loving to them and others.
I have trained with Maple and have known Soryu and others there for many years. I know this community to be impeccably honest, caring and high integrity.
Modern society, especially in this country, is so distrustful, so suspicious of anyone different, and so eager to blame anyone else for one’s own ignorance, failings and projections. It’s no wonder this country is rampant with violence, racism, poverty and abuse on all levels.
How sad is it, that when a Buddhist community rises above this and with scrupulous care, love and dedication is able to create a place that offers light and hope to the world, and it is attacked by mentally unhealthy persons who climb onto the internet soapbox to spew their reprehensible falsehoods?
I dearly hope such persons find the healing that they desperately need, so they can live a healthy, happy life and stop causing harm to others in this way.
As for anyone who has a sincere interest in working on solutions to the hate and destruction that humans are wreaking on each other and the planet, rather than reading nonsense on the internet all day, I recommend that you arrange a visit to Maple and see for yourself. I have traveled and lived in many countries, and explored many communities over decades. I know of no other community that does a better job than Maple at facing the enormous existential challenges the world faces, with such grace, love, skill and wisdom.
Thank you for sharing this.
In many ways I feel sympathetic to this document and the people who wrote it, because I also am part of organizations that have involved hundreds of people over many many years, and so of course I know what it's like to feel kind of stuck in limbo when someone has grievances you think are not justified, however true they feel to them, but which you have no way to disprove. I also know what it's like to be part of a team of close-knit people who pour our hearts and souls into our project and actively spend tons of time going over our strategies, our conduct, our goals, any critiques we get or generate amongst ourselves, just to make sure we're actually doing the right thing, and would love to get real, grounded feedback on how we can be better.
So seeing that sort of language in this document makes me split-and-commit, as usual: there's the world in which every word here is true, and the world where it's all a bunch of people wearing a reasonable-and-humble-person-who-nevertheless-has-self-respect skin suit to just sound reasonable and humble while dodging all accountability, and I do not know where in reality we are between these two extremes .
But there are some tells, for those reading closely, that make me not optimistic. Rather pessimistic, really.
"The student has power over the teacher" is one of the most artful and absurd dodges of responsibility for potentially abusive practice I've ever seen, similar to saying "No one can have power over their romantic partner, because everyone chooses their partner and whether to listen to them or not, and can just leave at any time." True in theory, but reality doesn't work that way and it would be exceedingly naive to believe that it does. It presumes that no teacher-student relationships can have any power imbalance in the teacher’s favor, and wording it like this makes me think the people who wrote this either know that this is absurd and wrote it that way anyway, or they honestly cannot see abuse happening in front of them because they will say "well the person can just leave," both of which would be major red flags of different kinds.
See also the "is Soryu abusive" section. That's bad, folks. There were specific claims made in the accusation document, and to dodge all of them by pointing to “formal definitions” of abuse that you don't even specify while shrugging it all off indicates to me that you know exactly what he does that people would call abusive, and have internal justifications for why it's not abusive. What, so he's not hitting people or driving anyone to commit suicide or restricting their access to money or sexually assaulting them? Cool, none of that was in the accusation document. Good legal defense, but a terrible social one.
And just to pick one more, you keep pointing to how "relatively flat" the hierarchy is and how Soryu doesn't have meaningful power over everyday stuff, especially when he's not there. But the one example you gave where the whole board(?!) did something he disagreed with resolved by everyone apparently just entirely backing down so as not to take on the "financial responsibility of the organization?" Listen, I get it if a person realizes they aren't on the same page as the rest of their org anymore and they decide to part ways. And of course it makes sense that he would stop using his own funds or efforts at fundraising if he doesn't agree with the direction everyone else wants to go.
But if Soryu is the one single-handedly propping up the org with his own money or something, then the obvious conclusion is that the hierarchy is not "relatively flat," it may be relatively flat beneath Soryu but what everyone else decides doesn't matter, because Soryu's veto is the final veto and his approval is the final approval. If people didn't know that before that incident (which by the way sounds fascinating and I imagine a lot more indicative of the sorts of things the accusations against MAPLE were pointing at than MAPLE wants to admit) they certainly should know it after.
All of which is to say, I may not know where exactly in the continuum between extremes MAPLE sits, but whatever I was hoping for from this response, it did not come, and I am now both more wary of MAPLE rather than less, and less convinced it contains people of real competence to point out these issues in its communication strategy, let alone the organization’s day to day.
Hi Damon,
First, for a little context, Kyle was given a year and substantial funding to write his document. We had no funding for our response, and had only 3 weeks to write it at a time when there is a lot of important work that we are doing. Furthermore, Kyle’s document seems to be heavily AI generated, while ours is not. These are some reasons why this initial response is comparatively so basic. We currently plan to continue expanding our response over time.
Regarding your point about the power dynamics in student teacher relationships, see my response to Helen. In summary, the student has most of the power in the type of student-teacher relationship that we practice at MAPLE, given that the role of both the teacher and the student is to be in service to the student’s spiritual path and highest aspiration. As I said to Helen, a good teacher should have some power in the relationship, but that power is used for the benefit of the student in a similar way to how a good parent uses power for the benefit of their child. The teacher does not receive personal benefit from this dynamic, on the contrary, the teacher sacrifices tremendously.
You criticized our lack of responding to specific claims of abuse made in Kyle’s document. We are not going to go through and respond to every one of Kyle’s claims without adequate resources for such an endeavor. However, if there are any specific claims that are of particular interest or concern, feel free to let us know.
Regarding what you brought up about hierarchy and the example from the question of whether Soryu threatened to leave the organization, I will give you more backstory on the situation.
The board had just demanded that we formally commit to being a Buddhist organization. Soryu was not in favor of that, though he didn’t oppose it. Their point was that you either need to be formally a Buddhist organization that uses other practices or you formally need to be a non-sectarian organization that uses Buddhist practices. They recommended being Buddhist, and after long discussion with everyone in the org, some seeing it one way, others the other, we agreed that we should be explicitly Buddhist. Soryu then left for a time, and the leadership that was supposed to be responsible for the board’s decision took a different route. They were not being malicious; they were simply doing what they thought was right without appropriately taking the direction of the Board. Furthermore, they weren’t willing to take any responsibility, financial or otherwise. When we say “financial,” we mean the general well-being of the community. In particular, we mean responsibility over fundraising. Soryu does not by any means “prop the organization up with his own money.” This is an absurd suggestion. Someone needs to take responsibility for fundraising. Soryu has been willing to do this tiresome work, and at that time, others were not.
And regarding the final section of your comment:
The only way that people can know what happens at MAPLE is through their own direct experience, not through reading claims online, Kyle’s or ours or anyone else’s. Otherwise we are just discussing a conceptual framework of MAPLE and the people here, and conceptual frameworks are not truth. We encourage you to come in person to see for yourself, and welcome your most challenging questions in relationship.
"We had no funding for our response, and had only 3 weeks to write it at a time when there is a lot of important work that we are doing"
I took all that into consideration when I picked the specific things I pointed out as being negative updates from your post. They were not things that I think more time and effort would have helped with; they are things I have trouble imagining being generated from benevolent + competent people on any timescale.
"Regarding your point about the power dynamics in student teacher relationships, see my response to Helen."
I have just done so and I find it continues to present deeply flawed model of human psychology or power dynamics. Yes, of course taking a role of teacher to others, even when asked or "begged" to do so, gives power over the student. The power is evident in the begging; it is actualized into something that can easily be felt as "debt" once acceded to. And to say "the teacher does not receive personal benefit from this dynamic, on the contrary, the teacher sacrifices tremendously" is aggrandizing nonsense.
Teachers absolutely do personally benefit from teacher-student dynamics. Even if unpaid, all good teachers gain respect, status, and influence among their students, at the very least. A benevolent and conscientious teacher is *aware of that* and goes out of their way not to abuse those things; they don't deny or obscure it, and they definitely don't play up some grand narrative about how much they're sacrificing.
Quite frankly, that sounds like a classic guilt trip tactic to get people to feel indebted. Any sacrifice a mentor may be making is their own choice; if they do not find they are being fairly compensated, either in money or respect or whatever, they are free to choose not to teach, and unlike the student, they are not compelled by their own deep emotional needs... unless, of course, they are, which it sounds like Soryu is.
I have taught hundreds of people over the past decade, young and old, and while yes, this involved some sacrifice in many instances, these sacrifices need not be tremendous, and should not be in a healthy dynamic... and before you attempt to reframe what healthy means by a different set of values, I am explicitly calling out any dynamic that leads to your students leaving after years and saying "wow that place was actually kind of abusive" as a strong signal of "unhealthy." Kyle was not the only person to say this about MAPLE, as you well know, just the most recent and thorough.
This is an example of where I doubt you could write a better defense with 100 hours and funding; your beliefs, as you're stating them, reveal a deep misunderstanding of human psychology to me, and clearly support the model where MAPLE leadership is, at best, unaware of how unhealthy the dynamics they foster are.
"You criticized our lack of responding to specific claims of abuse made in Kyle’s document. We are not going to go through and respond to every one of Kyle’s claims without adequate resources for such an endeavor. However, if there are any specific claims that are of particular interest or concern, feel free to let us know."
A simple "No, Soryu doesn't scream at or insult students, or engage in collective punishment, or guilt-trip people who attempt to leave" would be helpful.
If you do not say that, my presumption is it's because you know that it would be very easy to corroborate Kyle's side of those accusations, and MAPLE just believes for some strange reason that Buddhist-drill-instructor-with-a-fragile-ego is what the pinnacle of a loving and skillful teacher devoted to his students' growth looks like.
"Soryu does not by any means “prop the organization up with his own money.” This is an absurd suggestion. Someone needs to take responsibility for fundraising. Soryu has been willing to do this tiresome work, and at that time, others were not."
Yes, I mentioned fundraising as an alternative, and as I said, in either case that is entirely reasonable.
But to repeat, what matters is that it seems pretty clear that his absence is not something MAPLE leadership is capable of or willing to endure, which means that, again, he effectively has final veto over any decision, and his preferences are the preferences that ultimately matter most.
If you have a different example of Soryu disagreeing with the board about something and not getting his way, that is what I would consider actual evidence of a "relatively flat" hierarchy. Obviously Soryu might not have deep thoughts or feelings about any given decision, let alone personally weigh in on all of them, but the defining measure of your hierarchy at this point seems to be "what happens if everyone else in the leadership pushes in one direction and Soryu pushes in the other."
"The only way that people can know what happens at MAPLE is through their own direct experience, not through reading claims online, Kyle’s or ours or anyone else’s. Otherwise we are just discussing a conceptual framework of MAPLE and the people here, and conceptual frameworks are not truth. We encourage you to come in person to see for yourself, and welcome your most challenging questions in relationship."
While it's true that there's no replacement for direct observation, I consider first-hand testimony more than mere conceptual frameworks, and reserve my right to lightly hold tentative models of others based on such claims.
And I appreciate the invitation, but to be honest, just as you have said that responding as thoroughly as you would like to would require funding to make it worth your while, I cannot imagine the sum that it would take to get me there to be within your budget, nor, frankly, would I trust my experience there to be representative.
At risk of being overly combative, honesty compels me to say I also just do not think you would find me a "good student," if anything like what Kyle described is true. While reading Kyle's report, I felt a visceral sense of aversion to the environment described, where one man can apparently make such demeaning and childish demands as Soryu apparently has, and not immediately be laughed out of the room or lose all power and status in the organization. In a more empathetic frame, if a colleague or friend of mine did something like that, I would take them aside and ask them if they were okay, and figure out what led to such a response... something that doesn't seem to be common, there.
Again, if you would like to claim that Soryu has never done things like make everyone stare at his face for over an hour because someone nodded off during one of his lectures, now is the time to do it. Otherwise, no thank you; my life is pretty great, and if there's spiritual growth I still need to undergo, I trust I can find it among people who demonstrate they are even better than I am at integrating my emotions, not absurdly worse.
As a final note...
"Kyle’s document seems to be heavily AI generated"
I'm not going to go into this, but for transparency's sake I want to note I consider it a bizarre accusation to make, and pretty obviously untrue. Again I find myself being forced to wonder at MAPLE's competence vs it's maliciousness; I know it's not a top priority in all the other things mentioned, but if you have any reason to believe this you should explain or present it, otherwise I'm going to take it pretty straightforwardly as an attempt at slinging whatever mud you can at the wall in the hopes that some of it sticks.
If it turns out it was "heavily AI generated" I will offer a sincere and deep apology. Until then, this sort of thing is really not helping your case.
We appreciate your request for clear simple answers to factual claims. We have edited the beginning of this post to do so.
I appreciate the more direct claims, regardless of veracity, but want to note that the last example is once again very much not evidence of a relatively flat hierarchy, and I’m confused about what makes you think it would count as evidence in favor of that rather than against it.
Most Westernized modern people have a deeply flawed model of human psychology and power dynamics because they haven't actually experienced, for themselves, what is possible. But it's not MAPLE's role to correct everyone's opinion. That's not the mission we've signed up for.
Kyle's description of what it's like here is not to be remotely believed. So your 'visceral sense of aversion' is to a false imagination that has nothing to do with reality. Your insistence that there is something wrong anyway, based on your analysis of this response, is also not based in reality. /You don't know./ And it seems like further you don't know what you don't know.
Your life is precious. Please don't waste your life on mere mental exercises.
Hard as this may be for you to believe, I am in fact holding quite easily the possibility that everything Kyle said was misrepresentative in some way, or even outright lies. "I don't know" has never been a hard thing for me to notice, or admit.
But please do not high-horse me on "human psychology and power dynamics" when I call out MAPLE for saying things like this:
"In the teacher-student relationship at MAPLE, the student has the primary power. The student chooses the teacher and chooses how much or little to follow the teacher’s teaching."
I’m open to arguments and explanation, but I absent them I think it’s entirely reasonable to note things like that as evidence to me that what Kyle was pointing at in his post may in fact have some truth in it.
I consider you a friend, if a distant one from years ago, and would have thought the you I knew from years ago would have immediately noticed the flaws in what that quote implies.
If I'm wrong about what you would have said ~7 years ago to a statement like that, or if you have changed your mind about it, I would love to hear you explain why MAPLE holds this position, or what I'm wrong about in considering it a demonstrably false presumption about human nature, and one that can easily blind someone to harms going on around them.
Hm... What's the demonstrably false presumption about human nature? I just want to be sure in what you're referring to.
Sure, I used to hold views about human psychology and power dynamics that were similar to others at CFAR, to other rationalists, or to modern Westerners in general. At the time, I felt my views were quite sophisticated, actionable in their precision, and made good predictions. I have since been overwhelmed by evidence that they are wrong on many levels. Again, mostly due to not actually experiencing what is possible.
The possibility of a good and proper teacher-student relationship has been largely destroyed in the West. This is why the West doesn't believe it exists. Instead the West believes whoever is in the position of leadership has power, and whoever isn't is in a weaker position, a potential victim that must be protected from authority.
This view has been trained into people, beaten into them, over many centuries of abuse and corruption and manipulation.
There are barely any glimmers of another way, in Western literature or story-telling or historical memory. But it is all subtle propaganda to promote a certain set of false assumptions.
But for millennia, Eastern traditions have carried on a totally different set of assumptions and practices. For even much, much longer than that, indigenous tribes all over the world have a much more diverse set of practices and ways of being. The Western mind has very sophisticated immune responses against updating from these, over millennia of inoculation and immunization. Due to the high level of sophistication of this ideological defense, I don't expect a set of posts or comments on the INTERNET to make a dent. In fact, your even asking for it as though it were viable to convey here is part of the system that is making it impossible for Western assumptions to make any meaningful update.
So yeah, spending years in a monastery was worth it to me to truly investigate those assumptions, directly for myself, just like unschooling is totally a thing that takes time and effort on the part of each person and isn't just a simple matter of spreading around a new set of assumptions. It's about unraveling the existing ones. This is not a simple matter of conceptual explanations.
Your argument relies on the premise that I must have those Western assumptions, but I don't in fact believe teacher-student has to be about power or potential-victimhood. I'm fully on board with the idea of teachers and students having complex relationships than that, and being equals in many ways.
What confuses me is the blithe assertion of the original post that the students are the ones with the power over the teacher. I can stretch my imagination to think of some situations where this is true; for example, a teacher who is extremely poor, and needs to take any paid opportunity available, or some system where student reports can make or break a teacher's career.
But the idea that this is the default is just not how society works, by and large, and I am extremely skeptical it's how it works at MAPLE, maybe particularly for Soryu, given the amount of prestige, status, and power he wields in the institution.
The power to walk away is a good power to have. I don't mean to discount it, or infantilize those who go to MAPLE as students. But the reality I have observed throughout society is that those who go to places like MAPLE are going with something in their life that they deeply desire to fix or some greater purpose they deeply desire to be part of, and this IS a position of vulnerability, and someone who claims to have the answers to healing/empowering them IS, definitionally, in a position of power over them.
This may not be true for any individual person. I am fairly confident I can go to MAPLE and walk away if I find the teachings not to my liking, or degrading in some way.
But I do not believe this is true for most people who go there, and whatever you wish to insist about Western society, the fact is you are IN Western society, and most people who enter MAPLE are products of that society, and have spent their whole lives having teachers hold power over them.
So I am left still waiting for some actual explanation of what it actually *means* for MAPLE to say this fairly obviously untrue thing. Not a lecture about Western society or some mind-reading or psychoanalysis about what I must believe, from your perspective; what I hope to hear are some examples or understandings of MAPLE life that helps students actually feel empowered to challenge MAPLE teachers, or its teachings, or to walk away in good spirits if it is not to their liking, rather than feel shamed, pressured, or criticized for desiring, say, more food or sleep than the teachers insisted was the necessary amount for them to have (this is from accounts besides Kyles, that were far less criticizing of MAPLE as a whole).
"the teacher sacrifices tremendously"
If the teachings are not freely given, why would I take them? Better to leave the teacher to whatever other things they'd rather do.
Man, that “the student has power over the teacher” section’s a neat trick. Does the teacher have power over the student, or is that only applicable in every *other* teaching dynamic that has ever been?
Hello Helen,
Thank you for your significant question. It is important to investigate this closely.
Those of us in the modern world who have gone through the modern educational system have likely experienced a teaching dynamic where students are in a classroom getting bullied by some people, humiliated by others, told that they are wrong by the teacher, and not allowed to leave. It would be sad to believe that this dynamic is both normal and universal.
In indigenous cultures, children often beg adults to teach them; to tell them a story, or teach them a skill. Responding to this ask for teachings does not give the adult power over the student.
It is common for us to give power over our lives to others. An example is the way that parents, out of love, give their lives to their children. Parents put themselves in that position knowing that they are not perfect but that they will do what needs to be done.
A true teacher loves so completely that their life vanishes. The true and highest aspiration of the student must be supported and realized, and that is the measure of the teacher. In order to support their students in this way, the teacher should have some power over them, but that is still love.
“It would be sad to believe that this dynamic is both normal and universal.” Sure would, if one did! Strawman argument.
A child requesting instruction does not establish that the instructor lacks power.
The parental analogy is confused. Parents plainly hold power over children and, of course, parental abuse and manipulation of varying degrees is common.
“A true teacher loves so completely that their life vanishes.” Setting aside whether this statement is true… how many people need to say “Soryu has not vanished into the teacher role and it had effects A, B, and C” for you to reconsider the notion that he fits into this definition? What proof would you require to change your stance, and is that standard of proof achievable?
“But that is still love.” Love is beautiful, and I don’t doubt it is present at MAPLE. Does the presence of love mean it’s impossible for power imbalances to develop?
Again: Does Soryu have power over his students, or does it only run one way?