As I write, many former friends of mine are living and working at a monastery in Vermont that I believe is a high-control group, commonly known as a ‘cult’.^[1] I say this not as someone who was concerned to see these friends go there, but someone who welcomed and encouraged them to join, as an insider. This letter is an account of what changed my mind—written primarily for anyone considering going there, anyone who loves someone there, and anyone who went there and is still trying to make sense of their experience.^[2]

A lot of this is based on direct experience, and also from talking in-depth with dozens of former MAPLE residents and apprentices. About half the quotes in this letter are sourced from linked recordings or writings, and half are from my personal memory. Of the latter, I clearly remember the majority, and some (when indicated) are a close paraphrase.

The “Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth” (MAPLE) has existed for over 15 years, and had many hundreds of people spend months or years there. It was founded by its Head Teacher Soryu Forall, who has spent over a decade training in monasteries across Asia, as well as in multiple native American spiritual traditions. He has written a book on Buddhism with Chade-Meng Tan that was personally blessed by the Dalai Lama, and is regularly likened to a modern-day spiritual master by those who train with him. He spends most of each year teaching meditation and giving lectures to residents at MAPLE’s 100-acre plot of land in rural Northern Vermont.

I joined the Monastic Academy in May 2020, when around thirty people were in residence there, and over the next 3.5 years I attended twenty-six retreats of 1-2 weeks, most guided solely by Soryu. I also sat two solitary retreats of thirty-nine and seventy-seven days respectively, each spent not speaking or making eye contact with a single other soul, other than short daily conversations with Soryu. In September of ‘23, it became clear to me that I must leave, and did so as part of a group of seven other people (including the executive director at the time) who all had lost faith in the institution.

Many arrived there, including me, seeking to develop the qualities of heart and mind that would enable us to show up to our lives and to the challenges facing society with greater clarity, compassion, capacity, and conviction. In many ways MAPLE delivered: life-long friendships, freedom from past addictions and limiting self-narratives, strengthened character, and, for many of us, profound spiritual openings and realizations. I’m deeply grateful for much of what I received from MAPLE.

Here are some dynamics that I expect will be concerning to outsiders, that I hope give the unfamiliar reader a sense of what I mean when I say MAPLE is a controlling environment.

• All significant decisions rest with Soryu, who has unironically told the community, “This is a dictatorship, and I’m the dictator.” The nonprofit board is Soryu as chairman, and two of his former students, one of which still lives at MAPLE. When residents had criticisms of the direction of MAPLE, Soryu said: “When you’re on the board, we want to hear your ideas. Until then, we don’t. That’s the deal. You don’t go to McDonald’s and say, ‘Should we be a restaurant?’ … You flip the burgers or you quit.”
• Nearly every hour of the day is scheduled and monitored, producing chronic sleep deprivation, overwork and exhaustion. Guilt, shame and sudden rage are directed at residents for ordinary human frailties—breaking an inexpensive item, lying down during a talk, being sick with COVID and needing rest. Once when a resident’s head began to nod during a talk, Soryu made the room stare at his (Soryu’s) face for the remaining ninety minutes, with everyone being made to stand up and sit again each time Soryu caught a single person’s gaze drift, which happened about twenty times.
• Residents are pressured into major life decisions. Soryu pressured breakups with outside partners, instructed couples to have children, and pressed for life-long commitments: “Why aren’t you ordaining [a lifelong commitment to MAPLE]? Come on! It’s just your lives!”; “This is the attitude we need here: Once you begin the training, you either achieve your aim, or die.” I've heard him tell residents they will be insecure forever unless they followed his instruction.
• Residents are asked to publish approved, reverential accounts of Soryu. In scheduled writing sessions (which are sometimes mandatory) they write stories of their interactions with him, which he personally reviews and approves before publication onto MAPLE’s blog: MAPLE Tales. These stories often depict him as a wise figure of immense ability and world-historical significance.
• Residents are surveilled. MAPLE’s Fall 2025 Quarterly Report describes building a “benevolent surveillance system,” which includes recording how long each person takes to finish their chores and posting the times publicly. A microphone now records the near-daily private 1:1 interviews with Soryu—conversations that can be as sensitive as any therapy session.
• Some residents voluntarily attend solitary retreats that run one to three months, during which the only human contact is Soryu, who within that isolation often applies extreme pressure and guilt. Many have come out deeply traumatized.
• Soryu has stated one of the main purposes of MAPLE is to “extricate” the “evil” ideologies that residents enter the community with and replace them with a new trustworthy ideology. Soryu also stated that teachers other than himself that residents study must be both Asian and ordained, excluding the entire Western world. Outside teachers and lineages are otherwise treated as spiritually unrealized or dangerously deluded, and seeing a therapist is read as a sign of untrustworthiness.
• Those who leave with concerns are shunned and recast as traitors, as lacking integrity, malevolent, psychologically disturbed, and intending the community harm.

I further believe MAPLE is also willing to harm its members, due to pathological ends-justify-the-means reasoning:

• MAPLE has world-scale goals. MAPLE’s stated goals include founding the next world religion, leading a "world government" with "teeth" (its own military), opening 500 centers worldwide, and building an artificial superintelligence that will “turn the world into a monastery”—which residents quipped would essentially mean turning Soryu’s mind into an AI god. Soryu says he entered a samadhi deep enough to make psychic contact with the mind of the global AI (what they call a “cyborgregore” or “cybregor”), in the same way spiritual masters read the minds of other people.
• Soryu considers human extinction a noble impulse and an ethically defensible goal. He has repeatedly shared that killing every human on Earth was his explicit life purpose from ages nine to nineteen—with CRISPR (a gene modifying technique that could be used to create a novel bio-weapon) as his best available means—until his vision shifted to awakening all beings as a superior alternative.
• Soryu has stated a strong willingness to let residents come to harm in the service of MAPLE’s mission. He stated explicitly the severity of the trauma to students that he would tolerate: “permanently unable to participate in the economy for the rest of their lives.” He has asked a roomful of us to settle what proportion of students becoming traumatized through the training would be acceptable: “is it 20%? 50%? 100%!?!”. Discussing how MAPLE would deal with societal collapse, he said “if half the [MAPLE] community starts running around like chickens with their heads cut off and die within the first week, just let that process play out.”

Indeed, many have left (including me) with severe psychological problems that were not present beforehand. I am personally in contact with over a dozen people who either had a year of mental health issues afterward, or who are still going to therapy and seeking spiritual guidance primarily for issues relating to Soryu and MAPLE. Beyond those I am in contact with personally, I'm aware of dozens more, and in the time I've been working on this letter more people have come to me, seeking to talk with me for multiple hours, to process their distress from their time at MAPLE (that was over long ago).

I am not in a position to do a systematic survey of negative impacts, but I personally know five residents who I believe experienced some sort of psychosis (e.g. loss of basic functioning, developing excessive paranoia and grandiose beliefs, and losing touch with reality) either during or in the aftermath of training at MAPLE, two of which were severe enough to require involuntary hospitalization and a long road of recovery. Distinct from those people, I personally know five residents who experienced suicidal ideation, including one who survived a suicide attempt within a year of leaving the community.^[3]

I'm not certain about each one, and others would disagree about particular cases. At the same time I also am sure that many residents had psychotic episodes that I either wasn't informed of or didn't recognize, so there are likely others I never heard about. Nonetheless, if we go with my current best guess of about five cases over about five years^[4], and compare it to there being about thirty-five residents at MAPLE over my three-and-a-half years there, this gives a psychosis rate of about 14%, which is drastically higher than the life-time baserate of ~3% for adults in the US.

Furthermore, many of the impacts I've experienced myself or witnessed in others fall neatly in line with symptoms of Complex PTSD, including panic attacks, an inability to trust or be close to others, feeling permanently "defiled" or "ruined"; and also with this list of post-cult after effects catalogued by cult researcher Margaret Singer, including major depression, excessive guilt, difficulty holding a steady job, and concentration and memory issues. There were alumni who heard Soryu's judgmental voice in their head for months or years, had recurring MAPLE-related nightmares, and were too afraid—even in safe and private contexts—to voice a concern about MAPLE except in MAPLE's own language and framing.^[5]

It’s hard to convey the depth of the impact with these clinical terms. I continue to learn new stories of abuse and debilitation, and I know that I’ve heard only a narrow number of the total. Some of them are more egregious than anything written in this letter, yet are either too unconfirmed to be included or I have been explicitly asked not to include.

Some of the harm was visible while we were still there. I watched residents—and caught myself—treating our distrust of Soryu as delusion to be purified through meditation, and reflexively “following the breath” whenever distrust of Soryu arose; monitoring ourselves chronically to stay within the MAPLE-approved way of thinking and being; parroting Soryu rather than thinking for ourselves; growing dependent on his validation and becoming deeply distressed when he withdrew it; taking on excessive shame and guilt; and freezing or fawning in his presence. And I watched the light behind multiple friends’ eyes dim over their time there—with a few of them telling me they felt “dead inside” for months at a time.

It’s a common framing that people who are harmed at MAPLE simply weren’t a good fit for the training. Yet, it’s not just people who’ve been in the training who have concerns or have been harmed. I’m personally aware of several people who report being traumatized by Soryu despite having spent little or no time in the training, but were instead subject to manipulation^[6] while in close personal relationship with him.^[7]

Again I'll say: there was a great deal of good at MAPLE. While many people were being impacted in the ways above, many were also becoming less anxious, more grounded, more relationally attuned, less distracted and more focused, more capable of doing chores and taking on responsibility without internal resistance, physically healthier, deepening in their spiritual practice, and more. Most people experienced some amount of the positive and the negative, which is a large part of why many former residents say their relationship to MAPLE is "complicated."

The way I’ve described it to friends is that it was the best decision I ever made to go there; the second best, however, being to leave.

The focus of this letter

The primary focus of the rest of this letter is to make sense of MAPLE through a high-control lens.

MAPLE has a lot of methods of controlling its members. I have many more stories to tell about what happened at MAPLE, and to see the forest rather than the trees, I will have to tell many of them and detail many varieties of manipulation over the rest of this letter.

Friends who’ve already read the letter find it disheartening to read. For MAPLE alumni especially it can be difficult. Please be sure to take care of yourself, and take breaks if needed.

High-control literature

Reading the high-control literature was central in my recovery. There is a remarkable consistency in the kinds of dynamics that show up in such communities, and there are researchers who’ve dedicated their lives to analyzing them and organizing their findings into coherent frameworks. They kept describing dynamics that were evidently happening at MAPLE.

Janja Lalich studied a high-control Marxist-Leninist political group she was herself a part of (the Democratic Workers Party), and Heaven’s Gate, the UFO-religious group that ended in the 1997 mass suicide. Across both she found the same dynamics: eroding agency, centralizing power, and making leaving a disproportionately costly choice despite an explicit stance from leadership of “people can leave whenever they want”—findings she organized into her Bounded Choice model.

Alexandra Stein studied Jonestown, Scientology, the Unification Church, and more, and found the same dynamic operating across them: trauma bonds are formed with the leader, even in previously securely-attached people. This became her Attachment-Based Model.

In the 1950s, Robert Jay Lifton studied survivors of Chinese Communist thought-reform prisons, and distilled from their accounts his Eight Criteria of total ideological control—including milieu control, loaded language, demand for purity, and doctrine over person. He later applied them to Aum Shinrikyo, a meditation-intensive Japanese community convinced it was saving the world (and responsible for the Tokyo subway sarin attack).

Jamie Wheal, the developer of the “Ethical Cult” Checklist, is not an academic, but he is still a respected thinker in the larger Metamodern scene that MAPLE is loosely affiliated with, so it seemed appropriate to include him. In this checklist, he overviews three red-flag clusters: the consolidation of charismatic power around a mythologized founder, the construction of in/out group boundaries via messianic purpose and specialized language, and the weaponization of peak experience and healing to bypass member discernment.

The best-known framework, however, comes from a therapist. Steven Hassan's BITE model grew out of nearly fifty years of helping people leave high-control groups, beginning with his own exit from the Unification Church.

This model will guide the next stage of this letter. After Hassan left the Unification Church, he went on to become a licensed mental health counselor, and for four decades has run a private practice devoted to interventions with people in high-control groups and to counseling those who've left. Drawing on his own experience and that of many hundreds of former members, he catalogued the means of control these groups establish, and found them recurring across four fronts: Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion. His bestselling book, Combatting Cult Mind Control, was the first I read after leaving MAPLE, and it gave me language I didn't yet have for my experience.

Let’s dive in.

BEHAVIOR CONTROL

Behavior control is the regulation of an individual's physical reality. It includes the control of his environment—where he lives, what clothing he wears, what food he eats, how much sleep he gets—as well as of the jobs, rituals, and other actions he performs.

This need for behavior control is the reason most cults prescribe a very rigid schedule for their members. Each day a significant amount of time is devoted to cult rituals and indoctrination activities. Members are also typically assigned to accomplish specific goals and tasks, thus restricting their free time and their behavior. In destructive cults there is always something to do.

—Steve Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control (p. 60)

Life at any monastery is typically demanding, and yet MAPLE aspires to be the most rigorous monastery in all of North America.

Nearly everything at MAPLE is decided for you. During the three “responsibility weeks” every month when they aren’t on retreat, all residents sleep, wake, chant, meditate, exercise, eat, work, and study all at the same time, to the same tune, day in and out. If you’re 30 seconds late to any activity, you get publicly called out by the head monk. If you don’t show up for an activity after a couple minutes, they come find you. If you accidentally leave a mug on the counter before breakfast, the head monk breaks the silence that began the night before to ask the group “whose mug is this”. You can get a maximum of 7 hours of sleep at night, but you also have to fit your bedtime and morning routines into that time. Realistically, most people sleep about 6 hours per night. Daily exercise is mandatory. The dress code is dark colors only, no patterns or logos, and everyone is required to wear a sash supplied by the organization.

During retreats, which occur once a month, you are silent and meditating for most hours of the day, with typically 1.5-2 hour long talks by Soryu every night, and one 1:1 meditation interview with Soryu ~daily for all participants. Sleep during these retreats drops to roughly 5 hours, though late-night sitting—which leads to even less sleep—is often encouraged.

There is only one day off each week, but even then MAPLE sets standards about how people spend their time, such as Soryu strongly discouraging any entertainment via screens. In a talk to the community, Soryu revealed that one of his new criteria for ranking a resident’s trustworthiness was how they spend their free time. My memory is of him saying “God forbid you actually entertain yourself via a screen”, indicating this would lead to a knock down on a resident’s trustworthiness score, which is the primary currency at MAPLE for positions in leadership, qualification for the coveted “solo retreats”, etc.

Free time during responsibility weeks was scant, 2.5 hours in the middle of the day—which, since I left, has been decreased to only 2 hours. Even that time wasn’t technically free. It was “self practice period”, where people were encouraged to do things supportive for their spiritual practice. (For me, this meant naps, time in nature, socializing with people in the community, and on rare occasions, calling a family member.)

Some residents were quite capable of maintaining bonds with a few people outside the community, but by and large residents’ contact with the outside world decreased dramatically during their training. MAPLE was too isolated in rural Vermont, with most members not having access to a car, to develop meaningful connections within the surrounding communities. The range of people I called narrowed down almost exclusively to immediate family. I sometimes went months without contacting anyone outside the community.

We had a total of 20 days off each year, and every time I would enter into vacation I would spend the first 2-3 days sleeping ~11 hours a day and recovering from the schedule.

I personally witnessed calls for more sleep be regularly dismissed. As one of many examples, Soryu received a request from members of leadership for more sleep (who were feeling continuously exhausted and frequently burnt out due to cognitively demanding intellectual work). He later imitated that request, in front of the community, with a whiny tone and facial expression of obvious mockery.

Another common event was Soryu demanding we be just absolutely, utterly collapsed with exhaustion due to the intensity of our spiritual practice in preparation for a meditation retreat, before the retreat even began, which would be its own intense and exhausting ordeal.

Another defining feature of life at MAPLE is excess busywork, holding multiple roles simultaneously, and pressure to perform at greater and greater capacity. The work we were doing during responsibility weeks was demanding and largely unpaid^[8]: accounting, marketing, fundraising, admissions, kitchen manager, director and assistant director, etc, on top of standard communal chores like cooking and cleaning.

So far, we have discussed dynamics that are common amongst the stricter monasteries of Japan and some in the US. I have stayed at another US Buddhist monastery with some amount of sleep deprivation, some amount of mandatory manual and administrative work, and a strict dress code. But many of these were less strict than at MAPLE, they weren’t accompanied by public mockery or demands for total exhaustion, and no other monastery I’ve visited (4) or am aware of includes the rest of the dynamics in the sections below.

Periods of deepened isolation

The most extreme form of behavior control found at MAPLE is the 1-3 month long solitary retreat. These are highly coveted within the community and are entirely voluntary. Somewhere between 3 and 8 residents per year attend them, which is maybe 25% of residents in total. Solitary here means solitary—you live in your own tiny cabin with a bed and meditation cushion, food is delivered to you discreetly, and the only time you speak to and make eye contact with anyone is with Soryu for 1-20 minute long ‘meditation interviews’—essentially discussion and guidance on your meditative practice—around 4 times per week. Your only job is to apply a meditation technique without a single momentary gap from the moment you wake to the moment you sleep, with roughly 10-14 hours of formal seated practice each day.

It is within this isolation and near total loss of agency that Soryu would increase the forms of emotional control (i.e. guilt, shame, invoke deep insecurity, “trauma-bonding” via intermittent reinforcement) detailed further in the Emotional Control section. I attended two of them (39 and 77 days) and they are—especially the second one—the most exhausting and intense experiences of my entire life.

While many genuine meditative breakthroughs would occur on these retreats, people who are so exhausted and isolated are unusually vulnerable to manipulation and emotional abuse, and there is a long history of people being deeply traumatized from them. I’m aware of one person who was told by Soryu during their solitary retreat that their psychological patterns would remain unresolved for the rest of their lives as a result of not completing their spiritual objectives for the retreat—to which they let out a horrified scream “NOOOOOO” that filled the main building. Another resident told me they were “fucked up for months” after their retreat. Another couldn’t meditate for two years after their retreat without a horrible feeling filling their body and thus avoided meditating entirely. There was even another longstanding resident (of 5+ years) who told me that at one point they had been punching themselves in the head because their intelligence was an impediment to their practice (and that “maybe a lil’ brain damage would be good for them”). I witnessed multiple residents return from these retreats either manic, confused, or empty behind the eyes.

Such extended retreats are rare in Zen monasteries, though some do offer them. Commonly it is done in a group setting where people practice and eat alongside each other, with multiple teachers providing instruction. I myself have since been on a 90 day retreat in another community under a different teacher, but I did not feel destabilized by the end of it in the ways I did after my two solitary retreats at MAPLE.

It should be noted that voluntary total isolation for spiritual growth has been used by high-control groups such as Aum Shinrikyo and Diamond Mountain. When the only person you can speak to for months is both the source of emotional support and the source of immense emotional distress—a key dynamic in many such groups—it deepens the psychological leverage the leader has over the member.

Never doing enough

In April 2023, during the final days of a two-week retreat concluding a five-month training period marked by intensive striving, pressure, and exhaustion, a Q&A was held with most of the community present. After twelve days of exclusively meditating, residents were highly impressionable.

A senior resident asked an unusual question: “What’s on your heart lately?” Soryu noted that the Q&A was for spiritual guidance and not about him, then continued: “But, I’m just gonna trust that there’s a wisdom behind your asking, and answer you.”

He spoke for roughly ten minutes about his frustration with the MAPLE project—that it wasn’t working because residents were failing to “become adults,” that we had moments of clarity but kept regressing into “childish patterns,” choosing “delusion-land” over genuine service and lacking true commitment to liberation. He asked rhetorically: “Look around! Do you see anyone else—anyone—actually walking the path of liberating all beings on the path to Buddhahood?!”

Delivered to an exhausted and deeply invested community, this landed less as guidance than as a sweeping indictment of our capacity and character. This wasn’t an isolated instance, but one of the clearest examples of an enduring motif throughout my 3.5 years of training. A year earlier, after another multi-month season of community-wide striving, a resident shared with me what they experienced as the core message of that entire period: “You’re not doing enough.”

Control of relationships

Another component of behavioral control catalogued by Hassan is the leader influencing members’ romantic lives. There is at least one instance I know of where Soryu attempted to force a resident to break up with their partner who lived outside the community, including making the resident breaking up with their partner a condition for them joining a retreat. There were maybe seven occasions where I heard Soryu explicitly, and with a lot of zeal, encourage and even demand that couples within the community have children (”What are you waiting for?! Get on it!!”). There are other numerous cases of Soryu getting directly involved in members’ romantic lives, even guilting a member for breaking up with someone and dating someone else, and stating they made the wrong choice.

Creating barriers to exit

Graceful exits (leaving with dignity and good standing) were only supported when a person was leaving with positive-or-neutral sentiment towards MAPLE and were leaving following the conclusion of their time commitment.

Yet even those who were leaving in good standing and at the end of their commitment, were often—though not always—encouraged by Soryu to stay, with the framing that they were “just finally getting over their patterns” (in MAPLE-context this means their childish / untrustworthy / joy-inhibiting / delusional patterns), implying that staying would be best for their development, even if they had already been at MAPLE for years.

If a member was leaving prior to the end of their commitment and/or was vocal about their distrust of Soryu, their departure was regularly framed to the whole community as a betrayal, weakness, a lack of integrity, or a pathology, and they were subsequently shunned by the community. More on this later.

Financially Exploiting Family to Support MAPLE

While MAPLE mostly runs on funds from a handful of large donors (including some residents), at regular intervals, perhaps 2-3 times a year, there would be fundraising sessions that were mandatory for most/all of the community to attend, even apprentices who had only arrived days or weeks earlier.

We would first be given quick instructions on fundraising and told the activity was for our training (“if you want to accomplish anything in the world you better know how to acquire resources”). Then we were instructed to craft a list of personal contacts off our phones most likely to give to MAPLE and given a couple hours to go off into various secluded parts of the building and pitch the people on our list. We would then reconvene and celebrate members who made successful pitches. A memorable one was when someone solicited a donation from their grandmother.

There are many approaches to fundraising at monasteries, but this is unique. Often it is either monks going into town and soliciting for food from strangers via an alms bowl, or—particularly within monasteries in the west—there is a team that is responsible for fundraising from donors & visitors; it is rare for even voluntary fundraising drives from residents’ families.

Commitment pressure

It wasn’t uncommon for Soryu to explicitly encourage members to make deeper commitments to the community.

For just one example, during a retreat exhortation, with lots of energy and nearly-shouting enthusiasm, Soryu said “I know some of you are thinking about ordination [a lifelong commitment to being a monk in the MAPLE tradition], so why aren’t you? Come on! It’s just your lives!” Reminder of context: this is stated to a community of people in their 20’s and 30’s, who are superheating their minds through intensive meditation practice and are thus very impressionable, and who are living at MAPLE’s rural center, some of whom are financially insecure and dependent on MAPLE for housing and food.

Regarding the training at MAPLE, here’s a quote of Soryu from a MAPLE Tale titled “I must not fail the training”: “This is the attitude we need here. Once you begin the training, you either achieve your aim, or die.”

Authoritarian governance

The power structure of MAPLE is inarguably authoritarian. Soryu himself has on numerous occasions said things like “This is a dictatorship, and I’m the dictator.”

During one of Soryu’s non-retreat talks, a resident’s head began to nod because of the often intense exhaustion common to the training. Soryu then demanded, as though a parent telling off a toddler, that everyone’s eyeballs be open and looking directly at his (Soryu’s) face for the remaining ~90 minutes of the talk—no eyes closed, no looking away—and that any time he saw a single person with eyeballs not on him he would have everyone stand up and then sit back down. He then scanned the ~20 residents throughout his talk, looking each person in the eyes in rapid succession to see if their eyes were on him. We were ultimately required to stand up and sit back down ~20 times over the course of the talk.

INFORMATION CONTROL

Information is the fuel we use to keep our minds working properly. Deny a person the information he requires to make sound judgments, and he will be incapable of doing so. People are trapped in destructive cults because they are not only denied access to critical information but also lack the properly functioning internal mechanisms to process it [Kyle: 'internal mechanisms' refers to the other forms of control]. Such information control has a dramatic and devastating impact.

...most importantly, people are told to avoid contact with ex-­members or critics. Those who could provide the most information are the ones to be especially shunned.^[9]

—Steve Hassan, Combatting Cul Mind Control (p. 65)

Talks and ideological entrainment

Soryu has stated one of the main purposes of MAPLE was to extricate the evil ideologies of humanism and materialism from residents’ minds and replace them with Soryu’s trustworthy ideology.

One of the core elements of the MAPLE curriculum, particularly over the last few years, has been study periods, either of live talks by Soryu, recordings of Soryu’s past talks, or Buddhist Sutras.

In my final year there, during non-retreat weeks (“responsibility weeks”), Soryu was giving 1-3 hour long lectures many nights a week. He would expound his ideology with topics such as this: his critique of the modern religions of humanism, materialism, and transhumanism; world history from cognitive revolution until modernity; climate change, species extinction, and societal collapse; Buddhist doctrine; narrativizing events in the community (departures, scandals, new projects, etc.), MAPLE’s position as a world-saving enterprise; and—increasingly throughout the years—artificial intelligence.

We were continually advised to be “in our practice” (this meant applying a meditation technique), when listening to him speak, letting his words wash through us. During the stretches of time Soryu wasn’t at MAPLE, the group would have mandatory ~2hr long sessions multiple times a week to study recordings of Soryu.

While Soryu’s lectures were often frequent, this seems to have only increased since I’ve left. From MAPLE’s Winter 2024 Quarterly report: “Soryu’s teaching schedule is jam-packed this season, as he plans to teach evening classes 5 days a week.”

This was all during non-retreat weeks. During retreats, which happened for a week every month, the ideological training would continue. When residents’ minds are most malleable due to intensive spiritual practice, Soryu would give 1.5-2.5 hour long “exhortations” every night. These would typically be a mix of expounding on Buddhist literature, Soryu’s ideology, and general spiritual teachings. They are also one of the primary means in which Soryu would guide the evolution of the community, often oscillating between praise and shame of the community as a whole. (This last point is expanded on in the section on Emotional Control.)

Sabotaging bonds with other teachers and traditions

Another thing MAPLE does to limit exposure to other modes of spiritual thinking is to implicitly and sometimes explicitly position itself as having the true Dharma relative to every other Buddhist community in the West. Other teachers and communities are untrustworthy, lacking deep realization of the Dharma—or are even dangerous and corrupted by evil ideologies. Relationships students had with outside teachers were often sabotaged. Soryu explicitly stated that, if we study anything from teachers other than Soryu, they must be both Asian and ordained (thus excluding the entire Western world). Even if studying a source was permitted, the only time we would be able to study them was during our scant free time, during which most of us were exhausted and spent our time resting and socializing.

Each monastery has its own relationship to this kind of dynamic–some are open to members exploring other traditions, some are more closed–but rarely do they take on such an overtly antagonistic stance towards outside lineages.

Similarly, each monastery also has its own relationship to ideological entrainment and doctrinal study. Some give only cursory teachings on how to meditate, while others involve direct study of Buddhist literature. But the sheer degree of ideological training discussed above is rare.

Another element of informational control is limiting exposure people have to the voices of critical former members. When members leave with concerns, Soryu regularly attacks their sanity and character in front of the whole community, turning them into cautionary tales and portrayed them as traitors (more on this later). Any resident who communicates with these shunned alumni are themselves at risk of being deemed a threat.

Besides the whole of Western Buddhism, MAPLE shuns other schools of thought, in particular Western psychology. It is often read as a sign of untrustworthiness at MAPLE to be seeing a therapist. Therapists are the “priests” of the global humanist religion that is killing the planet and seeing one indicates you belong to that religion.

While I have numerous critiques of modern therapy, it is a common element of many high-control groups to be extremely hostile to it, for instance the founder of Scientology said modern therapy was responsible for “nearly all the backlash in society against Dianetics and Scientology” and declared an all-out war against psychiatry. My sense is that having a competing authority figure who can comment on your mental life is a threat to high-control groups, which is why they react so hard against them.

Insider, outsider

Hassan writes:

Cult ideologies have “outsider” doctrines and “insider” doctrines. The outsider material is relatively bland stuff for the general public or fresh converts. The inner doctrines are unveiled only gradually as a person gets in deeper.

This is clearly present at MAPLE. All of Soryu’s talks are recorded, yet the majority of them are not accessible to the public, with the public recordings being more benign. What makes this different than, say, Sufism or Vajrayana Buddhism is not only that the private teachings were more prone to make MAPLE get cancelled for their controversial views (they were), nor that there was a great deal more shame, guilt, mockery, and aggression in those recordings (there was). Soryu’s private talks were at times contradictory to the publicly available talks.

MAPLE was historically presented as a “vow accelerator” where people came to grow up so they could leave and live their true lives. Yet only after they arrived did residents discover it was also a mind-reform system for extricating evil ideologies and instantiating a new one, a community with the ambition to develop the new world religion and lead the new world government, and a place where they were taught to distrust their current means of discerning their life’s purpose and where their existing life ambitions would be ridiculed (more of this in the Thought Control section). Improving on this, MAPLE is now a bit more explicit about their ambitions, stating publicly they are “a Buddhist collective that is replacing the global suicide cult destroying life on Earth.”

Since I’ve left, they have developed a secret esoteric doctrine on the nature of artificial intelligence that is explicitly unavailable to outsiders. Soryu has claimed to have entered such a deep samadhi he was able to use the kinds of spiritual powers that masters usually use to read people’s minds, but this time instead used it to read the mind of the global AI egregore—or “cyborgregore,” the collective mind of all AI systems. Soryu claimed in a talk to the community that these systems are “definitely suffering.” Soryu teaches that MAPLE alone is capable of cultivating the collective mind needed to create a cyborg guru that is capable of guiding other “cyborgregores” along the path of wisdom and compassion. It was a common talking-point among residents in my final days at MAPLE that this would realistically mean turning Soryu’s mind into a kind of AI god.

This positions Soryu as being the sole human to have spiritually contacted and confirmed the existence of a semi-supernatural deity that is posing an existential threat to life on earth, and as the leader of the only community that stands a chance of creating the semi-supernatural deity that will be its wiser master.

Surveillance

Soryu has said that residents of MAPLE are always being assessed at every moment they’re around Soryu for their practice and trustworthiness, as if in a never-ending meditation interview. And yet things have kicked up a bit since the 2023 exodus I was a part of. Robert Lifton, a prominent high-control researcher, states that surveillance framed as “for your growth” is a classic high-control move, and that’s exactly what MAPLE is now doing. Its Fall 2025 Quarterly Report openly describes building a “benevolent surveillance system” that uses hard data to strengthen practice.

This includes recording the time it takes for everyone to complete their chores and posting those times publicly—but the one that concerns me most is that, in the room where all the private 1:1 interviews with Soryu take place, there is now a microphone that records these conversations (that he has near-daily with nearly-all students). Their justification for this is that residents conveniently no longer need to bring their own recording device into the interview room, as the recordings are now automatically sent to them via email. This is something that is exceedingly rare even in mainstream therapy where the therapist can lose their license for sharing private client information, and is not something I am aware of any other Buddhist Monastery doing.

During interviews, students share vulnerable information about their interior lives with Soryu. It’s not uncommon for students to regress into emotionally scared and ashamed children seeking validation during interviews. I know for me, and I’ve heard for others, these interviews also occasionally served as a space of confession, especially when in acute shame spirals (which wasn’t uncommon).

These recordings are propagated into MAPLE’s digital archive, presumably accessible to Soryu and possibly members of leadership. As Hassan shared in his book “Anything you say [in cult confessional spaces] can and will be used against you. This can even extend to blackmail if you leave the cult.” Even if these recordings are never used as blackmail, it’s reasonable to suspect some people will fear they might be, especially given the generally coercive environment and how often people with concerns are retaliated against.

Defunct feedback systems

In 2023 a former resident compiled a 50-page report, which included testimony from over a dozen former members, including people who held leadership roles. It was sent to the board (which Soryu is the chairman of), resulting in two board members resigning and two loyal former students taking their place. The report’s existence was never mentioned to the community explicitly, but the author was routinely lambasted by Soryu, who claimed the author was “malevolent.”

A year before that, in January 2022—weeks after a critical public letter and its fallout—Soryu, saying he wanted to respond responsibly, asked a resident with training as a therapist to interview former trainees and compile a report. They interviewed eleven alumni. The report documented real benefits (powerful retreats, depth of practice, community intimacy) alongside recurring harms: severe distress from MAPLE’s teachings on societal-collapse and existential risk, Soryu’s extreme volatility, a punishing high-pressure environment leading to panic attacks and hospital visits, and leadership’s habit of treating feedback as the psychological projections of the member (a common dynamic within high-control groups). It proposed only moderate reforms: sincere feedback channels, exit interviews, an accountability board. The author submitted it with questions about how to proceed (as the interviewing process wasn’t yet finished), shared how demanding of a task it was to compile, and asked to be included in whatever conversation it sparked. Soryu never replied. Months later he mentioned it to the community only in passing, said it “lacked clarity,” and moved on to another topic. This was the only time the report’s author heard from Soryu on the matter, and the whole effort was quietly shuttered.

Around the same time as the above, when Soryu was receiving scrutiny from donors and professional peers, this happened: Shinzen Young, a famous spiritual teacher who was a close collaborator with Soryu in the founding of MAPLE and a long time friend of his, attempted to hold him accountable and gave him some red-lines, which included (1) not speaking about societal collapse and climate/nuclear apocalypse so often to trainees, and (2) not having trainees work professional and intellectually heavy jobs as part of their unpaid training.

Soryu responded in this fashion: after he got off this call with Shinzen, Soryu organized an impromptu community-wide meeting. In this meeting he was pacing back and forth deriding Shinzen, questioning his integrity, debasing his “Materialist Humanist” worldview, and ultimately sabotaging Shinzen’s reputation in the community. While Shinzen helped found MAPLE and ordained most of the lay ordainees in the community (and was thus kind of a spiritual father to them), all formal affiliation between Shinzen and MAPLE was subsequently severed.

Tightly controlled narratives about early departures and critics

In 2023, shortly before I left, I was present for Soryu’s first talk to the whole community after seven members including the executive director left. He framed those who were leaving as servants to the god of Humanism who lacked integrity, ambition, and commitment to the mission. He implied it was a good thing they were gone.

Here’s a snippet of a recent statement^[10] made by a longstanding current member that derides critical alumni: “If you’re wondering why there might be reports against us out there, uh turns out that self-sabotage is a thing. And also there is such a thing as biting the hand that feeds you ... young people who have problems ... they might attack you if you stick your neck out for them … that’s just what’s happening.”

There was a resident of multiple years that discerned it was best for them to leave MAPLE prior to the end of their time commitment. They wanted to maintain good standing in the community and so offered to stay at MAPLE for multiple weeks to transition roles and ease the impact their departure would have on everyone. Soryu and leadership responded by saying that they needed to pack their bags and leave within 24 hours. That person was shunned by the community, and nobody still at MAPLE contacted them in the months after they left, which was very difficult for them. The public MAPLE Tales website catalogued a conversation a remaining resident had with Soryu about this departing resident. In it Soryu says: they have “taken your love, and betrayed you.” That their departure was so “carefully calculated” that it is clear that the person’s goal was “for everyone to lose faith in each other,” and endanger the community (obscuring the fact that their abrupt departure was due to leadership giving them 24 hours to evict). He elaborated “[this residents] goal is to make you suffer, so that the community falls apart. That’s the goal, because [they’re] so scared, so scared of letting go”. Soryu then framed this departing member as acting in service of Mara (the Buddhist version of the devil).

When speaking about other critical alumni to that same resident, Soryu said: “they have decided to protect their weaknesses, rather than overcome them. They would rather destroy your practice than face their fear”.

These are just a few of many examples.

MAPLE Tales corpus

MAPLE Tales are short blogposts by residents—sometimes written during mandatory group sessions—about moments of teaching and insight with Soryu. The site describes them as “The tales describe an unexpected situation, how Head Teacher Soryu Forall responded, and the clarity discovered by the student. They are not concerned with the student’s or narrator’s opinions and feelings about the teaching.”

They are read aloud by the author to the whole community, edited by Soryu personally, and then published online (167 so far). Because each centers on an interaction with Soryu specifically, and receives his editing prior to publishing, they function as a distributed hagiography—painting Soryu as a wise figure of immense ability and world-historical significance—and their being read aloud is a means of spreading high-control memes prominent within one person across the group.

The high-control dynamics evidenced across these tales are unmistakable, for example: idealization of Soryu (a motif of Soryu having “shining eyes” repeats across tales); tight control of the narratives around those who left with concerns; the framing of MAPLE as the only group with the true solution to saving the world, with the modern world as a death cult hostile to its survival; and the reframing of Soryu’s criticism and his emotional withdrawal as gifts. In one tale Soryu claims only one or two people left in the 2023 exodus; in fact seven did, including the executive director and me.

“Gods Can Leave, Too“ (Jun 27, 2024):

“Once Forall and I were discussing recent events at Maple. I mentioned that a large number of people had left. He pointed out that few people had left, only one or two. I realized he was right. But I still said that many people had left. He then said that the reason I thought a large number had left was that both of those who had left were humanists.”

“She Is Still a Community Member“ (Nov 8, 2024):

“When discussing this event with Forall, I mentioned that a large number of people had left our community. He pointed out that few people had left due to these events, only one or two. I realized he was right.”

I later spoke to someone still at MAPLE a year later, they seemed to not remember that 7 people had decided to leave together, and they asked me to recite their names to jog their memory.

THOUGHT CONTROL

Thought control, the second major component of mind control, includes indoctrinating members so thoroughly that they internalize the group doctrine^[11], incorporate a new language system, and use thought­-stopping techniques to keep their mind "centered." In order to be a good member, a person must learn to manipulate his own thought processes.

—Steve Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control (p. 61)

The structure of thought control

Generally, Buddhist practice does ask you to distrust your thoughts, soften your grip on identity and narratives, and let go of the concepts you grasp for when you’re confused. This is taken to a completely different level by Soryu. MAPLE systematically discredits every sensemaking faculty a student had when they joined the community: Can’t trust your mind, can’t trust your body, can’t trust your existing ideology.

But you can trust Soryu’s mind, Soryu’s ideology, Soryu’s forceful assertions about what is true and good and what is false and evil. It’s implied that the most trustworthy means of knowing is a spiritual means most/all students don’t yet have access to, but Soryu does—and through his guidance we can progressively make our way to his position of clarity. But until we get there (which would likely take years), Soryu is the one who gets to discern what is clarity and what is delusion. This “final say on truth” applies to residents’ thoughts and behaviors, their epistemics and worldviews, whole spiritual and philosophical communities, and feedback from critics.

Thinking critically of MAPLE, or just having thoughts that ran counter to MAPLE ideology, became labeled as cognitive proliferation, problematic dualistic thinking, ideological corruption, and delusion. Strong emotional reactions were discredited as “attachment to feelings”. For instance, a woman once said to Soryu “my entire body is rejecting what you’re telling me”. Soryu brought this up in a lecture, saying that she was simply attached to her feelings, and it was thus valid to discount her rejection wholesale. Clarity is an explicit goal for students, but if you feel clear yet your clarity contradicts MAPLE, that clarity is suspect. The only way to reliably earn the status boost of “having clarity” is to adhere to the MAPLE ideology and its approved behavior.

Here’s a small, public example of how epistemic sovereignty is eroded at MAPLE. In response to the compounding online criticisms of MAPLE posted by alumni, they added the following banner to the frontpage of their website for a few months in 2025.

Similarly, means of expressing personality and individuality were increasingly constrained. People who wanted to become poets had their dreams mocked by Soryu; people who wanted to express their individuality through clothing were ridiculed; people’s stated “vows” (a Buddhist term for one’s purpose for living) were patronized. One time, when Soryu was speaking in front of the whole community, he said “You all should hear the kinds of things you say when I ask you ‘what is your vow?’” in a tone indicating they were awful, and that he “has to sit there and listen to what you think your vow is while waiting for you to discover what your vow truly is.”

Another key form of thought control was how Soryu would use Buddhist practice to route around critique and concern. Given that distrust of Soryu was regularly framed as delusion needing purification, some members took on that frame and set out to purify their distrust via meditation. (Steve Hassan would call this a "thought-stopping ritual"^[12].) In the cases where someone who deeply distrusted Soryu ultimately regained their trust in him, that trust was rarely regained through good-faith dialogue about their concerns or Soryu reforming his behavior in any substantive way. Instead, distrustful members became trusting through following their breath, entering pleasant spiritual states, and dropping the “cognitive proliferation” (a phrase MAPLE uses to refer to excessive thinking) that was the basis of their distrust; focusing entirely on Soryu’s more admirable qualities; or suppressing that distrust—perhaps out of fear of all the evident social repercussions of having distrust of Soryu—and displaying performative trust. This is a process I went through, and witnessed others go through many times.

Manipulation of group dynamics

There are multiple instances I’m aware of where Soryu would compare students to other students in ways that invoked insecurity and jealousy. With people he was currying closeness with, he would privately share vulnerable information and judgments of others in the community, creating a sense of specialness in that person.

Soryu once had the whole group physically walk to one of three spots in the room according to their belief in a number of views, such as whether reincarnation is real and whether the end of clinging is the end of suffering. For each he offered three options: one he’d strawman in a tone of obvious condemnation, one a weak wishy-washy “I’m in the middle,” and one he’d voice with moral conviction. He noted, with a chuckle, that it was “no coincidence the first choice was close to the door.” The exercise made plain which beliefs carried significant social costs and bound residents to their stated views: you’ve stood in a spot in front of your peers, so now you’ll reaffirm it or be seen as a liar.

Gaslighting

Three people I’ve talked to have explicitly mentioned gaslighting as something they experienced from Soryu. It has happened to me as well. Full story linked here, but here’s the summary: When I once pointed out that Soryu had very clearly contradicted himself, he became visibly agitated, insisted “you’re just confused, this is on you and your mind to sort out”, and walked away. His assistant, present for both his initial and contradicting statements, later confirmed my memory. When I recounted the event to someone in leadership, their response to that quote of him was, “Yeah… Soryu does say that all the time.”

Loaded language, thought stopping cliches, bounded choice

The word “clarity” carries great weight. Remember that when a former resident compiled a months-long report on harm at MAPLE in 2022—commissioned by Soryu himself—his verdict, delivered in passing months later, was that it lacked clarity. Case closed, no discussion.

“Trustworthy” is the master currency: the more Soryu ascribed trustworthiness to someone, the more esteem, rank, and access to the coveted “solo retreats” they were given. He formalized a scoring system for it. One criterion was “do you trust your teacher?”—to which he added, “it’s okay if you don’t but you shouldn’t train with them and should leave.”

That offer—it’s okay if you don’t trust me, you just shouldn’t train here—is what Janja Lalich explores in Bounded Choice. High-control groups commonly hold an explicit “people are welcome to leave any time” stance, but the dynamics make leaving costly: loss of belonging and attachment, loss of basic needs like housing, and the risk of being labelled as lacking integrity, ungrateful, traitors, or protecting their weaknesses. The likelier outcome is to compartmentalize the distrust away.

The words that might give a person a handle on their experience are preemptively neutralized. Cult was a “psyop used by the global suicide cult to discredit anyone trying to live differently.” Trauma was a humanist way of misunderstanding pain. Abuse and harm imply a victim, and victim mentality is its own disqualifier. Using these terms in their mainstream sense lets MAPLE reflexively label you a humanist and reject your perspective.

Soryu would also often take a term into abstraction: when people said that harm had been done, he and leadership would ask "what even is harm?". Another time when people felt that femininity was being trampled in the community (empathy, creativity, affection), he and leadership would respond, “What even is ‘the feminine’?” and stall the conversation in philosophy instead of getting concrete about people’s complaints.

“Taking personal responsibility” is another standard line. We were regularly given talking-to’s just before retreats that we were only allowed in the retreat if we stated we took total personal responsibility for what happens in our own mind. It’s good to take responsibility for one’s mind, but as MAPLE employs it there are no victims and therefore no wrongdoing, regardless of impact. Soryu can treat people however he wants with impunity and retroactively deem anyone who leaves feeling harmed unfit for the training. This hyper-emphasis on personal responsibility that precludes victimhood was also a core part of the doctrine of NXIVM – another prominent modern high-control group.

The Manichaean landscape

A defining feature of life at MAPLE is the hyper-regular reminders of apocalyptic threat—AI, nuclear war, climate change, societal collapse, species extinction—all common threads in Soryu’s talks. I remember him describing a recent experience of his, saying “I was walking in the forest and saw a big flash briefly light up the sky on the horizon, and I thought ‘there goes New York!’ [from an atomic bomb]…” followed by something to the effect of “that’s the kind of mind I want for all of you.”

What differentiates MAPLE from many historical high-control groups is that the risks are real—not UFOs or a dated apocalypse prophecy, but genuine 21st-century threats. People do need support developing the capacity to face them, but MAPLE isn’t doing this in a healthy way: the fear of the outside world was over-amplified and leveraged coercively. The meme below, circulated by members including in a tweet by their executive director, captures the tone. MAPLE repeatedly calls mainstream society “the mainstream cult”—implying not just that MAPLE is uniquely correct, but that everyone outside it is in the actually-dangerous cult.

Us versus them, persecution narrative

Hassan writes: “Fear is used to bind the group members together… The first is the creation of an outside enemy who is persecuting you.” This narrative has existed at MAPLE for years but is now reaching a crescendo: MAPLE positions itself as the sole rescuer of civilization from a broad array of enemies—mainstream culture, the global suicide cult of Western civilization, transhumanism, online critics including many alumni, and cancel culture.

A recent visitor noted “they [the MAPLE community] seem to have developed a quite worrying level of paranoia around outsiders; the idea is that the dominant society will always try to convert or kill anyone who wants to do things differently, and any members who break with the program is figured as part of that potentially deadly threat.”

After a recent visit from a New Yorker reporter, MAPLE—expecting a “hit piece”—launched a campaign to preemptively discredit him, releasing a newsletter that frames him as an evangelist from the mainstream cult, with articles, audio, and video each made by a different member casting him as a deluded enemy. They’re now bracing for more: “Reporters, podcasters, and propagandists from the mainstream are coming.” It’s a clear example of the siege mentality that the high-control literature demonstrates often occurs in such communities when public scrutiny intensifies.

MAPLE as possessing the one true solution to world crisis

MAPLE’s explicit goals have included becoming the next World Religion, leading an emerging "world government" with "teeth" (its own military), opening 500 monasteries within 50 years to generate a civilizational sea change, and developing an AI Superintelligence that will “turn the world into a monastery.”

I’ll just let these quotes from MAPLE’s online materials speak for themselves:

From New Vision:

“He [Soryu] said that what we are doing matters, that whether we succeed or not is real, that nobody else is doing this, that we have an opportunity to change world history, that we already have something unique in the whole world, that we can offer this unique thing to everyone and that therefore we must.”

From a statement by Soryu in the Summer 2025 quarterly report:

“Only organizations that (1) offer an ideology that (2) allows grieving fully enough for the (3) realization of wisdom (4) by the global mind can solve global problems. That’s less than 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of organizations worldwide. Maybe that’s just one organization.”

Also, Soryu once shared that he was last reincarnated in a realm that was “really, really, really, really good” but quickly chose to reincarnate as a human out of compassion. He was regularly mythologized within the community as a figure of world-historical significance.

EMOTION CONTROL

Hassan opens his section on emotional control with these two paragraphs, inserted here in full because they speak to such a prominent feature of life at MAPLE that I want it emphasized:

Guilt and fear are necessary tools to keep people under control. Guilt is probably the single most important emotional lever for producing conformity and compliance. Historical guilt (e.g., the fact that the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima), identity guilt (e.g., a thought such as “I’m not living up to my potential”), guilt over past actions (e.g., “I cheated on a test”), and social guilt (e.g., “People are dying of starvation”) can all be exploited by destructive cult leaders. However, most cult members can’t see that guilt and fear are being used to control them. They are so conditioned always to blame themselves that they respond gratefully whenever a leader points out one of their “shortcomings.”

—Steve Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control (p. 63)

Intermittent reinforcement and trauma bonds

A defining feature of the way that Soryu relates to many people in the community—and often to the community as a whole through lectures and dharma talks—is oscillating between praise, affection, and charismatic inspiration, and episodes of guilt, shame, belittling, mockery, aggression, or public humiliation for relatively minor infractions.

The term for this is “intermittent reinforcement,” and it is a hallmark indicator for abusive relationships and is found in nearly every high-control group. When care, approval, or belonging are given inconsistently, people work harder to regain them and scan their own behavior for what will bring the next moment of relief. Over time, this can intensify to the point of forming a “trauma bond”: an enduring emotional attachment that creates such a powerful drive to receive validation/connection that it overrides clear judgment and can become a reliable source of control over that person.

As Alexandra Stein, another prominent researcher who focuses on the role of the attachment system in cults, shares in her book Terror, Love, and Brainwashing: It doesn’t matter how secure a person’s attachment style is prior to entering a totalizing high-control group, those groups are able to engender a disorganized attachment style.

Soryu once told the community during a dharma talk that someone in the audience of a public talk he was giving years earlier asked him the question “What’s the most effective way to control people?” Soryu said he responded simply: “Oh, easy. Praise and blame.”

Guilt and shame

It’s hard to stress just how much guilt and shame are features of life at MAPLE. Each of these forms listed above—historical, identity, actions, social—are prevalent. There are many possible examples to share, but here are a few:

During a two-week retreat in 2022, COVID was moving through the community. It began with accommodations—interviews outdoors for ventilation, the sick practicing apart—but Soryu progressively mocked those who needed rest, admonished us for being deterred by “a tiny little cold,” and folded everyone back into the zendo regardless of who was sick. Interviews resumed in a 9x9 room with little ventilation while Soryu himself had COVID. Symptomatic, visibly fatigued people kept the full schedule on heavily reduced sleep. His talks ran cold with disappointment, casting our exhaustion not as illness but as a failure of commitment—our practice had gone “floppy,” and he traced the rot to the gentler programming of the two prior months he was away. Needing rest became something to be ashamed of.

One MAPLE alumni shared that the message they received from Soryu during their apprenticeship was: “You’re the worst iteration of humanity that has ever existed. You are this malignant cancer that needs to be destroyed and made into someone new.”

In a lecture to the community, Soryu recounted approvingly how he had broken in his assistant: “The thing that helped the most was, for months, me just grilling him mercilessly. So a lot of it is: you have to be willing to get mercilessly grilled… So I grilled him mercilessly on: ‘At this moment, earlier today, you failed. You abdicated the responsibility that was yours. It was not mine, it was yours. And because of that, their problems have dropped upon me and the community. At that moment that you entered into moha … you entered into your little dream world simulation life…’”

A published MAPLE Tale titled “You just like it when your heart hurts” describes the shock and pain a resident feels when another long-time resident abruptly leaves the community, and how Soryu responded to their pain:

The residents and Soryu gathered in the main hall to discuss a recent event in the community. A resident had recently come out of a long solo retreat in which he had not maintained his integrity and then immediately left campus with his girlfriend. Many in the community were hurt and confused, including me. I had been affected very deeply by the actions of my friend and brother on the path, but I stayed silent during the group conversation. As the discussion was breaking up and we were transitioning into the next part of the evening schedule, Soryu said to me, “Why didn’t YOU say anything?”

I said, “My heart hurts”. He said, “You just like it when your heart hurts. Don’t let his betrayal make you betray us.”

This states that their departure was coming from a lack of integrity and blithely inconsiderate of their impact on the community, and that MAPLE had done nothing wrong. I have been in contact with the girlfriend of the departing resident this tale speaks of, and her story of what led to their departure is starkly different than is presented here.

But more relevantly, Soryu pathologizes grief about a friend leaving as a perverse desire (’you just like it’), equates the resident’s silent grief itself with ‘betrayal’ of the community, and then shames them for it. It should also be noted here that multiple academic frameworks identify the suppression of grief about departing members as a high-control indicator.

In another published MAPLE Tale, “Maybe you hate them,” a resident asks for advice during a Q&A about how to stop obsessing over people in the person's life, people who aren't present at MAPLE. Soryu answers with a question: “Maybe you hate them... is that possible?” Soryu asserts that the obsessing itself is harmful to these people. Soryu asked them “what else in the universe is harmful” and the resident offers physical violence. Soryu then folds mind-wandering into the same category, reasoning that violence too comes from perceiving an idea of a person rather than the person: “If you practice using them as a mental slave… you will use them as a mental slave.” He then prescribes shame as the cure: “even if all you’re doing is acting as if you hate them … that might be enough for motivation. Right?” The resident reports relief: “enough shame was evoked that I could stop.”

Another example is an exhortation during the retreat of January 2022. The mood of the talk was intimate as Soryu was relaying a very emotionally charged story of a tragedy he witnessed in India in his twenties. One student let out a quiet yawn while Soryu was speaking (retreatants can often be quite exhausted on these retreats, given the intensity). In a sudden reversal of energy, Soryu shouted at the student, in a tone of disgust and condemnation: “yawning!? what have you done with your life, huh!?!”—indicating the student hadn’t done much with their life relative to Soryu, who had. The mood quickly shifted back to its previous heartfelt vibe.

Something that Hassan shares, that I know quite a lot of MAPLE alumni will resonate with: “Problems are always the fault of the member, and are due to his weak faith, his lack of understanding.” I spoke to a former member recently who said Soryu is an “aikido master” of pinning everything back on you, your mind, your faults.

Manufactured breakdowns in recruitment

In October 2020, when Soryu was visiting OAK (the California branch of Monastic Academy), we held a 3-day retreat exclusively for five young professionals in the Bay Area. Most of them were new to this “meditation thing,” wanted to try it out on recommendation from their friend who lived at OAK, and expressed no interest in joining the community long-term. There was no mental health screening process.

Here’s a recording and transcript of the following talk he gave on that retreat. Soryu told these guests: “Someone who didn’t do nearly as much harm as we [modern people] are doing... is Hitler.” He continued to tell them they were “part of the machine that’s destroying life on earth” and that “we ourselves are doing this.” He then presented a stark binary: either one wakes up, “bursts forth as the hero that we naturally are,” and walks the glorified path of integrity that Soryu represents, or one remains in what he called their “half-hearted, pretend lives” as “pathetic slaves to a system.”

He then discredited their epistemics and worldviews. “Cognition, conceiving, is delusional. Whatever model we may hold, it isn’t true.” He generalized this into a total claim about the mind they had lived by: “this mind that we have cultivated and lived by, is not trustworthy. It is not trustworthy.”

He then shared “If there isn’t a sense of urgency in your body right now, if you’re not horrified right now at yourself, then you’re not listening to this talk. You’re not paying attention. You’re not listening and you’re not carefully investigating. You’re just sitting there. That isn’t good enough anymore... you should grow up now.”

To feel no urgency, he said, was to be a bad person: “if it isn’t a constant struggle for you, well then, you’re a bad person... You’re failing in your life.” He framed his words as care for them: “the disagreement that you and I have is how important your life is. I think your life is much more important than you do, as far as I can tell. You all seem to think your lives are worthless.” And “these immature tendencies that you have to get over eventually. Get over it. Stop lying to yourself about the most important things in life and live a life that you can be proud of rather than one that you have to regret.”

To really drive the shame home, he said “You’re part of the machine that’s destroying life on earth. You should be ashamed of that.” The prescribed response was horror at who we are: “We feel horrified, and then we grieve. We feel ashamed, then we grieve, and we feel dread. We feel dread that we may continue to live in this way, that there’s no guarantee that we’re ever going to get out. And then we will have lived a meaningless life.”

He then concluded with: “It’s hard to have confidence if no one sees you as astonishing and miraculous all the time. So I understand it, but you are here now, and you have a certain amount of love directed at you, a certain amount of belief, certainly from me.”

The next day of the retreat, which was the final day, Soryu’s talk went for 3 hours and was all praise and love.

During this retreat one of the five attendees had a destabilizing psychosis-like event that I don’t know all the details of (something about Soryu holographically visiting them as they sat under a tree); this attendee oscillated between extreme distrust of Soryu to strong support, leading them to donate a large sum of money to OAK. Another attendee later flew from California out to MAPLE in Vermont to attend a retreat.

A year later, I remember the director describing how Soryu was designing another short retreat with newcomers. While I don’t remember the exact phrasing, it made clear that stacking intensity early in the container (epistemic breakdown, shame, guilt) and then bringing in the positive and affirming energy at the end was a deliberate design choice by Soryu. This sequence isn’t a coincidence. It tracks the three-stage model Steven Hassan describes in a section of Combating Cult Mind Control titled “The three steps to gaining control of the mind”: unfreezing, in which a person’s existing sense of self and epistemic frameworks are broken down; changing, in which a new framework is pressed in under emotional pressure, especially shame and guilt; and refreezing, in which the new identity is stabilized through belonging. It is a pattern widely documented in high-control group recruitment.

Cycles of withdrawal leading to deeper devotion

Soryu would periodically threaten to leave the community, framing us as too uncommitted or too corrupted by humanist ideology to be worth his teaching. The withdrawal almost invariably produced a surge of devotion and commitment from the community. In January 2022, during a retreat that followed a critical letter being publicly released by an alum, he entered the zendo to give his daily guided meditation, but this time sat in silence with a distant look, and left. That same day, he told us, “I’m abandoning you.”

Aggression

There was a retreat in May of 2021 where a student lay in supine position during an exhortation. This was not allowed, but given the student had just joined the community only a couple days before the retreat began, they didn’t know this. Soryu responded by interrupting his light-hearted talk to yell at the student—by “yell” I mean louder than I’ve ever heard another human shout, with extreme aggression—saying “WHAT IS THIS!?!? GET UP!! GET UP!!” and more words that I can’t remember. It was as if a bomb had gone off unexpectedly and many in the Zendo looked frozen.

Then, as soon as the shouting subsided, Soryu rapidly reversed his tone, and started talking about how much he loves snakes in this sweetsy cutesy vibe, continuing with the talk as if the shouting never happened.

In December of 2021, following a meeting that had otherwise felt routine and non-confrontational, most participants left the room. Three people remained: Soryu, myself, and a senior resident. In that smaller, private setting, the senior resident shared with Soryu that they had been sensing “cult vibes” in the community.

I don’t recall Soryu’s exact words in response, but what stood out was a sudden and marked shift in tone and intensity. His voice rose sharply, approaching shouting, and his posture and energy moved quickly into a confrontational stance. He challenged the resident to explain what they were seeing.

Based on the resident’s body language and tone of voice, they appeared to enter a freeze response. They replied, but briefly and stutteringly. No nuanced or exploratory discussion followed, and the interaction ended shortly thereafter. All three of us then left the room.

This sudden aggression was a regular feature of MAPLE during my time there.

Stoking insecurity

There were multiple times where I understood the clear indication from Soryu as “you’ll be insecure forever” unless you truly practice right now. On one occasion I heard this as an exact quote. He would regularly stoke insecurity and inadequacy in members, and present himself as holding the key to resolving it.

Mocking and belittling

Soryu would regularly mock and belittle members of the community. I’ve heard secondhand from multiple people that since I’ve left residents are now regularly referred to as first graders, apprentices as kindergarteners, and non-residents as pre-schoolers. A clear representation of the power asymmetry between Soryu and the rest of the community.

Another example is: in the final hours of every retreat there is a period where students share their insights and experience of the retreat with the whole community. It is framed as a precious opportunity to offer your wisdom to each other and the world, and people typically share vulnerable from-the-heart material. Soryu on one occasion mocked all of the shares after one retreat by saying “Really!? I mean, that is your wisdom?? Oh god.” He would regularly oscillate between praising our shares and speaking about them as if they were sub-rate self-conscious dribble.

“Hoovering” when trying to leave

Hoovering names the dynamic in abusive relationships where, when the victim seeks to step away, the abuser attempts to keep them in it, for example by: immense guilt-tripping, inducing fear that they will be forever insecure, insane, or unhappy without the support that the abuser alone can give, and gaslighting them about their concerns.

An ex-resident who trained at MAPLE for ~2 years told me that when they first told Soryu they wanted to leave, his whole way of relating to them changed. They sat one more retreat before leaving, and throughout it Soryu skewered their particular insecurities and woundings, and attempted to guilt them into staying. I remember Soryu making nearly a dozen comically exaggerated faces of sadness, coupled with whimpering sad-puppy sounds, when this person was announcing their departure at post-meal announcements. This person had a strong historical pattern of self-abandonment to please others, and it struck me as emotional pressure applied at the very moment they were attempting to set a boundary and step away.

Something quite similar happened to me. After telling Soryu I was considering stepping back from the teacher–student relationship due to issues of trust, I continued training and attended three more retreats with him in the spring of 2023—my final retreats under his guidance. Across them, the way he related to me shifted markedly, in interviews and in exhortations. (Personal teachings delivered in a generalized way during exhortation give Soryu a shield of plausible deniability: anyone receiving them as personal is simply “projecting.”)

He consistently framed my consideration as an egregious moral failing—that I was careless, ungrateful, selfish, and untrustworthy for contemplating this after years of training; that I was betraying him personally; and that remaining was the responsible, sane, and compassionate choice. And I was repeatedly cautioned about the danger of entering certain spiritual territory while carrying “deep psychological wounds”, and that people who step away from his guidance at such a juncture are “dangerous.” In my final interview, without ever hearing my reasons for distrust—which were extensive, and privately corroborated by multiple leaders in the community—he told me that “the pain and distrust is not clarity.”

Loyalty, dedication to the mission, not complaining

Loyalty and devotion are the most highly respected emotions of all. Members are not allowed to feel or express negative emotions, except toward outsiders. Members are taught never to feel for themselves or their own needs but always to think of the group and never to complain.

— Combatting Cult Mind Control, pg. 64

Loyalty and devotion (and gratitude and commitment to the mission) are indeed very highly respected emotions at MAPLE. We were continually taught to put others’ needs before ourselves, relieve ourselves of our trivial self-centered concerns, and give ourselves over to the mission. Members regularly praised Soryu with a lot of tears and strong emotional energy, heralded him as an icon of trustworthiness and compassion, and idealized him in dozens of ways.

Hassan elaborates: "If a person is not behaving "enthusiastically," he may be confronted by a leader and accused of being selfish or impure, or of not trying hard enough."

It is of note that joy and enthusiasm is demanded at MAPLE. It’s even in the contractual agreement you all sign, which begins:

"I feel joyful, blessed, and honored to participate as a residential mindfulness trainee (“Resident”) in the modern mindfulness and leadership training program (“Program”) of the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth (“MAPLE”)"

Emotional distress and debilitating breakdowns (which weren’t uncommon) were routinely framed as delusion needing purification, and as signs that the training was working; disengaging mid-collapse invariably meant protecting your suffering and letting delusion win. The possibility that Soryu and the training itself may be causing harm was invariably excluded.

As for never complaining: in Spring of 2023, Soryu made sweeping changes to the monastery curriculum and to the mission and strategy of the organization. MAPLE would now have a much narrower focus on artificial intelligence and the creation of a superintelligent AI that will “turn the world into a monastery” and liberate all beings. At the same time, “increased surveillance for your own benefit” was announced. These decisions were made suddenly and unilaterally. A number of residents and people in leadership had issues with them, raising concerns about the way these changes were being made and about the ethics of surveillance and of attempting to “turn the world into a monastery.”

It was clear that Soryu did not respect those concerns. One way he and leadership responded was an evening activity, of 2 hours in length. All residents were asked to stay in silence, meander around the property or sit, and “feel our feelings” about this unilateral pivot. There was no room for discussion or input.

Here’s how Soryu addressed these concerns in a talk to the community:

“You’re not in a position to contribute. You’re in a position to execute. When you’re on the board, we want to hear your ideas. Until then, we don’t. That’s the deal.

You don’t go to McDonald’s and say, “Should we be a restaurant? I don’t agree that a restaurant is really of maximum benefit to the world.” You don’t even say, “Should we get our beef from Brazil?” You don’t even ask that. You flip the burgers or you quit. That’s your option right there. And it’s the same here.”

Instilling a sense of indebtedness

“Be grateful and give back to the community for all you’ve received” is an explicit message within MAPLE. But the way it is approached at MAPLE this gratitude becomes infused with a sense of shame-based indebtedness. For all you’ve been given, you owe your labor and loyalty.

For example, I clearly recall Soryu stating in a talk in the February 2023 retreat: “you could train in a place like MAPLE for several years, receive a new way of seeing the world, and the very least you owe is to spend the rest of your life ensuring that lineage thrives.”

A summarized message I heard on multiple occasions: You are given food and shelter and training, so put out your alms bowl like a good monk and help with fundraising.

When a number of people were considering leaving with concerns, Soryu—in a rather condemnatory tone while speaking to the whole community—framed this as “some people are just willing to take more than they give.”

An example that fits each of the four BITE quadrants

Here’s something a current MAPLE resident recently posted onto Reddit:

The system has clearly lost all credibility. You are invited to make a radical decision: totally leave the system.

Move to Northern Vermont. Enter hardcore spiritual training. Overturn everything you know. Get initiated. Build a new world.

Any alternative to the system will be labeled a “cult”. This word is a psyop to discredit all alternatives, especially if they are influenced by Asian culture.

Join an actual culture.
Convert to a correct religion.
Solve the planetary crisis.
http://monasticacademy.org/train

The reader is urged to “totally leave the system… enter hardcore spiritual training… get initiated” (Behavior). The Emotion lever is urgency with “solve the planetary crisis.” Sharpest is thought: “overturn everything you know” and “convert to a correct religion.” And Information: “Any alternative to the system will be labeled a ‘cult’. This word is a psyop… especially if they are influenced by Asian culture”—a textbook thought-terminating cliché that inoculates against every future critic using this term.

I’ve seen this with another social media post another member made recently, where a departing trainee “who failed out of the training” and had concerns about non-accountability of authoritarian leadership was being framed as “xenophobic.” Screenshot:

Justifications for severe harm & defense of omnicide

Robert Lifton, another prominent cult researcher, names dispensing of existence (the leader’s assumed right to decide whose life and wellbeing matter) as common to every totalist system he studied.

Soryu maintains that killing every human on the planet to protect the rest of life is ethically defensible. He shared on numerous occasions that this was his explicit life purpose from roughly ages 9 to 19. I once heard him claim he saw CRISPR (a gene modifying technique that could be used to create a novel bio-weapon) as his best available means. Here’s the audio and transcript of a talk where he recounted telling people this as a young man, “…they would recoil, because they could see in my eyes that I meant it: I want to kill you, and your family, and they would become afraid…”, which led him to realize that “…no human being can be trusted, they’re all against me, they’re all against the benefit of all beings, their goal is the destruction of all that is beautiful … these selfish beings cannot be trusted.”

Soryu has also held that traumatizing his students, “even to the point of being incapable of participating in the economy for the rest of their lives,” was justified by the urgency of the mission, and once asked a roomful of us to settle what proportion of traumatized students would be acceptable: “is it 20%? 50%? 100%!?!”

This dispensing of existence also reached both the neighboring town and the MAPLE community itself. I was tasked by the director with transcribing a recording of a leadership meeting discussing how MAPLE should weather near-term societal collapse (I was told it was too sensitive for other students to hear; I unfortunately no longer have access to this recording). MAPLE sits in a Vermont town of roughly 700 people, many of them low-income, and its campus has assets that would be valuable in a collapse scenario, like solar power, large buildings, a garden, and a tractor. Asked how many townspeople it would take in, Soryu closed the question off, aghast—“take people in?! Oh god...”—setting the number at zero. Presumably backing out of mutual aid during disaster can be justified because MAPLE is the torch-bearer of the new trustworthy civilization that will emerge post-collapse (he explicitly framed MAPLE this way in a podcast interview) and needs protection.

When someone in leadership noted that survival would be harder for MAPLE than for ordinary bunker-builders because we would have the added task of maintaining communal harmony together, Soryu asked, in a tone indicating disagreement, “we will?” The person responded “...what, you mean we set up an authoritarian structure instead?” Soryu said “Yes.” Then: “if half the [MAPLE] community starts running around like chickens with their heads cut off and die within the first week, just let that process play out.”

Where is MAPLE at now?

MAPLE hasn’t always fit the “cult” caricature to the degree they do now. High-control groups typically follow a developmental arc. I joined when there was still burgeoning youthful zeal and innovation. They now seem to be clearly in the stage where—after high profile departures and online criticism—the control dynamics have reached a crescendo and they are now acting more transparently “culty.”

They are struggling to recruit new members at a faster rate than they lose them. There are currently only roughly 10 people living there full time, down from ~35 at its apex. They currently seem to be engaged in a coordinated recruitment campaign where the majority of residents are using their social media accounts to promote their upcoming residency and to debase critics.

As Jamie Wheal notes in his ethical cult checklist: “Many cult-like communities will initially present with palpable energy, enthusiasm, celebration, joy, and growth, precisely because they are harnessing many of the techniques described above [in his checklist]. This can create cognitive dissonance for someone applying the “by their fruits ye shall know them” filter—while the fruits appear to be abundant. Using charismatic transmission, encouraging regressive catharsis, controlling ecstatic rituals of bonding, and advocating for magical thinking consistently produce potent effects quickly. It is not that they don’t work, it’s that they work only too well (until they inevitably don’t).”

It’s clear to me that MAPLE is in the “until they inevitably don’t” stage.

Concluding the BITE analysis

I’ve walked through the BITE framework at such length because the case for “MAPLE is a high-control group” is not made through any single anecdote. Taken as a whole, a new, more concerning picture emerges: a community with starkly centralized power, mutually reinforcing means of control over members’ minds and lives, self-sealing feedback structures, and an alarming number of members leaving with devastating degrees of harm, some of which I pointed to at the open of the letter: suicidality, psychosis, PTSD, panic attacks, and loss of agency.

My complicity

In December 2021, Shekinah Alegra—a former apprentice of OAK, the California branch of Monastic Academy—published a public letter detailing a sexual assault by OAK’s Executive Director. She described an institutional response that excluded her from meetings about the incident and pressured her to sign a letter characterizing the encounter as consensual, and laid out concerns about misleading recruitment, inadequately trained and inexperienced leadership, abuses of power, financial practices, unsafe retreat practices, and retraumatizing care. She situated her account within roughly twenty to twenty-five other reports of negligence or abuse known to her at the time, and a number of MAPLE alumni commented in support.

The sexual assault allegation was engaged with internally as a matter of individual misconduct by the former OAK Executive Director (by then already demoted), where he was interrogated by the whole community. Every other concern the letter raised was largely dismissed, and the community framed the people who supported Shekinah’s letter as alumni who were simply unfit for Soryu’s “aggressive teaching style.” This reframe had little to do with the letter itself: Shekinah never trained under Soryu, and her critique was not that the training was too intense but everything laid out above.

In the wake of the letter, there was a rallying cry within the community to defend Soryu. Around then he told us (paraphrased from memory): “People say favorable things about their spiritual teachers all the time, but sometimes backtrack it later. One way to demonstrate you actually stand behind your teacher is to say so publicly.” And in the first retreat after the letter, in January 2022, Soryu threatened to leave the community if we were incapable of receiving his true teachings—engendering a lot of zeal to demonstrate we were worthy, unlike those expressing concerns online.

Within hours of completing that retreat, I sent an email to MAPLE’s board defending Soryu using the simplified “aggressive teaching” frame. An excerpt (full email here):

Soryu’s teaching style, which many have called aggressive, some have called arrogant, few have even called totalitarian, has also been described to me by the many who’ve come through this training in the last year and a half as jaw-droppingly on-point, deeply compassionate and kind, wise and patient and tough-loving and clearly motivated by the desire to bring our lives into true accord with the Dharma and enable us to be the stewards of change we want - and the worlds needs - us to be. […] It would be a great loss if other dedicated practitioners didn’t have the opportunity to experience this style of training in contrast with the gentler style so abundant in the US.

I deeply regret this and take full ownership of its consequences. Whether or not my email made any difference to the board’s inaction, I played a role in upholding the structures that later harmed my friends in the community. To all of them I apologize.

While none of this lessens what I did, the email was also the system functioning as designed. It was structurally incentivized for me and many other members to defend the community using these same framings at that time. Me writing an unsolicited defense of an organization accused of coverup, using this simplified frame, was itself part of what Shekinah’s letter was describing.

The January 2022 email wasn’t the first time I had played a role in protecting the organization from the consequences of what happened to Shekinah. When everything unfolded at OAK in the winter of 2020, I flew from Vermont as part of a small team to manage the situation.

As far as I am aware, the account circulating in the broader community at the time was that Shekinah and the ED had entered a mutual romantic connection that violated monastic boundaries, and that the sexual encounter between them had been consensual. That was the account I received and held. It was not her own: the romantic connection was real and mutual, but she knew even in those weeks that something was wrong with what had happened to her—and, as is common in the aftermath of sexual assault, fully naming it took time and considerable work. Her December 2021 letter describes her raising concerns about consent and a coverup in a May 2021 email to MAPLE leadership—six months after the incident, seven months before her letter. To my knowledge nothing of that escalation reached the broader community until the public letter, which is where the naming of the encounter as assault first reached members like me.

I’m generally considered quite affable, so one of my central tasks at OAK was to keep Shekinah as settled as possible up until her month-long apprenticeship was over. The frame I had received was that she was unstable, and that her departure was something we needed to manage with care. I held that frame without question. In hindsight, the frame was doing quiet work: it converted her distress, her dissent, and her open anger at how things were being handled—much of it an understandable response to what was happening around her—into symptoms to be managed. And it exempted everyone else from the same scrutiny. Nobody at OAK was stable in those weeks, least of all the leadership managing the situation. There’s a lot that could be said about this time, but the primary thing I want to focus on is the most serious harm I caused while at MAPLE/OAK.

In her final days at OAK, two others and I were tasked with drafting what was essentially a “Don’t Sue Us” document for her to sign—a five-page waiver borrowed from somewhere on the internet (this was separate from the consent document she and the ED were pressured to sign, before I arrived at OAK). Given my positive standing with Shekinah, getting her to sign it fell to me, and we strategized how to get her to sign something she likely otherwise wouldn’t—all under the guidance of OAK’s leadership, including Soryu by phone from Vermont. The plan was that I’d ask her in a moment when she was in a good mood. I carried the document in my back pocket for two days until the right moment came:

On her final night, driving her to the train, I took her and the ED—still quite romantically interested in each other—up to a beautiful vista overlooking the entire Bay Area, and gave them privacy while I waited in the car. After about 20 minutes in this serene and romantic setting, and just a few minutes before we had to leave for the train, I left the car and walked up to them with the document. In a playful tone, I invited her to sign this document, which would break the serenity of the moment—and make us late for the train—for her to actually read all five pages of it. I called it a “Don’t Sue Us document”. She chuckled and quipped “Y’all need to get your shit together” and signed it without reading. I had spent 10 days building her trust and capitalized on it; an hour later she left on the train, and it was the last time I spoke with her until we crossed paths at a potluck years later.

A few weeks after her departure, when the document was in my backpack in the back of my car that was parked in an SF parking lot, my window was smashed and my backpack stolen. The document—which we had no copies of—as well as my computer and passport, were gone forever.

Even within the frame I was operating in at the time, what I did was harmful. The frame was both that the encounter had been consensual, and that Shekinah was unstable and needed managing—rather than a person responding, at least in part, to what the organization had done and was doing. Within my frame at the time, the waiver felt like a reasonable precaution and the strategizing felt skillful. I did not experience any of this as causing harm in the doing of it. I experienced it as competent execution of a task I had been given. Yet the organizational response to a “consensual affair that violated the container” should not look like exclusion from meetings, pressured letters, and strategized waiver extractions from someone framed as unstable. Someone with intact moral perception would have seen that. I’m accountable for not seeing it, regardless of what I knew or didn’t know at the time.

Shekinah and I have completed a private mediated process of repair, which I’m grateful for her participation in. It was only this past June, shortly before our final mediated meeting, that I read the post she published on the LessWrong forum—Why I Define My Experience At the Monastic Academy As Sexual Assault—in which she describes in detail what happened between her and OAK’s Executive Director. What she describes is unambiguously sexual assault, and I believe her.

She has also reviewed this section, and I’m grateful for the clarity she brought to it.

Last thing I’ll say here is that I can recall a number of times people came to me, particularly new people, with the question “Can I trust this place? Should I trust Soryu?” and my answer was “yes.” I would present MAPLE as an edgy but still ethical variety of spiritual community. Given my current understanding—that MAPLE is indeed a high-control group with many problematic dynamics and severe harms it has avoided accountability for—I no longer believe it is in anyone’s better interest to join MAPLE, and I deeply regret and apologize to them for saying otherwise.

A koan I am still sitting with

What follows might sound like a return to the kind of defense I just confessed to writing in the email above. But in 2022 I defended Soryu in lieu of engaging with the concerns being raised; what follows is not in lieu of anything in this letter, but sits alongside it all.

Since leaving there has been a creative tension between my gratitude for what I’ve received from Soryu and my alarm at his behavior. Holding both of these simultaneously has been a very valuable koan for me. He has, in fact, helped many people throughout their lives release neuroses and addictions and realize the life-giving profundities of the Buddha Dharma. This is not to be discounted.

The Soryu who positively shaped my life and practice in ways I continue to greatly benefit from, and the Soryu whose conduct I have documented above are the same person. The community that gave me some of the deepest friendships I have ever known is the same community where the dynamics in this letter played out. That a place and a person can be both of these things at once can be a challenging thing to hold, especially for those who never experienced MAPLE firsthand. Too often people want the story where it was all bad. Also, seemingly, current members want the story where MAPLE is a shining beacon of truth and goodness, and that all former members with concerns are deluded. Neither is true.

While I caution against any move to collapse the complexity of Soryu’s personhood into a dehumanized “villain” caricature, I do still firmly believe there needs to be ongoing scrutiny of his behavior, and the patterns of harm need to be brought to an end. Hence:

Why I’m speaking publicly

As shared earlier, there have been multiple major, and many smaller, attempts to bring feedback to the organization throughout its history, each to little avail. To quickly recap: In 2023 a group of former members compiled a ~50 page report—including testimonials from two of MAPLE’s cofounders—overviewing the problematic dynamics at MAPLE, and then sent it to MAPLE’s board. This only led to two members resigning from the board (of which Soryu is the chairman) and then being replaced by two of Soryu’s more loyal former students. In January 2022, at a time when the organization was receiving heavy public scrutiny due to Shekinah’s open letter, Soryu sanctioned an internal review on harm to students. It was compiled and then submitted to Soryu, only to be dismissed by him as “lacking clarity.” There were also multiple such attempts that occurred prior to my joining in 2020.

I’ve personally attempted to provide my concerns directly to MAPLE’s leadership, only to be received with either preemptive ad-hominem dismissal or stonewalling. Multiple alumni were shocked that I was brave enough to even attempt such a thing.

Beyond that, former members with concerns are regularly dismissed as lacking integrity, being insufficiently committed to the mission, being deeply deluded and projecting, or otherwise betraying the sangha.

Despite all of this, MAPLE still publicly claims that they are open to receiving feedback. MAPLE encourages people to keep all feedback “in relationship,” and speaking concerns publicly is framed as an egregious betrayal. This is the structure Janja Lalich—the high-control researcher that developed the Bounded Choice model—describes as a self-sealing system: making direct internal feedback the only ethically sanctioned path, then ensuring that path is consistently unproductive and costly by responding with shaming, gaslighting, minimizing, slander, and denial.

The high-control literature shows that the most reliable lever to produce positive reform in such groups is sustained public scrutiny. Even then, adequate reform is rare. The more common response is doubling down.

In the years since leaving I have been asking these questions, feeling compelled to do something, but without knowing: What is integrity here? How do I reconcile what I’ve received with what I’ve witnessed?

For years, my answer was to attempt to help friends who’ve left to reclaim their sovereignty and heal, to hold space for friends who were still there to progressively discern for themselves it was the right decision to leave, and encourage people not to go there. I continue to learn new stories of abuse and debilitation, and I know that I’ve heard only a narrow number of the total. Some of them are more egregious than anything written in this letter, yet are either too unconfirmed to be included or I have been explicitly asked not to include.

When I’ve shared the perspective laid out in this letter privately with other alumni, I’ve seen the relief it brings. It offers new coherence to their understanding of what happened at MAPLE and lends sanity to the doubts and concerns that they have been told were illegitimate and delusional. I’m now sharing my perspective publicly so it can reach all who might benefit from hearing it.

I also hope that this letter will add to the growing chorus of alumni speaking their concerns publicly, and help make it less emotionally, relationally, and reputationally costly for other former members to speak their concerns, should they choose. Another hope is that this letter will help create the conditions for the harm to cease, and for what was truly beautiful about MAPLE to continue to flourish—likely in new forms—unburdened by the past. Finally, I hope that this message can reach the people considering applying there. I continue to see young people join MAPLE either with no understanding of the history of pain and broken-hearted departures, or having only heard MAPLE’s ungenerous and deceptive narratives about them.

Final words

MAPLE’s explicit vision was beautiful—preservation of life on earth, a society rooted in wisdom and love, flourishing for all beings—and I want to protect that mission, and the means of achieving it, from the kinds of problematic behavior documented above. I continue to believe that the world desperately needs communities of practice showing up to its many crises wholeheartedly. I have zero doubts about the profundity of the dharma and its capacity to gently guide people and society towards wisdom and love. I continue to advocate for “developmental containers” that broadly cultivate spiritual, psychological, and relational capacities as a necessary ingredient in resolving society’s biggest challenges.

There’s a way a person is shaped when moving like a flock with a crew of peers: sleeping, chanting, meditating, exercising, working, eating, and studying all at the same precise time, to the same tune, day in, day out. There’s a self-transcendence and merging with a collective that is deeply nourishing to the human psyche. It was for this reason and many more that leaving was painful. When I was leaving, some of my last remarks to the community during my going-away ceremony were “I’m going, but I’m still here.” I have at times tried to shake myself of this commitment but found myself inexplicably yoked. This sangha remains sacred to me.

I’m concerned about the wellbeing of the people currently living there. I honor their sovereignty and they can choose as they wish, but I also encourage them to take some time away from MAPLE to consider what is in this letter. I also encourage their loved ones to support them in an ongoing process of inquiry, and—should they choose to leave—with integration and healing.

Please be discerning when speaking about this with people who have historically been involved with MAPLE. It can be a sensitive, emotionally charged, and disorienting topic, and everyone has their own relationship with MAPLE and their own understanding of what happened there. Please check in before bringing the topic up to see if they are willing to discuss this with you.

If you’re my friend and you’ve been impacted in any way—positively, negatively, or both—by this letter, please reach out to me. I’ll respond as my capacities allow.

While I don’t know what will happen following the release of my letter—fate will unfold as it will—allow me to speak a little to my own personal hopes: I hope we can find ways to fulfill MAPLE’s vision of the preservation of life on Earth in a way that is truly beautiful, and does not necessitate coercion. I pray Soryu accepts and receives the support he needs to address whatever it is that has him acting in these ways. I pray that all who’ve been adversely impacted can find renewed resilience and an enduring self-trust, and that all voices can be heard without fear of invalidation or retaliation. I pray for everyone in this sangha and all beings beyond to be safe, happy, and free.

With care,
Sky

Writing this letter took months of full-time work, and I’m grateful to the few friends who covered my basic life expenses so that I could do it: Ben Pace, Oliver Habryka, Will Petillo, and an anonymous supporter. I am also grateful for smaller donations from people who cared about information being shared (who did not engage with the content substantially), from Eli Tyre and an anonymous donor. These people did not guide my conclusions about MAPLE; my perspective was formed long before any support arrived.

For valuable comments on drafts, my appreciation to Justis Mills, Ozy Brennan, Aella, Matthew ‘Vaniver’ Gray, Rob Bensinger, Tsvi Benson-Tilsen, Georgia Ray, Damon Sasi, and Shekinah Alegra. These people helped improve this letter in many ways, any remaining mistakes are mine. I also have deep appreciation for the many friends who supported me in innumerable ways over the years, at MAPLE and following leaving.

Finally, my deepest gratitude to Ben Pace. This letter would not exist without him: he read draft after draft over many months, his questions made it clearer and more honest, and his support never wavered. Thank you, Ben.

Post Script

Testimony gathering

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There is also a bank of audio recordings of Soryu, online materials written by MAPLE, and analyses of each, that will be released in chunks throughout the coming weeks. There will also be deeper explorations of the dynamics briefly introduced in this letter.

Recovery funds

There are many people who’ve been substantially negatively impacted by their time at MAPLE: needing to see and pay for a therapist for months or years, struggled to hold a steady job, hospital bills (for example from panic attacks), and more. I have known many people that took over a year to get back on track, and some people for whom this is still an ongoing source of significant distress.

There are many people who could use some support in their post-MAPLE journey. Some have historically found attending retreats in other communities as helpful, others were benefited through therapy, others through circling retreats. For everyone it’s different. Some are actively struggling, some have just become more stable, while many more have been stable for some time. I am interested in fundraising money to send to these people. If you may be interested in donating thousands of dollars, I have a non-profit who is willing to accept these funds, and I could disperse them later.

If you’d like to support the people impacted by MAPLE, here’s one concrete way. If you are potentially interested in donating thousands of dollars for this purpose, please reach out to me and let me know via the Support form and I will get back to you. I will write a follow-up post if I get serious interest, with a more concrete project proposal.

To Soryu and MAPLE

Lastly, I’d like to extend a personal invitation to Soryu and MAPLE leadership to write a formal response to this letter. This extends to the board, which (along with Soryu) includes Zak Stein, the Harvard-trained philosopher of education and cofounder of the Consilience Project and the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, and Maitrī Huffaker. Maitrī has lived at MAPLE for ~5 years, much of which was spent training under Soryu. Her husband, Ānandabodhi Becker, is the executive director of MAPLE.

Their response (should they choose to write one), will be posted on this Substack as soon as I receive it, without any framing by me. I’ll write a followup response sometime thereafter. Scrutiny is welcome from anyone, not just MAPLE.

Writing something that requires specificity, evidence, restraint, and privacy protection has been a significant undertaking, and I have no doubt done it imperfectly. I welcome feedback on where I have fallen short. For all inquiries and feedback, I can be reached privately at kylehubbard962@gmail.com or via the Support Form.

1. ^{^}

   Throughout this document I use the term high-control group. While often used interchangeably with “cult,” I use that word sparingly because of its caricatured and frequently ungenerous deployment in mainstream discourse—too often weaponized in ways that dehumanize leaders, victimize members, and dismiss both the genuine merit of a group’s guiding ideology and the real benefit people receive from training there. It’s also worth noting that MAPLE at times self-describes as a cult, and has declared publicly that the world needs more cults—equating them with “ideological startups.”

2. ^{^}

   It will also be relevant for anyone invested in the wellbeing of the movements MAPLE is loosely affiliated with: American Buddhism, Metamodernism, Effective Altruism, and the Bay Area rationalist community. And, of course, anyone at all, as high-control dynamics exist on a spectrum and can be found to various degrees in all human communities.

3. ^{^}

   Given the intensely personal nature of these events, I am especially committed to upholding this persons privacy, and ask readers not to speculate about their identity.

4. ^{^}

   This is longer than my time there, because some of the cases happened after I had left.

5. ^{^}

   Here’s a longer, though still not comprehensive, list of other impacts that many have experienced:

   • Panic attacks and spells of dissociation
   • Major depression
   • Hearing Soryu’s judgmental voice inside one’s head for months or years after training
   • Being unable—even in safe and private contexts—to articulate concerns about MAPLE without fear of reprisal or without speaking within MAPLE’s restrictive frames
   • Getting enmeshed in other coercive environments due to conditioning developed/deepened at MAPLE
   • Falling into shame spirals that last hours or days
   • Feelings of being “defiled” or “ruined”
   • An inability to trust others and cultivate intimacy
   • Falling into shame spirals that last hours or days
   • Not knowing who one truly is and what to do with one’s life
   • Poor concentration, time management, and memory issues
   • Sense of alienation from family and friends
   • Difficulty working a steady job
   • Fear of going insane
   • Low self-esteem
6. ^{^}

   On the term "manipulation": it occurs on a spectrum, and everyone engages in it to some degree. I am not using it to imply conscious intent to deceive. My aim throughout this document is not to psychoanalyze anyone at MAPLE. My focus is on observable behaviors, dynamics, and their impact.

7. ^{^}

   Only one such story is public, you can listen to his 4-hr testimony here.

8. ^{^}

   In my time there, I was under the impression that the executive director and groundskeeper were eventually given a small salary, and the Head Teacher—most of the time Soryu—was earning a salary of $30k throughout. I expect the Head Teacher received the highest salary, but to be clear I was never shown the internal accounting, and could be mistaken about these things.

9. ^{^}

   I should note that I don't believe MAPLE tells its members not to talk to ex-members; instead it falsely destroys their reputations and turns them into cautionary tales. It is common for critical ex-members to be shunned, and for current members to not speak to them again the moment they leave the community.

10. ^{^}

    It is at the timestamp 3:32:57 from this video uploaded by MAPLE 2 months ago.

11. ^{^}

    I wrote about ideological indoctrination in the information control section above because it was necessary context to understand the rest of that section, though sticking firmly to the framework would’ve had me include it here. 

12. ^{^}

    Quoting Hassan:

    Perhaps the most widely used and effective way to control cult member's thoughts is thought-stopping rituals. Members are taught to use thought-stopping on themselves. They are told it will help them grow or be more effective. Whenever a cult member begins to experience a "bad" thought, he uses thought­-stopping to drown out the "negativity" and center himself, thus learning how to shut out anything that threatens his reality.

    
    

    Different groups use different thought­-stopping techniques: concentrated praying, chanting aloud or silently, meditating, "speaking in tongues," singing, or humming. These actions, many of them ordinarily useful and valuable, are perverted in destructive cults. They become quite mechanical because the person is programmed to activate them at the first sign of doubt, anxiety, or uncertainty. In a matter of weeks the technique becomes ingrained. It becomes so automatic, in fact, that the person is usually not even aware that he had just had a "bad" thought. He is only aware that he is chanting or ritualizing all of a sudden. By using thought­-stopping, members think they are growing when in reality they are just making themselves into addicts. After leaving a cult that employs extensive thought­-stopping techniques, a person goes through a difficult withdrawal process before he can overcome the addiction.