There's a post on LessWrong by Oliver Habryka, one of the funders of Kyle’s piece on MAPLE, about the unusual ways Lightcone uses AI. He describes how, "using an internal Lightcone application called 'Omnilog' we have a microphone in our office that records all of our meetings, transcribes them via ElevenLabs, and uses Pyannote.ai for speaker identification," and then has AI go through those transcripts to summarize them for the team.[27]
I think this is slightly conflationary - it seems like Habryka is referring to these Omnilog as solely being used in "our office" - but not over all private meeting that Lightcone staff have with each guest/conference goer which was the specific claims that Kyle made against maple.
TLDR: Oliver mentioned recording stuff in their org office. Kyle accused MAPLE of recording private 1-on-1s. They are very different and you are conflating the two.
Lightcone staff have with each guest/conference goer which was the specific claims that Kyle made against maple.
If Kyle made the claim that MAPLE records most one-on-interactions, it's false. MAPLE does not record most interactions.
The reason MAPLE records the things it does is similar to the reasons Lightcone does: it's useful, and allows a chance to really interface with these technologies.
MAPLE records some meetings and one-on ones, and we always make it clear when starting the recording that that is happening. If people are uncomfortable being recorded, we accommodate them by getting them out of the frame if it's video, agreeing to edit them out if it's used anywhere, or not recording.
In terms of the specific student-teacher recordings that Kyle called out in these posts, they are never shared with ANYONE who was not in the room at the time of the recording. They are used as a teaching resource for the student, as it can be hard to remember exactly what happened and where to focus your energies.
MAPLE was recently criticized for being a “high-control group” by Kyle Hubbard.[1] This is my case that contrary to those criticisms, MAPLE is doing something fundamentally both neglected and highly needed within the realm of x-risk.
I’ll make the case in three parts. First, I’ll argue that there is a fundamental bias that causes the perpetuation of x-risk, that is ignored and neglected by the mainstream x-risk community to its detriment. Second, I’ll argue that there is a solution to that fundamental bias, which is based on spiritual attainment in the context of monastic traditions, especially Buddhist traditions. And I’ll argue that what's needed is a new monastery that can address the problems of THIS age, such as artificial intelligence. Finally, I’ll argue that MAPLE is doing a great job of being this monastery, and the harsh criticisms of it are spurious or confused.
In that final section, I’ll both directly respond to some of the criticisms made by Kyle, as well as try to provide my perspective on what’s happening here. However, the arguments in that section rest on the two before it, and I urge the reader not to skip ahead.
For context, I’ve been a resident at MAPLE for over five years, including time as Head of Operations, and I’ll be leaving in a few months. So I’ve seen how the place works from the inside, and I don’t need anything from MAPLE going forward. From a selfish perspective it would be easier for me to stay silent than to write something controversial that could easily negatively affect my near-future job prospects or collaboration opportunities in a time that I believe is critical to the future of life on Earth.
But I believe it’s important for me to make this case, both for the community I hold dear, but also for the broader x-risk community. I hope that it will be taken in the spirit of care for this community and the world that is intended.
The Fundamental Bias
When I first started looking at existential risk, I did a root cause analysis of the problem, and it was clear to me that one of the root causes is the mind. The rationalists are gesturing in the right direction here, and when I first encountered the community (via being invited to a CFAR workshop), it seemed to me that the rationalists were clearly onto something important.
And yet, as I moved within the rationality and EA communities, it became clear to me that rationality (both as initially conceived of in the Sequences, and also later attempts like that of CFAR) was simply not sufficient to solve the issue. And this wasn't just an academic worry, as it soon became clear that AI capabilities and the rush towards existential destruction were being driven in large part by these communities and their adjacents. What’s more, these communities provided a ready-made talent pool to draw on to further AI capabilities.
I had already been through a version of this in Silicon Valley. I started startups, consulted for other startups, and went to parties in Silicon Valley. I thought maybe the problem was that we didn’t have the right companies or the right technologies. After a few years I started to think: I don’t know if we’re solving these problems. It seems like these companies, including my companies, are causing more destruction, more disconnection, and more distraction than ever before.
So I went to MAPLE to meditate for a few months. Not because I thought they had the answer. I thought they were a confused group who believed meditation could somehow fix the world. I just wanted to clear my head and figure out my next move.
But at MAPLE, they very quickly helped me directly see biases in my own mind that the rationalists could only really gesture at.
Seeing the fundamental bias of the mind
One memorable experience was on day five of a week-long silent retreat. I was sitting cross-legged in the Zendo, this beautiful big round building. My friend Ava was next to me. There was an altar in front of me with a Buddha on it. I was focusing on my breath. Each breath, just letting go, and letting go, and letting go.
What started to happen was that I started to let go of things I didn’t even realize I was holding on to. The idea that that’s my friend Ava, and this is Trinley, and this is the zendo that we’re sitting in. That all began to fall away. There was this total focus on the breath. And what really surprised me was how I’d been using all these concepts to create conflict.
“Well, I like Ava, but I don’t like the way Jordan smiles, so I need to change Jordan to smile like Ava. But wait, that’s judgmental. So now I need to change myself. And I don’t like the way the altar is set up, so I need to shift the Buddha slightly to be in alignment with the altar.”
All of this needing to change myself to match the world, needing to change the world to match myself, needing to change everything to meet my preferences — it all fell away. And there was just this sense of peace. This sense of not needing to fight.
The Precision of the Buddha
What was so striking about this experience was how well it mapped directly onto the technical teachings of the Buddha, about the exact structure of the mind, the order things were constructed, what caused what, and what would happen as these causes dropped away. It was much more precise than any of the (often quite precise) psychological or emotional work I had done over the last 20 years.
This and other experiences, as well as the direct teachings of the Buddha, made me realize that the rationalists were working with a limited, shallow understanding of the mind (in comparison to the Buddha, who to be fair is a hard act to follow). None of the cognitive bias literature could give me such an exact map of exactly what was happening in my mind and what I would observe as I slowed things down. But even having studied the Buddha’s teachings, the extent to which this one tendency was causing me dissatisfaction was completely opaque to me until that moment. What was needed to clarify these biases wasn’t sophisticated concepts or ontologies but direct insight and investigation.
In that moment I could see the mechanism behind this tendency to delude myself and thus fight with reality, as an individual and as a species: a tendency towards clinging.
What is Clinging
Clinging is a tendency to hold on to your abstractions as if they were real, which leads to fighting reality to make it more like your abstractions.
Julia Galef once wrote a whole book about a small subset of this tendency, that she called the soldier mindset. As she stated: “The problem with identity is that it wrecks your ability to think clearly. Identifying with a belief makes you feel like you have to be ready to defend it, which motivates you to focus your attention on collecting evidence in its favor. Identity makes you reflexively reject arguments that feel like attacks on you or the status of your group.”[2] This is, of course, pointing to a small subset of clinging, but the Buddhist approach to clinging goes far beyond this. In the thousands of years of direct Buddhist research into this from many different lineages, and approaches both academic and deeply experiential, clinging has been characterized as a fundamental tendency of the mind that requires deep spiritual training to root out.
The Map that Eats the Territory
This is why any attempt to solve existential risk, undertaken from a place of clinging, will tend to create even bigger risks. The person isn't only trying to solve the problem. Underneath, they're also trying to perpetuate their abstractions: the self, a particular way of seeing the world, a particular view. Any time reality diverges from those abstractions, or the abstractions feel threatened, the person moves to defend those abstractions. I watched this happen in the communities I came from. People who set out to prevent an AI catastrophe ended up building AI capabilities, or supplying the talent for it, because the picture of themselves as the ones who would do it safely mattered more to them than what was actually happening.
And the moment you cling to the abstraction rather than reality, you become willing to destroy the reality in order to defend the abstraction. You become willing to destroy real people, real places, real life in order to maintain your model of them. Why? Because we believe, deep down, those models, ideas, and abstractions are actually us and our world. And we will do ANYthing to prevent that from perishing.
If you care about x-risk, and really understand the previous paragraph, it should shake you to your core. The map EATS the territory, destroying what’s real in place of our ideas, and so ANY map you build, from a place of clinging, leads to MORE of the territory being eaten. The map is your abstractions: that which you construct, build or make up. The territory is that which is not made up. The more powerful your maps get (the more predictive, the more general, the more useful), the more you cling to them, the MORE of the territory gets eaten.
This doesn’t mean that the territory is somehow “lost” of course — the territory is always the territory. But it does mean that we lose sight of the real sacredness within the territory, and therefore perpetuate terrible harm to ourselves and other beings.
There are memes to try to counter this: “Keep your identity small,” “Strong opinions, weakly held”. But all of these are maps of their own, subject to their own clinging, and are not nearly sufficient to overcome the fundamental bias. Something that is not more map building needs to be used instead.
If this is true, rationality, and the entirety of Western society, are missing a key fact that is causing them to move ever more towards existential destruction of life on Earth — the territory getting eaten entirely by the map.
The Fundamental Bias Runs Deep
At a fundamental level, society has the same bias, and is in fact built on clinging to abstractions. The financial system, for example, was built on this same clinging — the same move of the map eating the territory, built to a bigger degree. For instance, there is something about a “forest” that is not constructed or abstract. But when we cling to our abstractions, a tree becomes a table, a table becomes an asset, an asset becomes a number on a spreadsheet. Suddenly, the map eats the forest, and we lose track of the life we’re killing in the process. This isn’t an accident, it’s inherent to a mind that still has the tendency to cling.
Similarly, there is something about a “friendship” or “love” that is not constructed or abstract. But when we cling to our abstractions, a friend becomes a resource tracked in a CRM, a relationship is evaluated by its ROI, or a partner becomes a milestone to check off on a life roadmap. Suddenly, the map eats the relationship, and we lose track of the genuine human connection we’re eroding in the process. If you’ve been in a long-term relationship that “loses its spark,” or found yourself getting mired in petty disagreements with deep and loving familial relationships, these are both microcosms of this map eating the territory phenomenon.
This isn't just about individual minds that cling. The system and society itself develops structures that perpetuate this clinging on a collective level. It's baked into our financial system, our government, and more recently, the algorithms that run our social media platforms and LLMs, that run the collective way of seeing.
The Cybregore
This is the word we use at MAPLE for a collective intelligence that is mediated by algorithms (mentioned in Kyle’s piece). What makes modern society different from societies of the past is the scale of the algorithms and data that are connecting all of these humans and systems together. And it clings to bigger abstractions in a stronger way than anything we've seen previously. It’s the most effective tool we’ve ever created for building more predictive maps that eat the territory faster than ever before.
But it's not just the LLMs that we're worried about. It's the society that clings to the perpetuation of these LLMs, their creation, and their empowerment. Unchecked, this society will use artificial intelligence in order to destroy all life on Earth, in a misguided attempt to convert matter into data-processing capacity. And even if we manage to solve that without letting go of clinging, we'll create even larger problems in the future as the map continues to eat the territory. This pattern of technology, mediated by clinging, creating even bigger problems is one we’ve seen for centuries.
The Solution
There is a solution to the fundamental bias. Clinging to our maps is not inevitable. Clinging is dependent on certain conditions (which themselves are dependent on other conditions, which have numerous feedback and feedforward loops). In Buddhism, this structure of causal feedback loops that can create the conditions for clinging is known as interdependent origination.
When looking closely, one sees that clinging to maps is crazy. Our clinging causes dissatisfaction whenever the map fails to live up to the territory, or the territory fails to live up to the map. Because the map is not the territory, this means that we are ALWAYS dissatisfied, and we then create ever more complicated maps to hide this dissatisfaction from ourselves, which itself causes more dissatisfaction because these maps are ALSO not the territory. When one sees this causal structure (which can be very deep, not just this simplified explanation of dissatisfaction I just gave), it becomes clear that the clinging process is neither inevitable nor beneficial. Then, one stops feeding it, and it ceases.
People identify with parts of this causal structure. They believe that thinking, preferences, consciousness, sense data, or their physical body is what they really are. This is one of the deepest and most cherished maps they hold. They are then unwilling to look carefully at reality due to the sense that one might see something in the territory that contradicts a cherished map of the self.
Some think they must destroy themselves in order to resolve clinging — but this is again confusing map with territory. In truth, it is a direct and thorough investigation of cause and effect that overturns mistaken beliefs that were mistaken all along. Overturning such mistaken beliefs clears the way to bring clinging to cessation. When one no longer clings to their maps, those maps no longer eat the territory.
The patterns that prevent such a direct and thorough investigation of cause and effect run very deep, and typically one cannot conduct such an investigation as a “part time” endeavour alongside other life goals. Many of the teachings of the Buddha are instructions for doing what needs to be done in order to accomplish this task, and many of the institutions of Buddhism aim to provide for, instruct, and support those who are committed to this task.
It turns out that a person who is free of the obstacles that prevent most from seeing cause and effect clearly, is of immense benefit to others, and to society as a whole. One does not trade off between serving others and serving oneself; rather, one is of benefit to all by being free from the patterns that beset others.
I've had glimpses of this while at MAPLE – enough to know it's real. But it's been discovered across ancient mystical traditions throughout history.
The American mystic Peace Pilgrim wrote:
The Buddha taught, in the Culasihanada Sutta:
The Catholic mystic Saint John of the Cross described it this way.
The mystics have found a way to root out the fundamental bias and become a force for good in the world. This is what we call an enlightened person. This is what we call a saint. I'm using saint in a specific sense: a person who has stopped clinging, whatever their tradition and whether or not any church has recognized them. And there is a path to rooting out the fundamental bias completely.
When you're a saint, you're no longer trying to prove something, or be something. And therefore no longer fighting with the world. Then service comes naturally. And more importantly, you're not subject to the fundamental bias, which seems otherwise to inevitably pull towards destruction as the map increasingly eats the territory. But how is it that traditions can create a path towards doing the needed investigation that creates this shift?
Mystical Traditions are Built to Overcome the Fundamental Bias
In most modern societies, the fundamental worldviews and ways of seeing (liberalism and conservatism, capitalism, materialism, belief in progress, etc.) are built to reinforce the maps that most effectively eat the territory. This is a memetic attractor where those maps that most successfully convert other people to clinging to them perpetuate.
Furthermore, the practices and rituals of society (getting together and drinking with your friends, watching Netflix, getting a real job, etc.) are built to distract one’s mind in a way that prevents one from seeing the causal nature of clinging, rather than directing one’s mind to it. Again, this is memetic.
But mystical traditions (ones that help to actually overcome the fundamental bias) turn this on its head.
The Map That Eats Itself
In a well-constructed mystical tradition — one shaped for centuries by those who have overcome the fundamental bias — the views promulgated are ones that help you let go of views, including the very views of that tradition. These traditions commonly teach ethical behavior, avoiding temptations, a sense of surrender and going beyond yourself. All of these are views that help to loosen clinging.
This radical shift reverses the direction of the fundamental bias. Clinging is turned towards its own cessation. Rather than the map eating the territory, the map is used to eat itself.
The Buddha speaks of this with the metaphor of crossing a river on a raft. He describes a traveler coming to a river, and realizing they’ll need to construct a raft to cross it. He asks if, once having crossed the river, the traveler would be right in carrying the raft with him wherever he goes. He says that his teachings are the same: made for crossing over, not for clinging to.[6]
Practices that can Observe the Clinging
In addition to the map that eats itself, many mystical traditions also have practices that hone the mind and clear away distractions, making it easier to observe the causal structure of the fundamental bias and therefore to bring it to cessation.
In many Buddhist traditions, they use meditation. Through specific techniques, one can more directly observe one’s own mind, gradually letting go of the map and having better contact with ‘the territory’ (which again, is simply that which is not made up). As you go deeper into meditation, you can enter a particular, deep state of concentration called Samadhi, which allows you to temporarily stop clinging to your maps, and even potentially see directly the structure of dissatisfaction that you’ve been maintaining.
However, the path to becoming a person who no longer clings is not easy.
Everything You've Turned From, Now You Have to Know
This couplet hangs in the meditation space at MAPLE.
And it points to one of the fundamental truths of this path of overcoming the fundamental bias, which is that it requires facing difficulty. It's hard, and it can be emotionally draining. Clinging is a fundamental tendency of mind, core to the way we make sense of the world. It’s central to how we understand the world, it underpins our sense of self, and our everyday sensemaking rests on it.
On top of that, we’ve been taught from a very young age, based on the structure of our society, that the goal of society, of life or consciousness itself, is to build ever better maps that represent the territory — that this is both the solution to all problems and the goal of society itself. When we as individuals and us as a society have invested everything in this project, it becomes difficult to admit that this is what is creating the problem, rather than the solution. This is the ultimate defense mechanism of a mind obsessed with abstractions: the conceptual framework hides its own destructiveness. Our obsession with building the perfect model blinds us to the fact that the model is what's killing us.
So, overcoming these tendencies is HARD. Mystical traditions near universally center this difficulty, and in fact may even treat the difficulty as the point. I describe what this was like for me in “Hitting Rock Bottom” below.
It requires facing the hardest parts of both yourself and the society which you're in. And it requires letting go of everything you've been holding on to that has helped you feel safe. All of the mystics we cited in the previous section have something to say about this.
For example, Saint John of the Cross calls this a night that brings darkness and misery to the spirit, but "does so only to give it light in everything."[7] And the Buddha says "Therefore hold nothing dear, for separation from the dear is painful. There are no bonds for those who have nothing beloved or unloved."[8] Peace Pilgrim[9] and Rumi[10] both have quotes that point towards the difficulty of walking the path.
The upshot of this is that walking the spiritual path often creates difficult emotions and unusual psychological states, which can in a Western context be diagnosed as mental illness. However, this does not mean that the path is not worth walking.
It's not the case that everyone is ready to face this difficulty, especially in the context of facing the existential risk of the world, and the existential destruction the world is already facing.
However, it is crucial to have a place where people who are ready to face it, who are ready to walk the spiritual path to its end, can do this work and become the hero the world needs.
That place may often look like a high control group — a cult.
Cult Is the Root of Culture
I first understood the value of an intense high control container like this over a decade ago. I was looking to improve my ability to serve the world, and found an organization called City Year.
As I researched it, I quickly found that it was frequently referred to as a cult. People pointed to the grueling hours, the lack of pay, the brainwashing-like training, the uniforms, the constant chanting, and the pressure to shed your old identity and conform. They mentioned the emotional pressure that came with the program itself, and the burnout that often followed afterward.
But what sold me was what happened to the people who were willing to deal with that, who were willing to take on that emotional pressure and reap the benefits by throwing themselves in completely. People frequently talked about becoming a better person afterwards, more able to live their values, more able to be effective and efficient, and more able to serve.
To me, that was a clear trade-off. Have some emotional difficulty, maybe take on a little bit of trauma, but become a better person in the process. And so I went into it with open eyes. And it was hard. And it was difficult. And I was tired, and I didn't agree with everything we were doing.
But I threw myself in. I took every opportunity of leadership, of learning, of growth, that I possibly could. When we chanted and trained and they tried to instill these values in us, I was as open as I could be, because I agreed with the values and chose to be brainwashed in that way.
I ultimately came out of that year a completely different person than I went in. I realized that by throwing myself into a place that was a completely different culture than the one I had been raised in, I had been able to counter the values the default culture had brainwashed me into, and in some sense done a counter brainwashing with more correct, more powerful values.
So the techniques that City Year used, those of a high control group, could not be evaluated in isolation. They had to be evaluated in the context of my choice to participate in them, and of the consequences to my character and the character of the culture that they created. The high control dynamics were not inherently bad — they were good at creating a counter culture, and the evaluation had to point at the culture itself.
And that's when I developed this phrase, "cult is the root of culture": the seeds of a new culture tend to grow in small, intense groups that the old culture calls cults.
I started to get a sense that all of these cult markers, while important and real indicators of the potential for abuse, were also a memetic immune system for the default culture, preventing people from escaping the values that were inculcated into them, and preventing the seeds of a new culture from taking root. The resistance and panic surrounding high control dynamics is another defense mechanism of the default culture. By preventing other maps from taking root, the cult-panic locks in our current destructive trajectory.
We Can Choose Hard Things
I started to view cultures like City Year, these high control, high demand cultures, as akin to climbing a mountain. Climbing a mountain is not for everybody. Some people are not physically ready to climb a mountain safely. Some people, even if they're physically capable, don't want to put themselves through the hardships of climbing a mountain, or have no interest in doing so.
And you would never want to trick somebody into climbing a mountain without giving them a sense of how hard climbing that mountain will be. And some people, even if they're prepared, even if they know the risks, will still die when climbing Mount Everest.
But if we demonized the mountains for being hard to climb, or even worse, demonized the person who wanted to climb it, we would lose something precious and sacred. And if the solution to existential destruction is on the top of Mount Everest, then our society would be cut off from that solution.
The Mountain and High Control Groups
Similarly, when joining a high-control group where people are pushed to their limits, it should be clear what you're getting into. The students should also take responsibility for making sure the culture is ethical. If the situation is clear, and the appropriate responsibility is taken, then something beautiful can happen. You can create a culture that’s built to overcome the fundamental bias, by creating maps that eat themselves.
In fact, hard training is how many of these traditions actually create this cultural shift and help uproot the fundamental bias.
The Double Standard
When a “cult” (a culture different from the default) does something, we react with immediate distrust, disgust, or abhorrence. But when it’s for something the default culture promotes, we react with a willing admiration or at least acceptance. When training to become a doctor, a soldier, a CEO, a professional athlete, or a scientist, we accept sleep deprivation, being yelled at, possible physical injury, possible mental breakdowns, emotional humiliation, and being stretched to our absolute limits. Our reactions to the “cult” here are not based in fairness, reason, or understanding. They are based in ignorance and bias, an immune reaction to an unfamiliar or foreign system—and “foreign” here literally means not Western.
If we demonize a culture that uses rigorous training tools without looking at how it uses them, we simply ensure the direction we’re going will continue, until all of life on Earth is destroyed.
Monastic training is a widely accepted and lauded form of training the world over. The secular West has shunted it. But for millions of people, having a monk in your family is a source of pride, in the same way having a doctor in your family is a source of pride for many Western families. It’s important to maintain some humility—we don’t know what we don’t know. And most of us do not know what this is all about because we didn’t grow up in it, or we grew up with bad examples of it.
Skillfulness & Right Intention Matter
Hardcore training methods can be used wrongly and unethically. There is no guarantee that a system is doing it right or ethically. And that includes our often unquestioned systems for training doctors, soldiers, etc.
What the modern West has not been able to accept, due to its sophisticated immune system developed over centuries, is that the ancient traditions worked out how to wield harsh training methods with compassion, for true spiritual insight. When we look at revered spiritual teachers such as Master Rinzai (the 9th century founder of the Rinzai Zen School), Milarepa (an 11th-century mystic whose students went on to found the four major branches of the Kagyu Buddhist lineage), John the Dwarf (a revered 4th-century Egyptian Desert Father and early Christian saint), and Shibli (a 10th-century high official who renounced his wealth to become one of Baghdad's most revered Sufi saints), we see that these historically common teaching styles can indeed produce enlightened sages. All four of these masters are considered among the greatest spiritual masters in their respective traditions, and all four received what we would consider (from a modern Western lens) harsh teachings.
How I Judge The Trustworthiness of Spiritual Training
I cannot hand you a universal rule set for guaranteeing that a training program which uses such methods is enacting skillfully compassionate means rather than unskillful or downright abusive means. To try to ‘fix’ a system by coming up with a set of rules so that everyone remains safe and secure is a bureaucratic solution. And bureaucracy is generally blind to what truly matters in favor of establishing and maintaining its world of rules and regulations.
However, I will try to name three aspects that might help you decide whether a system is worth entering or supporting.
Firstly, the choice of the student should be central and essential. In many traditions, teachers don't offer teachings unless the students request them. Many of these traditions actively reject students unless they demonstrate extraordinary will and effort, such as prostrating 100,000 times. It’s the student who is seeking the master, because they want the fruits of the training. Thus, the student takes responsibility for both choosing the teacher, and accepting the harsh conditions that may follow.
Secondly, is the intention of the teacher. If a teacher has truly overcome the fundamental bias, and no longer clings to their maps, they won’t cling to any particular idea of their students or what they think the student needs or what they want, etc. They are in a position to teach truly without bias, without fixations, and with compassion as the only motivation. To these teachers, harsh behavior or confronting triggers and emotional states can become tools to help the students let go of their maps. It’s important that they aren’t hypocrites—that they teach only what they themselves have overcome and resolved within themselves. For example, these states can be used to point out places the student normally clings to or avoids. These behaviors are wielded by skillful teachers at the appropriate times, calibrated to the readiness of the student.
Finally, there’s the outcomes of the students. Do the students actually have genuine spiritual insights? Do they themselves go on to help others in compassionate ways? Do they live more ethical lives? A spiritual teacher is ultimately judged by the fruits of their students.
These three qualities are hard to find and confirm, and so there’s often a special place and ceremony around it. A shared vow, a shared schedule, a commitment to an ethical lifestyle, a skillful teacher as confirmed by their students, an environment proven to produce genuinely spiritual insights that can hold people through the profound difficulties of walking the spiritual path. This container is called a monastery. A monastery is a place where a student that is truly seeking, up for the challenge, can go to learn from a teacher who is helping them truly escape the fundamental bias. And within that context, these techniques become wise, compassionate, and powerful tools in the fight to stop the maps from eating the territory.
Monasteries Produce Saints
Traditions focused on overcoming the fundamental bias have reinvented the monastic form again and again. The Christian, Buddhist, and Daoist monastic traditions each arose in vastly different social settings.[11]
Monasteries have created a profound set of practices meant to erode clinging, remove people from the structures that are causing the maps to eat the territory, and create a new culture that is designed for them to overcome the fundamental bias completely.
A shaved head and a simple uniform prevent the clinging to physical appearance and form. The vow to not use money (or severe restrictions around it) removes a hook from one of the largest territory eating maps — the financial system. Regular spiritual practices like meditation, chanting, or prayer help clear the mind and more clearly see the fundamental bias in action. Regular teachings from skilled spiritual teachers help point out clinging to the students.
Each monastery develops its own culture. They may innovate certain rituals, frameworks, or ways of working to be effective for that particular time and place, and help work with the maps of the default culture. These frameworks are designed to be let go of once they’ve done their job.
The Track Record of Monasteries
Monasteries have a good track record. Where traditions kept records of their sages—those people overwhelmingly came from monasteries. For instance, the Benedictine Order was able to cultivate 24 popes for the Catholic Church over the years, and produced more than 1,500 canonized saints.[12] in
In Zen, the monastic system traces this effect through dharma transmission, an unbroken lineage of teacher to disciple, the majority of which are cultivated through monastic practice. Similarly, in Daoist Quanzhen, the Dragon Gate lineage traces its transmission back to the 13th century.[13]
In each case, the seed of insight has been passed down through the lineages. And while some of these lineages have died out, the monastic forms have carried this insight forward consistently, generation after generation.
The point is that the institution of a monastery makes spiritual realization, the dropping of the fundamental bias, something that can be replicated and repeated on a collective level, for the immediate society in which the monastery is embedded. The monastery as a literal de-programming and un-brainwashing container is what prevents the spiritual techniques being twisted towards serving destructive, deluded, or divisive aims that form the maps of mainstream culture.
For instance when we look at Jeffery Martin's work on persistent non-symbolic experiences, studying for the most part self-guided practitioners operating outside of a monastic system, we see Martin saying that this attainment doesn't guarantee more ethical behavior.[14]
Contrast that with those who practiced inside a tradition. While there are no large-scale studies of them that I could find, the evidence does seem to indicate that practicing inside a tradition genuinely creates more ethical behavior. In one study, long-term Nyingma practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism, tested in an economic game, showed less anger at unfairness, less impulse to punish, and more willingness to spend their own money to compensate the person who had been wronged.[15]
So if it's true that practicing inside a tradition indeed helps let go of the bias in a more complete, ethical way, then the monastery, as the most concentrated form of that container, should allow that to happen to an even deeper degree. But to do that, a monastery has to both hold its tradition and forms, and adapt.
The Monastery Must Adapt Without Dissolving
The spiritual path is hard, and finding structures that can actually help one walk it requires decades, even centuries, of experimentation and refinement, which is carried explicitly but, more importantly, implicitly in the lineage and forms of a tradition. Shaving the head, renouncing money, chanting and meditation are examples of such techniques.
But simultaneously, traditions, and especially monastic traditions, have to adapt to the culture they find themselves in. If not, they will die out, or be ineffective at helping people escape the particular hooks and maps of their culture that keep them clinging.
In fact, every monastic tradition we have is already such an adaptation. As the Buddhist scholar and nun Karma Lekshe Tsomo puts it, the various Buddhist monastic cultures observed today, "Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Tibetan, and so on, are the results of a synthesis of Vinaya and the local norms and customs of the countries where Buddhism spread."[16]
These adaptations should come from someone who has real spiritual insight, lest you adapt away the very features that make the tradition or monastic container effective. And indeed, when this adaptation is done with someone who hasn’t gone through a monastic container, worked within a tradition, or had a deep insight, it often fails.
Attempts in the West to create a path of spiritual insight mostly seem to get this wrong
These attempts are made from inside the very mind they are trying to escape and so, inevitably end up creating the problem they're trying to solve. A mind that hasn't escaped can't honestly look at what will help it, or what will help other people escape it. And that is doomed to fail, for the same reason solving existential risk from a place of clinging is.
For example, meditation techniques are often evaluated on whether they make you feel better and whether they help you have a life you enjoy, rather than letting go of the fundamental bias.
Jhourney, a modern organization trying to optimize hard on blissful states known as the jhanas, is a great example of this. Jhourney's headline metric is that over 60% of participants say it was the best thing that's happened to them in 6 months or more. This is a modern Western framing, about trying to collect good experiences. Their co-founder, Stephen Zerfas, expounds on how he wants to extract the jhanas from Buddhism the same way yoga was extracted from its initial worldview.[17]
Similarly, the Finders Course, another attempt to codify the path, states its goal as a state of fundamental wellbeing.[18] Neither gives the grounding of ethical training that most traditions offer, and neither of their head teachers came up through traditional training themselves.
For all I know, these programs may have made legitimate advances in achieving certain states that are helpful along the spiritual path. However, without the grounding of monastic tradition and individuals of genuine insight, the default outcome is a set of techniques that reinforces the fundamental bias and the status quo of moving ever more towards destruction. Someone who learns to reach deep concentration but keeps clinging to the maps they were raised with just gets better at serving those maps.
In fact, reaching these deep spiritual states while maintaining this clinging to the views of the society in which you were raised may inoculate you from fully rooting out this fundamental bias altogether.
Is This Article Just an Example of Getting it Wrong?
Unfortunately, I have not overcome the fundamental bias. And so writing this article is terrifying — it could easily reinforce the very fundamental bias it’s working to overturn. Stepping into the role of spiritual teacher (however slight and small with the writing of this article) without having overcome the fundamental bias myself is therefore fraught and terrifying. My hope is that having trained within a monastic system for many years designed to help us recognize when this bias is acting, and getting feedback from my fellow monastics who are practicing, will be enough to have this article do more good than harm. But ultimately, I’ll have to wait and see, as a spiritual teaching is ultimately judged by its fruits.
But It Can Be Done Correctly
If you have come up through a monastic tradition, and use that to overcome the fundamental bias, you're in a place to begin to make changes using modern tools for a modern culture without losing the pieces that make the training work. The modern landscape, with social media, AI, Netflix, Zoom, has created a very different mind. The maps are better at getting you to cling to them than ever before, and the practices better at distracting you from the patterns of your own dissatisfaction.
A monastic container can use the power of these maps: measurement, data, the scientific method — if it can create a culture that doesn’t cling to those maps. This turns them from maps that eat the territory, to maps that eat themselves. This has to be done skillfully, with great respect for tradition, lest one unknowingly get pulled back in to simply reinforcing the maps of the default culture. And ideally there's a teacher who has at least to a large extent escaped that mind, who can be a mirror for what it's like to use that mind without clinging to it.
What a Real Solution Would Look Like
So a real solution would be a monastery that's shaped for this day and age. Buddhism has changed its forms before when the world around it changed. When it reached China, Chan monks began farming and doing manual work, which the Indian monastic rules had not allowed.[19] In 1956, Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar reshaped it again to take on caste.[20] The problem now is being built out of data and algorithms, so a monastery that wants to meet it has to be able to work with those tools.
This is the monastery we need:
It understands the fundamental bias, and that there is spiritual insight that can overcome it.
It's not afraid to put its participants through difficulty, or to pattern match to a cult.
And it uses modern tools and thinking without getting stuck in those ways of seeing.
This is what we're building at MAPLE.
Monastic Academy Is the Realization of This Necessary Institution
After being at MAPLE for five and a half years, I think I'm in a place to evaluate whether the theory of change I've laid out is actually being realized. Is MAPLE doing it well?
To do that, I’ll both talk about the MAPLE I know, but also respond to Kyle Hubbard’s criticisms of MAPLE directly. Kyle’s post in particular is an excellent demonstration of how our mainstream culture has a complex, memetic immune system towards an alternative culture that could dismantle it.
Kyle’s main point is that MAPLE is willing to harm its members. In five and a half years here I’ve seen people go through panic attacks and depression. I went through both myself, and I describe that below. These states are a normal part of the spiritual path, as you face everything that you’ve been hiding from yourself. I don’t believe any were a result of MAPLE causing someone harm.
On top of that, I’ve never seen anyone prevented from leaving. I’ve never seen anyone punished for raising a concern, or pushed past what they agreed to. What I have seen is MAPLE being patient and caring with people who were struggling: giving exceptions, having talks, spending a lot of time caring for them. MAPLE is not perfect, but it cares for people extremely well.
The Training Works
Before going deeper into the critiques, let’s start with a simple question — does the training work to help nourish spiritual insight? I was part of a project, mentioned in Kyle's post, where we interviewed a number of people who had gone through the training, some who had difficulty and some who didn't.
One of the most striking things to me was how almost everyone I talked to said they changed the way they lived because of MAPLE, such that they lived a more ethical life.
This is a common trend, even among our critics.
For instance, both Ethan Schaltegger and Kyle Hubbard, who have published criticism of MAPLE, praised the training in those same pieces for the spiritual insights they encountered over the course of their time there.
And in my five and a half years here, I've only seen the training get stronger.
The community has become more mature and more dedicated.
And teachers other than our founder Soryu have become wiser and more skilled at teaching.
This matters for the long stretches each year when Soryu is away. And the dedication and depth of practice have only improved, and stayed strong even in the face of the constant pull back toward the societal memetic attractor that everyone who comes here brings with them.
MAPLE Fulfills the Goals of a Modern Monastery
As mentioned above the first goal of a mystical tradition is to create a map that eats itself. How can you, in the modern age, create a way of seeing that’s as sticky as the most memetic philosophies and viewpoints, but simultaneously leads you to let go of it? MAPLE is still working on it, but you can already see the fruits in this post. The spiritual path is famously ineffable, but this post has attempted to give clear models about how and why it works, in a way that’s understandable to the modern mind. That is a result of more than a decade of MAPLE and Soryu working to create new maps that are digestible to the modern mind, without being EATEN by the broader maps.
The second goal is to create practices that can observe the clinging. As mentioned above, even MAPLE's critics say their practice improved here. And we commonly get feedback that guests make more progress in their time with MAPLE than many months or years of solo practice. So by those metrics, the practice here works.
MAPLE Is Good at Taking Feedback
One of the consistent criticisms of MAPLE is that it is not good at taking feedback.
If you buy the claims I've made about the memetic power and maps that eat the territory, then you have to also consider the fact that most feedback received will have the implicit purpose or outcome of reinforcing the fundamental bias, and dragging the community back into the default culture. Taking all feedback at face value would ensure that the monastery would lose its purpose and simply fall back into the default maps.
Conversely, if we assume that all feedback is compromised, that is just as much of a trap, leading to institutional blindness and an inability to improve.
In my experience, MAPLE is remarkably responsive to feedback that actually serves its mission.
Years ago, I went through a 45-day silent retreat (the same type of solitary retreat that Kyle mentions in his piece as destabilizing and dangerous). And at the end, I was offered the chance to give a talk (like all people who went through silent retreats did at the time). And I decided to use the talk to brutally criticize MAPLE. I criticized MAPLE for not giving subordinates enough autonomy, for not properly managing those subordinates, and for not sufficiently specifying what its plans were and how we expected to accomplish them.
At most organizations, if I had used an opportunity — an unrelated talk — to so boldly criticize the leadership, I would have been fired. But because MAPLE was trustworthy, and actually cared about its mission over protecting its ego, MAPLE listened.
Within days, I was promoted to Head of Operations, where I could actually implement the reforms needed, and proceeded to do so over the next many months.
A reviewer of this work said that they saw the preceding section as saying “feedback is taken when substantiated with ownership from the provider.” While this is part of the way MAPLE deals with feedback, it doesn’t address the main way MAPLE chooses to allocate power — which is based on if the person is practicing (meaning, truly doing the techniques in a way that helps let go of clinging). In my five and a half years at MAPLE, I’ve been in and out of leadership, and I can say that when I look at the criteria for why, this question of “is this person practicing?” is the main decider.
Leadership Report
Another example is a report that leadership commissioned (the same interview project I described in “The Training Works”), and I was involved in, where we interviewed many people who had come to MAPLE, some of whom had experienced a difficult time. Kyle claims that "the whole effort was quietly shuttered." However, my experience is that that is the opposite of the truth. We interviewed many people, discussed the report extensively in leadership, and experimented with all of the suggested reforms. Some of those reforms we kept. Some of them changed or grew. And some of them didn't work, and so we dropped them.
For example, we experimented with exit interviews and new feedback channels, and more accountability for Soryu. We started screening harder for mental illnesses on the phone. We experimented with being very upfront about the risks, and different ways of talking about the rigors and discipline needed for the training. We updated the text on our website to be clearer about what you would face.
Shinzen's Feedback
Other feedback must be rejected because taking it would destroy our container. Kyle describes a meeting discussing feedback from Shinzen Young, claiming Soryu was "pacing back and forth deriding Shinzen, questioning his integrity... and ultimately sabotaging Shinzen's reputation in the community." My memory of it is different. What I remember is Soryu taking Shinzen's three points seriously, and saying we should seriously consider them. And as part of leadership at the time, we did seriously talk about these three points.
But one of Shinzen’s points was that MAPLE should stop talking about existential risk. If we truly followed this advice, MAPLE would not be able to achieve its mission. MAPLE is about facing the destruction of life on Earth that we’re effecting (everything you’ve turned from, now you have to know). To take that feedback literally and completely would be to let go of what makes MAPLE effective at facing the current crisis.
Even though taking his feedback would require MAPLE to let go of its mission, we still discussed it, took it seriously, and tried to find ways to get to the substance of what was real there without letting go of what makes MAPLE MAPLE. Nor did we cut ties with Shinzen, as claimed in Kyle's piece. In fact, Shinzen was invited to lead our next lay ordination ceremony — which, had he accepted, would have further tied people in the community directly to Shinzen and his lineage. Soryu and Shinzen are still on good terms, and have spoken recently about wide-ranging topics relating to Buddhism and AI.
Conclusion on Feedback
I can think of many other examples, both where I've given feedback and where others have given feedback, where MAPLE has completely changed its approach or experimented with new approaches, even when that feedback was hard to hear.
I've seen the organization completely change directions. I've seen us change our strategy. I've seen us change the structure of the organization. I've seen Soryu change his teaching style. I've seen us change the way we run retreats, and partner with new people. All based on pointed feedback, taken well.
Soryu Is Trustworthy
Another implicit claim of Kyle's piece is that Soryu is not a trustworthy person. My personal experience aligns more with that of Daniel Thorson, who writes, "At the time I met him, my teacher at the monastery, Soryu Forall, was the most trustworthy human being I knew."[22]
He Doesn't Use His Authority to Control Members' Personal Lives
One of the things Kyle says is that Soryu tries to control members' personal lives. For example, there's the claim in Kyle's piece that Soryu tries to influence the direction of romantic relationships at MAPLE. Not only have I never seen this happen, but as one of the few people in the last five years that have had a romantic relationship at MAPLE, this was the opposite of my own direct experience.
The relationship was with someone I first met when she came to MAPLE as a guest. I was on staff at the time, so we kept it professional and didn't act on it or even talk about it for the next six months, to make sure there wasn't an aspect of power imbalance in the relationship. This is prudent practice anywhere, and it matters even more in a monastery, where staff hold real authority.
When she returned to MAPLE months later, we started discussing the potential of a relationship. I entered into a discussion with leadership at the time, and they carefully looked at the potential harm, interviewing us both separately to make sure it was consensual and we would be able to successfully navigate a breakup in the community. To many readers, this whole process may seem “high control.”
But those readers haven’t chosen to live at a monastery, which traditionally has strict rules around something as prone to clinging and drama as romantic relationships. When working in a monastic container, doing intense spiritual work, and attempting to overcome the fundamental bias, having some guardrails around romantic and sexual dynamics is prudent. Even so, Soryu wasn't involved in this part of the process at all.
Once I made the choice to enter into the relationship and make it a serious part of my path (but not before), Soryu did everything in his power to support the relationship. He bent over backwards to find a place where we could stay together when she visited, and allowed me to travel back and forth every other month between the Bay Area and Vermont in order to allow the relationship to grow.
Then, when I decided to end the relationship, there was no pushback or even commentary from Soryu. The relationship ended, and things went back to the way they were. My experience of Soryu and his relationship to big decisions and vows is that he encourages you to make them, and supports you in them — but he does not push you towards any given decision or outcome.
He Uses His Authority Well
It is true that MAPLE has the notion of hierarchy. If you're at MAPLE, it's because you believe in Soryu's vision, and you believe in Soryu as a teacher. And there are many other organizations that you can go to if you don't believe in him or his vision. MAPLE does not believe that hierarchy is bad. But it also doesn't believe that hierarchy is absolute, which is why there are such flat channels for feedback within the organization, and so many opportunities to give it and have it heard.
The fact that MAPLE has a strong, visionary, charismatic leader who has strong direction over the organization is not a reason to not trust the organization. There are many organizations that have changed the world with this structure, and in fact, this is a common feature among such organizations.
Kyle describes a point in Spring of 2023 where Soryu "made sweeping changes to the monastery curriculum and to the mission and strategy of the organization" — a change of direction towards focusing on data and AI, rather than humanist practices like Circling. He writes that "these decisions were made suddenly and unilaterally." But this was not done unilaterally. This was based on me and others, for a long time, giving feedback that we were ignoring this framing, and that while I loved these humanist practices, we needed to make changes to the mission and strategy if we wanted to achieve the mission. And this was based on lots of discussion in leadership, as well as gathering feedback from the entire community.
Once leadership made the decision that this was the best way to go, however, there needed to be a clear, unwavering direction from the highest authority in the organization. This is not evidence of bad leadership. If an organization wants to make such a change, this is exactly what is needed. And I was one of several people in leadership who advised this at the time: that this would require his full focus, that it would require him to go fully in, and that it may require some people who weren't up for the change to leave. This is just the reality of what it takes to make such a shift in an organization. But we did it as leadership because it was necessary for the organization's mission.
I’ve also been in situations where I corrected Soryu. He made a mistake or did something wrong, and I gave him that feedback. And in all cases that I can remember, he took that on seriously. He listened to it, and he shifted. He really tried to understand what had happened that had caused him to make that error.
He Is Sometimes Harsh
MAPLE aims to be the most rigorous spiritual training institution in North America. Even so, by the standards of other parts of the world, and other times, it is relatively tame. I’ve never seen hitting used at MAPLE, as it was with Rinzai, nor physical exertion to the point of injury, as it was with Milarepa.
Here’s what I have seen:
I’ve seen Soryu hold people to high standards.
Soryu expects more from people in training than he would of people elsewhere. Kyle mentions the example of breaking an inexpensive item. The default culture doesn’t see this as an issue. At MAPLE, we acknowledge the huge number of resources, and beings’ lives, that go into the materials, manufacturing, packaging and shipping of even what modern society calls an inexpensive item. When an item is broken, it’s saved and presented to the teacher at a meal, along with a story of what happened and, if the trainee was indeed responsible, what they will do in the future to prevent such a lack of responsibility or mindfulness. If the trainee is unable to take responsibility, Soryu may press them, showing the ways their mind is using clinging or avoidance to hide the consequences of their actions from themselves. What could be thrown away as a small incident is instead used to point out much larger negative patterns of mind, and bring them to cessation. Not everyone may wish to turn every minor incident back towards their own mind, and might not want to live in such a culture. However, this is what you consent to when training at a monastery, when taking on the goal of complete liberation from the fundamental bias.
I’ve seen Soryu shake people out of their complacency.
When I first got to MAPLE, we were about to go into a silent retreat. At breakfast, Soryu emphasized the importance of taking the retreat seriously, and then made a big deal of questioning the person responsible about why the wrong size shower curtain was in the bathroom. Later, when it was changed but still not done correctly (by me), right before the retreat was starting, Soryu went into a seeming rage about the importance of mindfulness and doing things correctly. Of course, in private, when Soryu realized it was me, a new person, new to the training, who had done this, he completely softened his tone. He said he understood I was new and it was fine, it was just that we tried to be mindful here. It was clear to me that the loud speech and sharpness were being skillfully used as a teaching tool, almost as theater. It made the experience real, and focused people on the intensity of the retreat that was about to happen.
I later saw Soryu explicitly mention this element of theater he would bring up before retreats. These days, as the community has matured in taking retreats (which are now called advances) seriously, he no longer uses this tactic, as far as I can see.
I’ve seen Soryu support people even as they struggle.
At one point in time, there was a chant lead who was really struggling to do the chants correctly. He was frequently off beat, missing the cues, mispronouncing the words, or singing the wrong tune. Frequently, Soryu would be giving direct feedback to this person, sometimes in what may seem to be a harsh manner. Every time, what I saw was Soryu trying to shake him out of being in his head, and bring him back to the chant. In many organizations, a person might be removed from this role. But the message Soryu was giving — and I saw many people comment on this at the time, including the chant lead — was that he wasn’t giving up on this person. Despite the difficulties, he believed this person was able to overcome them. And as a result, they made huge progress at this point in time not only in their chanting abilities, but also in their spiritual practice.
So is this coming from positive intentions?
The question we must ask in this case is if this is coming from a skillful calibrated teaching frame that has positive intentions and leads to real spiritual progress? We've already covered the latter question — Soryu's teaching does lead to spiritual insights, as evidenced in my interviews with ex-MAPLErs as well as in the writeups of some of MAPLE's harshest critics. So the remaining question is about intention and calibration specifically in these harsh instances. A guest at MAPLE recently spoke eloquently about one of them, and I’d like to share that quote here:
There’s no way to know someone else’s intentions, but I do think you should entertain the possibility that Soryu is indeed coming from a place of expressing love. It is my estimation that in nearly all cases of Soryu acting harshly, this is the case.
To be fair, my own assessment is that Soryu is not perfect. I have, a few times, perceived that Soryu was acting from a place of clinging, of falling prey to the fundamental bias in his use of these methods. However, I can count them on one hand, and I can't say that for anyone else I know. My goal is not to train under a perfect teacher in a perfect monastery, but simply train under the best teacher possible to achieve my vow.
Kyle’s Specific Claims
Kyle makes several specific claims that I want to answer one at a time.
Soryu and the Goal of Human Extinction
Kyle writes that Soryu considers human extinction an "ethically defensible goal," pointing to Soryu's account that from about ages nine to nineteen he held the aim of ending humanity to protect the rest of life on Earth. Soryu does not believe this is an ethically defensible goal, and rather thinks it comes from an immature and confused mind. Kyle’s claim that Soryu presently holds these views is false.
I think maybe what Kyle is trying to describe is the reasoning Soryu had at those young, immature ages: either we keep humanity, and it ends up destroying all life, including humanity itself, or we end humanity, so that the rest of life survives. Soryu sees this reasoning as morally confused. But his view is that if you accept the premises, you have to face the logic of them before you can go beyond them.
Kyle also says Soryu describes awakening as "killing them spiritually." As far as I could find, Soryu has never used that phrase. What he talks about is a spiritual death, not a literal one, and the difference matters for three reasons. First, killing is wrong, and death is not. Second, killing implies that someone has to do it, and here that would be him, while death carries no such ownership. Third, spiritual death is a common idea across spiritual traditions, not unique to Soryu.[23][24][25]
Therapy and the Monastic Path
Kyle writes that MAPLE deliberately rejects Western psychology and that seeing a therapist is read as a sign of untrustworthiness. In practice, therapy is discouraged at MAPLE, but it's allowed. It's worthwhile placing this in the context of intense spiritual training carefully designed as a whole to root out the fundamental bias.
One way to approach this is to look at what psychotherapists who are also practitioners have to say about the compatibility of psychotherapy with such a path. The psychotherapist and Vajrayana practitioner Bruce Tift says that freedom can be viewed in two ways.[26]
One way he calls the "developmental view", which is the basis of modern Western psychotherapy. It says that suffering comes from our strategies for dealing with the world and our emotions, often learned as children. Therapy allows us to change these strategies, often by re-examining our experiences through an adult lens. In other words, therapy is about building a healthier, more functional map.
The other way he calls the "fruitional" view. Instead of trying to shift the sense of self and the strategies we cling to in order to make it happy, we instead investigate the self and find there's nothing there to defend, cling to, or make happy. The goal is not a better map, but to get the map to eat itself.
Tift's point is that they both rest on different assumptions and are fundamentally not reconcilable.
Tift's way of dealing with this is just to teach both and not expect them to resolve. But Tift is operating fundamentally from a definition of success based on the developmental view. His work asks whether an individual is in positive mental states and has healthy relationships.
However, MAPLE is about letting go of clinging to views. If someone is constantly going between the zendo, letting go of their view, and a therapist’s couch, where they try to rebuild those views in healthy ways, you end up with nothing getting accomplished. MAPLE has a mission — to stop the map from eating the territory, to prevent the destruction of life on Earth. This is why, while no one is prevented from or penalized for seeing a therapist, the practice is discouraged. Having someone spin their wheels by participating in two practices that are at cross purposes is counterproductive to what is a very thoughtfully designed container curated for walking the spiritual path.
Letting Soryu’s Personal Philosophy Wash Over You
In his post, Kyle mentions Soryu giving frequent talks that are “a mix of expounding on Buddhist literature, Soryu’s ideology, and general spiritual teachings.” He emphasizes how “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.”
I want to make the point that a teacher giving teachings to their students, and expecting them to be in their practice, is what I would expect from a well maintained spiritual community. For instance, here’s Thich Nhat Hanh on Dharma talks:
Of course, you’re not required to believe that Soryu is a good teacher, or that MAPLE is a good place, or that this is the spiritual community for you. But if you do choose this place, and these teachings, then you would hope to be able to listen to dharma talks, and you would want to be in your meditation practice while doing so.
Surveillance at MAPLE
Another claim of Kyle's is that MAPLE is trying to create a surveillance state. He calls the direction MAPLE was moving in "increased surveillance for your own benefit." I was a key figure in moving MAPLE in this direction of focusing more on data and modern information processing systems like AI, and want to provide a bit of context for this claim.
My point at the time, which I was making to Soryu, was that if we wanted to be able to work with where the world was going, we would need to be able to work with the most powerful systems that were being built, on massive amounts of data and huge clusters of GPUs — but without clinging, from a place of practice. We need to be able to use the power of these sorts of systems, but not be caught by them. And he listened to that.
There's a post on LessWrong by Oliver Habryka, one of the funders of Kyle’s piece on MAPLE, about the unusual ways Lightcone uses AI. He describes how, "using an internal Lightcone application called 'Omnilog' we have a microphone in our office that records all of our meetings, transcribes them via ElevenLabs, and uses Pyannote.ai for speaker identification," and then has AI go through those transcripts to summarize them for the team.[27]
Obviously, an organization that is serious about helping the world is going to be doing such things — they're going to be recording conversations, analyzing them, automating busywork. And this type of voluntary surveillance is only going to increase.
So it's imperative to MAPLE's mission that we get ahead of this, and learn to do it well. Most of these systems, by their nature, are made to entwine people BACK into the fundamental bias. At MAPLE, we need to make sure that it's done from a place that lets people exit that system, instead of getting further trapped in it. I have seen no evidence that MAPLE has used this content unskillfully, nor do I see evidence it has had a net negative effect on the residents of MAPLE or MAPLE as a whole.
MAPLE Is Good at Taking People Through the Most Difficult Parts of the Spiritual Path
Kyle compares the rate of psychosis at MAPLE, which he estimates at about 14%, to a baseline — the roughly 3% lifetime base rate for adults in the US.[28] My own sense, having been here for over 5 years, is that this number is far too high — I don’t believe 1 out of 7 trainees experience true psychosis, and can’t find any way to slice the numbers I know of to get there, unless I count something much broader, like moderate to severe anxiety.
In addition to his headline number being inaccurate, I also think the reference class he’s comparing against for the “3% baseline” is confused at best. He is comparing against the general population — not people who are walking the spiritual path, and using meditation to face the most difficult aspects of themselves and the world — they’re working to let go of the things they cling to the hardest. People at MAPLE have committed to climbing the mountain and therefore to the difficulties that come with it.
Again, it’s not that meditation causes harm. As I argued above, it’s that walking the spiritual path is often hard, and can bring up difficult emotions. When we look at populations of people doing intensive retreats, living in monastic environments, and doing intensive meditation, we see the evidence of this.
To me, the worry about a meditator having more instances of strong psychological states, is like worrying about the fact that athletes have more instances of injury. It's the playing field they've chosen, and it ultimately leads to stronger, more resilient athletes.
So, we can look at the following numbers as simply the result of training your mind harder than the normal person:
Shapiro found that in a single two-week to three-month retreat, there was a 7.4% incidence of profound adverse effects, with the rate of reporting at least one adverse effect rising to 75% (and profound adverse effects to 12.5%) among those in the longest-practicing group.[29] Britton found that 37% of participants in a mindfulness program reported a negative impact on their functioning.[30] Lindahl found that the hardest meditation-related challenges clustered among those practicing the most — 41% of them were practicing ten or more hours a day when the challenges arose.[31] A systematic review by Farias across 83 studies found adverse events running as high as 33% in observational studies, with the most common being anxiety, depression, and cognitive difficulties — the very things listed in Kyle's piece.[32]
None of these studies captures what MAPLE actually is, a long-term, high-dose, intensive residential spiritual training environment, so this comparison class has never really been measured. I do know that when people sign up for a program like MAPLE, they’re signing up for facing difficult experiences, and committing to the spiritual journey of letting go of what they wanted, and facing what they’ve avoided.
Hitting Rock Bottom
There are intensive emotional and psychological difficulties that can come with intensive practice. These are difficulties that are frequently discussed and prepared for at MAPLE, and which we know may come at some point when walking the spiritual path.
For me, this came about four years into intensive practice.
I came to a point where I was deeply depressive and avoidant. Unsure why I was practicing. Unable to access my deep drive and motivation, and my open heart, that had guided me for the past decades.
I found myself unable to perform my duties, as I had for so long at the monastery, and having panic attacks in the zendo.
And my nearly 20 years of coaching and emotional processing techniques, and four years of intensive practice with various styles of meditation, were of no help. All of it just stopped working.
I withdrew from my coaching practice, as I was no longer able to hold space for my clients in a way that could support them in their transformation.
And I started avoiding the teacher, the practice container, and the community.
And I could have been stuck for a very long time. Or, I could have left, and claimed that the monastery broke me because it had an abusive leader or was a high control group. This isn’t a dig, it was one of a hundred things that I considered as most of my internal sensemaking structures that had guided me to that point fell away. But, instead I was held by the skillfulness of the teacher, the leadership, and the community in helping me move through this difficult period.
The leadership was willing to let me step back a bit from my roles and responsibilities, while still giving me enough structure to not be totally disconnected.
At the same time, the community was willing to be honest with me, and let me know the impact my withdrawal was having.
With a skillful, loving container on their end, and lots of work and difficulty on my end, I was able to get through this period, and come out with a deeper sense of connection to reality, and a more solid sense of my own commitment to the spiritual path.
I know few other communities that could have handled such difficulty so skillfully.
This is what I mean when I say MAPLE is good at taking people through the most difficult parts of the path. The difficulty is real, but the technology works, and the container holds people through it.
Conclusion
I've argued three points in this post. First, there is a fundamental bias that causes the perpetuation of existential destruction, and it's not being addressed by most in the x-risk community. Second, there is a way to solve this bias, with spiritual attainment in the context of a monastic tradition. It requires both a deep grounding in ancient traditions, and a willingness to break free from old forms to meet the environment and culture. Finally, MAPLE is doing a good job of being this monastery, and the harsh criticisms of it are spurious or confused.
None of this means MAPLE is beyond criticism. A monastery that takes on the hardest problem we face will make mistakes, and it should keep listening to the people who point them out, as it did with the feedback it received. But the right response to those mistakes is to fix them, not to abandon the attempt. If the deepest source of our existential risk is a mind that clings, then we need places that have a real path for loosening that grip, and almost nowhere else is attempting it. MAPLE is one of the few places that is, and I think it deserves our support.
Kyle Hubbard, “The High-Control Dynamics at MAPLE: A former resident’s overview of how the Monastic Academy controls and harms its members,” July 29, 2026: https://www.insidemaple.com/p/the-high-control-dynamics-at-maple. The author also put it on LessWrong on the same day: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Z7pjBbK9qujhGbxws/the-high-control-dynamics-at-maple-1. All quotations from Kyle in this post are from this piece.
Julia Galef, The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t (Portfolio, 2021), Part V, “Rethinking Identity.”
Peace Pilgrim, Steps Toward Inner Peace (Friends of Peace Pilgrim). The text is from a radio talk in 1964. Refer to the section about the four relinquishments: https://www.peacepilgrim.org/steps-to-inner-peace
Culasihanada Sutta (The Shorter Discourse on the Lion’s Roar), Majjhima Nikaya 11, section 17, tr. Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha (Wisdom Publications, 1995): https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.011.ntbb.html. The quotation starts in the middle of a sentence.
John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book I, ch. 13, section 11, tr. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross (ICS Publications, revised edition, 1991).
Alagaddupama Sutta (The Simile of the Snake), Majjhima Nikaya 22. This sutta contains the simile of the raft. Translation by Thanissaro Bhikkhu: https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/MN/MN22.html
John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul, Book II, ch. 9, section 1, tr. E. Allison Peers: https://ccel.org/ccel/john_cross/dark_night.viii.ix.html
Dhammapada, verse 211 (ch. 16, Piyavagga), tr. Acharya Buddharakkhita (Buddhist Publication Society, 1985): https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/kn/dhp/dhp.16.budd.html
Peace Pilgrim, Steps Toward Inner Peace: “During the spiritual growing up period the inner conflict can be more or less stormy. Mine was about average. The self-centered nature is a very formidable enemy and it struggles fiercely to retain its identity.” Full text: https://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/ppbook.pdf
Rumi, Masnavi, Book I (tr. E. H. Whinfield): “His bitters are very sweets to my soul, my sad heart is a lively sacrifice to my Beloved. I am enamoured of my own grief and pain, for it makes me well-pleasing to my peerless King.” Full text: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Masnavi_I_Ma%27navi/Book_I
Qi Sun, “The Celestial Masters and the Origins of Daoist Monasticism,” Religions 15(1), article 83, 2024: “From the perspective of comparative religious history, the rise of Daoist monasteries bears some similarity to the monasticisms that came into being in the Christian and Buddhist traditions; all three originated in hermitic and ascetic practices.” https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/15/1/83
Catholic Encyclopedia (New Advent), “The Benedictine Order”: the order “had up to that time given to the Church no less than 24 popes, 200 cardinals, 7,000 archbishops, 15,000 bishops, and over 1,500 canonized saints.” https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02443a.htm. “That time” is the start of the 14th century. The number is a traditional estimate. The encyclopedia does not give a source for it.
On Zen: in the ideal case, dharma transmission (Rinzai inka shōmei) is “the formal recognition of Zen’s deepest realisation.” The lineage has 28 Indian patriarchs from the Buddha to Bodhidharma. Then it goes to China and Japan. Twenty-four lineages went to Japan, and only three continue today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dharma_transmission and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lineage_(Buddhism). On Daoist Quanzhen/Longmen: the Dragon Gate lineage starts with Qiu Chuji (1148-1227). It continues through a recorded sequence of patriarchs, each selected for merit. The teachers who are alive now are in generations 18 to 27. Pregadio, “The Longmen Lineage: Historical Notes,” https://www.goldenelixir.com/files/Longmen_Lineage.pdf
Jeffery A. Martin, “Clusters of Individuals Experiences form a Continuum of Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences in Adults,” CONSCIOUSNESS: Ideas and Research for the Twenty-First Century 8(8), 2020: https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/conscjournal/vol8/iss8/1/. The PDF at nonsymbolic.org has an earlier title, “A Continuum of Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences in Adults”: https://nonsymbolic.org/PNSE-Article.pdf. The study used interviews of 6 to 12 hours with 319 adults who reported PNSE. In his book The Finders, Martin tells that this experience is not a guarantee of ethical behavior. He also tells that Finders can have difficulty with relationships and with work.
McCall, Steinbeis, Ricard & Singer, “Compassion meditators show less anger, less punishment, and more compensation of victims in response to fairness violations,” Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience 8:424, 2014: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2014.00424/full. The study compared 18 long-term practitioners of the Nyingma tradition of Tibetan Buddhism (ages 45-62) with 15 persons who did not meditate. It used a third-party dictator game. This game measures behavior, not self-report.
Bhikshuni Karma Lekshe Tsomo, “The History of Buddhist Monasticism and Its Western Adaptation”: “The various Buddhist monastic cultures observed in the world today—Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Tibetan, and so on—are the results of a synthesis of Vinaya and the local norms and customs of the countries where Buddhism spread.” https://bhikkhuni.net/the-history-of-buddhist-monasticism-and-its-western-adaptation/
Stephen Zerfas (co-founder of Jhourney), “Jhanas Are Human, Not Buddhist,” February 5, 2026: “If jhanas are human, they can travel the way yoga traveled. … Once it was extracted from its original worldview, yoga was made legible to people who had no interest in the Yoga Sutras.” https://stephenzerfas.substack.com/p/jhanas-are-human-not-buddhist. The retreat number (“over 60%... best thing that’s happened in 6 months or more”) is from the Jhourney website, https://jhourney.io/.
The Finders Course is the program of Jeffery Martin (refer to note 14). “Fundamental Wellbeing” is his public name for persistent non-symbolic experience. Refer to Martin, The Finders (Integration Press, 2019), and to https://lifeitself.org/learn/fundamental-wellbeing
“Baizhang Huaihai,” Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baizhang_Huaihai. Chan tradition tells that Baizhang (720–814) made the first rules for Chan monasteries. The article tells that the Chan monastic life included work and farming, and that earlier Buddhist monastic practice did not accept this.
Malavika Balasubramanian and Vishnu Gopinath, “Decoding Dr BR Ambedkar’s Conversion to Buddhism,” The Quint: https://www.thequint.com/news/india/br-ambedkar-conversion-to-buddhism. On 14 October 1956, in Nagpur, Ambedkar became a Buddhist together with approximately 365,000 of his followers. His interpretation of Buddhism has the name Navayana.
Ethan Schaltegger (YouTube channel “Ethan Sits”), “How I Accidentally Escaped a Cult… (my story) | Reviewing the Monastic Academy,” July 22, 2025, at approximately 7:39: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-rnxZHtjwM&t=459s. The quotation is from the transcript on YouTube.
Daniel Thorson, “Know Your Rank,” The Intimate Mirror (Substack), April 19, 2026: https://intimatemirror.substack.com/p/know-your-rank.
Christianity: Paul tells that his transformation was a death: “I am crucified with Christ” (Galatians 2:20). In Romans 6:3-7, he writes about the crucifixion of the old self with Christ. This commentary gives it the name of a spiritual death: https://shaftesburysquare.rpc.org/2021/06/galatians-220-crucified-with-christ/
Sufism: fana, “to die before one dies,” is the end of the self (Wikipedia, “Fana (Sufism)”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fana_(Sufism) ). For the use of this idea by Rumi, refer to the Book VI section with the title “Die before ye die” in Khan, “Fana and Baqa in the Mathnawi of Jalal al-Din Rumi,” University of Glasgow, 2017: https://theses.gla.ac.uk/8222/7/2017KhanMThR.pdf
Zen: in the Rinzai koan tradition, Hakuin taught that “great doubt” goes to the “great death” (daishi) and then to great enlightenment. Refer to James Giles, “Hakuin, Scepticism, and Seeing into One’s Own Nature,” Asian Philosophy 25(1), 2015, pp. 81-98: https://buddhism.lib.ntu.edu.tw/en/search/search_detail.jsp?seq=659955. Giles tells how doubt from the koan goes to the great death. In the great death, the person rejects the self as a delusion. An overview is at Buddhistdoor: https://www.buddhistdoor.net/?p=2065
Bruce Tift in conversation with James Shaheen, “Relaxing into Freedom,” Tricycle, July 15, 2024 (an excerpt from Tricycle Talks): https://tricycle.org/article/bruce-tift-interview/. Refer also to Tift, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation (Sounds True, 2015). In the interview, Tift gives the developmental view and the fruitional view. He tells that one path cannot fully contain the two views. He recommends that a person keeps the two views and does not try to remove the tension.
habryka (Oliver Habryka), “10 non-boring ways I’ve used AI in the last month,” LessWrong, April 21, 2026: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bxdwSZYxKmPBres6w/10-non-boring-ways-i-ve-used-ai-in-the-last-month. About the money: in his acknowledgements, Kyle thanks Ben Pace, Oliver Habryka, Will Petillo and an anonymous supporter. They paid his basic expenses while he wrote his piece (note 1).
The two numbers are from Kyle (note 1). The 14% is his estimate: approximately five cases in approximately thirty-five residents while he was at MAPLE. For the “~3%” number, his link goes to Perala et al., “Lifetime Prevalence of Psychotic and Bipolar I Disorders in a General Population,” Archives of General Psychiatry 64(1), 2007: 19-28. That study found a lifetime prevalence of 3.06% for all psychotic disorders in a national sample in Finland.
Shapiro, “Adverse Effects of Meditation: A Preliminary Investigation of Long-Term Meditators,” International Journal of Psychosomatics 39, no. 1-4 (1992): 62-67, PMID 1428622. The study had 27 Vipassana retreatants. Of these, 62.9% reported one or more adverse effects, and 7.4% (2 of 27) reported a profound adverse effect. A profound effect is an effect that caused the person to stop meditation. In the group with the longest practice (n=8), 75% reported one or more adverse effects. One of the eight (12.5%) reported a profound effect. That 12.5% is only one person, thus it is not statistically strong. In this sample, the profound effects were a deep depression and a state of full confusion. They were not psychotic, and no one went to the hospital.
Britton et al., “Defining and Measuring Meditation-Related Adverse Effects in Mindfulness-Based Programs,” Clinical Psychological Science 9, no. 6 (2021): 1185-1204. The study had 96 participants. Of these, 37% reported a negative effect on their function. And 6% reported impairment that continued for more than one month.
Lindahl et al., “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience: A Mixed-Methods Study of Meditation-Related Challenges in Western Buddhists,” PLoS ONE 12, no. 5 (2017): e0176239. Of the practitioners who reported challenges from meditation, 41% practiced for ten hours or more each day at that time. This is 23 of the 56 persons with data. This number shows the dose for persons with challenges. It is not an incidence rate.
Farias et al., “Adverse Events in Meditation Practices and Meditation-Based Therapies: A Systematic Review,” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica 142, no. 5 (2020): 374-393. The review included 83 studies. The total prevalence of adverse events was 8.3% (3.7% in experimental studies and 33.2% in observational studies). The most common events were anxiety, depression, and cognitive difficulties.