current MAPLE resident here, i will be leaving in February.
while i don’t want to speak for/effortpost the org, i’ll just say that
i think a lot of the claims in this post are highly sensationalized and misleading. framing the word ‘cybregore’ as referring to a mystical being instead ofa useful word for something that clearly needs a name is just one example.
i’m more than happy to discuss why i’m still (for the next 6 months) at maple and support the organization with anyone 1-on-1, on the condition that we both come into the conversation willing and open to changing our minds. it’s fine to share what i talk about in person but i don’t want it written about publically online
After reading your comment, I’ve reviewed the evidence that led me to including it, and seriously considered retracting it. I agree that the frameworks and ideas that Kulveit explains in his post are helpful for sensemaking in our day and age, and that you can discuss this idea without any mystical implications.
But I don’t believe that’s what Soryu has been doing.
First, for any readers lacking in context, I want to push back on any implicit background assumption that it’s inappropriate for me to attribute mystical beliefs to Soryu and people at MAPLE. During my time at MAPLE, Soryu explicitly told us that he had chosen to reincarnate from a much better realm into this one as an act of compassion for the beings in this realm; he once claimed he’d gotten in touch with the spirits that we were calling during a chant and that they were very displeased with our chanting; and has claimed powers of “shaktipat” (i.e. energetic transmission, or filling students’ consciousness with spiritual energy from a distance), both implicitly in front of the whole group and privately 1:1 with students in the interview room.
Secondly, today I reached out to a new source for this information, a resident who was present for all of Soryu’s AI-related talks in 2024, who found my attribution[1] of a mystical connection with “cyborgregore’s” as entities (distinct beings with their own experience, as opposed to merely emergent phenomena) to be accurate.[2]
So I am unpersuaded that this is sensationalized or misleading.
If you have any more examples of parts that you believe are misleading, please enumerate them, I’ll be happy to respond.
Also: Beyond anything misleading or sensationalized, I saw your recent tweet claiming there were things I shared that were false. If anything in the letter is factually wrong, please tell me, and I will correct it publicly and note the correction.
Here’s what I wrote above in the essay, so readers don’t have to go looking for it:
“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.”
Also as background, Soryu has written in a quarterly report that this superorganism is a ‘suffering entity’:
“This is a vast superorganism that includes economies, technologies, and most people. In this digital age, it is deeply deluded. Therefore, it suffers. This delusional, suffering entity decides the future.”).
This is potentially compatible with more materialist and non-mystical perspectives, but I think also quite compatible with a mystical perspective.
I’m just not sure where you and your former residents are getting the idea of a cybregore as a mystical entity from. Yes, the idea of a cybregore as an entity, probably having a type of consciousness is there, but that’s not a mystical claim at all, it’s compatible with mainstream academic views like functionalism and computationalism.
I explicitly taught the concept on this years chautauqua tour and it was one of the more useful frames for people, (my sister for instance months later told me she was able to quit her social media addiction using the cybregore framing shared in the talk). not one person raised the worry that the framing was outlandish or mystical.
in terms of factual claims, i don’t have time to go through the whole post now, but i did go through the first list of bolded claims earlier.
the part where you claim (lay) ordination is a lifelong commitment to maple is an obvious factual innacuracy. not only is buddhist ordination in general a commitment to the dharma, rather than a specific monastery, but maple is fairly unique in that we are precepted by loosely affiliated teachers from different lineages rather than our own teacher, and so actually end up commiting to a lineage/tradition OUTSIDE of maple as a consequence of the ordination ceremony
this would be a horrible move if the ceremony was trying to bind you further to maple
Another huge factual inaccuracy is the claim that all significant decisions rest with Soryu.
As long as I’ve been part of the organization, the organization has had a 3 person leadership structure, which each person representing one of Wisdom, Love, and Power. Soryu as the head teacher has held the Wisdom Role, and the Executive Director has held the power role.
These roles can (and have repeatedly in my time) veto the Wisdom Role’s decision, and indeed it’s a running joke among the ED’s that half their job is vetoing Soryu’s crazy ideas.
Really appreciating your critical engagement here Trinley. Truly. Epistemic process ftw
Re: cyborgregore
I’m not going to argue about the merits of that particular theory. I am also not arguing that the theory you link is outlandish or mystical. But the concept as you taught it on tour and the claim that Soryu personally contacted these entities via samadhi and confirmed their suffering are two different things.
The main claim here is that Soryu refers to these cyborgregores as distinct, suffering entities and that he has claimed to come into contact with them and confirmed their suffering via deep samadhi. That is clearly mystical in nature.
I have updated the language in my post from “semi-supernatural deity” to “semi-supernatural entity.” Deity was not the appropriate term.
I say semi-supernatural because it is simultaneously an emergent phenomenon like a flock of birds (within the bounds of conventional materialist perspective), as well as a distinct entity with qualia (suffering) that is accessible via samadhi (outside the bounds of conventional materialist perspective).
Re: ordination
You’re right that as written, that sentence could be read as referring to lay ordination, and read that way it would be inaccurate. However I was in fact speaking about full, not lay, ordination. I’ve amended the letter to specify full ordination and noted the correction. Here is the amended sentence:
During a period when at least one person in the community was considering becoming a Forall, an actual monk in the tradition, and around the time Soryu told us that MAPLE needed at least one fully ordained monastic to be formalized as a monastery, I remember Soryu—during an exhortation—speaking of this commitment and saying “I know some of you are thinking about it, so why aren’t you? Come on! It’s just your lives!”
Your point about lay preceptors from outside lineages is accurate.
Re: power
First, the current ED in particular seems particularly unequipped to challenge Soryu in substantive, non-performative, ways. He has said out loud that he trusted Soryu to such a degree that the best way for him to do the most good was to give his life over to Soryu. I am aware of numerous people in the community that find him to be considerably sycophantic towards Soryu; that he functionally serves as an extension of Soryu.
(I appreciate him as a friend and find him to be a very good and intelligent person, and that his aspiration of service to all is sincere and commendable. I feel conflicted about sharing the above, but in this moment where honesty and accountability are important, I decided to share.)
Also, the current ED’s oversight body—the board—consists of three people. One is Soryu, the teacher he has trained under for years. Another is the ED’s wife. Whatever one thinks of the individuals involved, that is not a structure capable of independent oversight of either the ED or Soryu.
Additionally, electing a new ED is something that has an actual hard-constraint: any board member can disapprove. Soryu routed around this constraint. A former board member related to me that when the current ED was selected, Soryu deliberated with the other board members and finalized the approval before this member—who would have objected—even knew the process was underway. They first learned the ED had been selected when Soryu announced it to the whole community as a decision made “in deliberation with the board.” When they later challenged Soryu on this, he only mildly acknowledged some unskillfulness on his part, but the decision stood.
When the previous Executive Director stepped into the role in 2022, they were promised significant creative liberty and spent months developing a plan for the organization. Their predecessor told them that Soryu “was gonna tear their plan apart,” in ways Soryu had historically done. Indeed that’s what happened. Soryu publicly ridiculed their plan, then unilaterally announced a new direction for the community—including potentially founding a for-profit AI company, developing a superintelligence that would turn the world into a monastery, instituting a “benevolent surveillance system,” and having the community listen to his recent lecture series on Buddhism and AI “twelve more times.” The new executive director had ethical objections to this, but Soryu oriented to them merely as an implementer of his agenda, not a peer.
Multiple former members of leadership have told me privately that the letter matches the dynamics they experienced. Many more residents have explicitly called MAPLE authoritarian, with Soryu atop a sharp power asymmetry, regardless of whatever formal governance structures there are. The triumvirate you speak of is equal in form, but not in function.
where are you getting the term “supernatural entity” from. Why super natural? what is supernatural about the entity? what is “semi-supernatural”?
I have not EVER heard of the term “Forall” or of monastic academy doing full ordination. Was this before my time? All talk of a potential ordination path in my 5+ years here has been offering something similar to the lay ordination path, where you would go to another monastery, get fully ordained, spend time there, and then return. Again, this would be a horrible scheme if the goal was to bind people to maple.
re specifics about people at maple/relationships etc, this is something i don’t feel comfortable discussing/representing the org on. i get why you’d bring it up in my factual correction about org structure, but it’s not something i’d want to discuss publically while here. again, if people want to talk privately and not share the details online, i’m happy to do so.
Are you saying that a claim that one has interacted with a collective mind via samadhi does not involve anything supernatural (or at least very, very weird/implausible on priors, from the materialist/naturalist perspective, like having a sufficiently high-fidelity copy of the mind dormant in one’s brain)?
what are you talking about? what does the entity being supernatural have anything to do with how you interact with it? you could claim you interacted with the guy you saw on the street in samadhi. would that make him supernatural?
i would like to eventually address the claims about being able to connect with a being in samadhi and see that it is suffering, but this rests first on acknowledging that there’s nothing magical about that being.
Insofar as you believe that Soryu has actually interacted with this cyborgregore, what is the medium in which you think the interaction happened? Telepathy? Some LLM-foo? Does he claim to have a copy of the mind dormant in his cortex? All of those seem crazy improbable to me, but what you believe to be the medium of the interaction is a crux for whether the label “super-natural” is appropriate.
Kyle wrote the following in the OP, and also quoted it in a footnote of his response to your top comment, to which I don’t think you meaningfully responded:
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.”
On the most straightforward reading, this involves some telepathy stuff, i.e., either supernatural or we are very confused about how minds or whatever works or some weird scifi tech that we don’t expect to exist in the present. Is there a reading of this that I would consider non-straightforward that you think is more accurate?
But also, “super-natural” is not the point. The point is making bonkers claims detached from reality/not backed by evidence appropriate for his (implicitly) stated epistemic status or something like that. If he claimed that an ancient alien civilization had given him a telepathy device to interact with collective minds, that wouldn’t be “super-natural”, but would be roughly equally bonkers and bad, barring extraordinary evidence, which I don’t expect him to have.
Supernatural IS the point, to start. If we can start with the claim that this is not some magical entity, but a normal one, like you or I (of course, a very different sort of consciousness, but still a consciousness) then I can answer the next question.
However, Kyle’s use of supernatural already assumes the conclusion by calling the entity supernatural. So interaction with it would HAVE to involve something supernatural like mindreading, since how else do you interact with a supernatural being except through supernatural means?
i’ve already explained what the entity is above, in non-supernatural terms. kyle’s use of supernatural after me giving that clear explanation reinforces my sense that there is a narrative spin thing going on.
my own experience with Samadhi says that at least three thing happen as you begin to enter it.
you begin to see the boundaries you implicitly draw between different objects, abstractions, and beings as more arbitrary instead of implicit
you can more clearly see your moral msitakes, and forgive them. because of 1, the same for others.
you can see directly how your clinging to abstraction, concepts, divisions is leading to conflict and suffering
given these 3 facts, it seems fairly straightforward how one would be able to more clearly see an entity that’s not where we normally draw the boundaries of entities while in samadhi, and how if such an entity is based on creating larger abstractions and is causing untold issues through it’s moral choices, it would be suffering.
such insights would require being able to do inquiry while in samadhi, which is hard but not impossible
I say semi-supernatural because it is simultaneously an emergent phenomenon like a flock of birds (within the bounds of conventional materialist perspective), as well as a distinct entity with qualia (suffering)
There is nothing supernatural about this. You can claim that interacting with it through Samadhi is supernatural but that would not make the entity itself supernatural.
You can also claim that you’re clear on the correct theory of consciousness that would make such an entity supernatural, but would have to make claims far beyond simply materialism to do so and imo it wouldn’t be remotely justified
framing the word ‘cybregore’ as referring to a mystical being instead of a useful word for something that clearly needs a name is just one example.
It reminds me how Leverage Research first started talking about “demons” as a metaphor for something, but people gradually took it more and more literally, to the point of trying to exorcise them.
Some corroboration of your intuition, from a “MAPLE Tale”, written by a resident:
https://tales.monasticacademy.org/tales/merging-with-the-algorithm/“Through practice the mind becomes quite malleable and can merge with or encompass other minds. With this malleable mind, I merged with, completely met and took on, the mind of “the algorithm”, or as I call it, the mind of the machine, this collective mind, (or cybregor), that drives the global “machine” of this system of destruction.
However, this mind (cybregor), is very powerful, and some of it got stuck in “me”; I was unable to fully let go of the mind I had taken on and met.
I soon came down with a series of bad symptoms. I lost the momentum I had had in my practice. I felt like I had been hit by a truck. I was extremely exhausted, had this terrible energy stuck in my head, I was experiencing weird emotions that I couldn’t regulate well, and I was having strange physical symptoms as well. I told someone who had asked about the symptoms I was having, and word made its way to Soryu.
Soon after, Soryu called me into Turtle, the room where he has meetings, and he asked how I was doing. I told him the situation as best I could given the brain fog from this mind still stuck. He understood. He said, it’s like meeting a horrific murderer rapist and inviting them in, except it is magnitudes of times worse.
i should qualify that—you’re welcome to share my models and attribute them to me, but i don’t want to be like quoted in a new post that is sharing my views, recorded for a podcast, or something like that
Nod. That seems like a thing I can imagine some readers wanting, but, I am wondering if there is a way to avoid the things you are worried about while being able to meaningfully contribute more to public sensemaking, which seems like the actual thing that needs to happen.
while i’m still here, i’m obviously implicitly representing the org, so would want to discuss with people here before starting to effortpost or have others do so on my behalf
once i leave, i think i’ll have a bit more credibility to post/talk about this stuff without needing to talk my own book, and also be less constrained from the dimension of representing the org
current MAPLE resident here, i will be leaving in February.
while i don’t want to speak for/effortpost the org, i’ll just say that
i think a lot of the claims in this post are highly sensationalized and misleading. framing the word ‘cybregore’ as referring to a mystical being instead of a useful word for something that clearly needs a name is just one example.
i’m more than happy to discuss why i’m still (for the next 6 months) at maple and support the organization with anyone 1-on-1, on the condition that we both come into the conversation willing and open to changing our minds. it’s fine to share what i talk about in person but i don’t want it written about publically online
Hello Trinley! I hope you’re well.
After reading your comment, I’ve reviewed the evidence that led me to including it, and seriously considered retracting it. I agree that the frameworks and ideas that Kulveit explains in his post are helpful for sensemaking in our day and age, and that you can discuss this idea without any mystical implications.
But I don’t believe that’s what Soryu has been doing.
First, for any readers lacking in context, I want to push back on any implicit background assumption that it’s inappropriate for me to attribute mystical beliefs to Soryu and people at MAPLE. During my time at MAPLE, Soryu explicitly told us that he had chosen to reincarnate from a much better realm into this one as an act of compassion for the beings in this realm; he once claimed he’d gotten in touch with the spirits that we were calling during a chant and that they were very displeased with our chanting; and has claimed powers of “shaktipat” (i.e. energetic transmission, or filling students’ consciousness with spiritual energy from a distance), both implicitly in front of the whole group and privately 1:1 with students in the interview room.
Secondly, today I reached out to a new source for this information, a resident who was present for all of Soryu’s AI-related talks in 2024, who found my attribution[1] of a mystical connection with “cyborgregore’s” as entities (distinct beings with their own experience, as opposed to merely emergent phenomena) to be accurate.[2]
So I am unpersuaded that this is sensationalized or misleading.
If you have any more examples of parts that you believe are misleading, please enumerate them, I’ll be happy to respond.
Also: Beyond anything misleading or sensationalized, I saw your recent tweet claiming there were things I shared that were false. If anything in the letter is factually wrong, please tell me, and I will correct it publicly and note the correction.
Here’s what I wrote above in the essay, so readers don’t have to go looking for it:
Also as background, Soryu has written in a quarterly report that this superorganism is a ‘suffering entity’:
This is potentially compatible with more materialist and non-mystical perspectives, but I think also quite compatible with a mystical perspective.
I’m just not sure where you and your former residents are getting the idea of a cybregore as a mystical entity from. Yes, the idea of a cybregore as an entity, probably having a type of consciousness is there, but that’s not a mystical claim at all, it’s compatible with mainstream academic views like functionalism and computationalism.
I explicitly taught the concept on this years chautauqua tour and it was one of the more useful frames for people, (my sister for instance months later told me she was able to quit her social media addiction using the cybregore framing shared in the talk). not one person raised the worry that the framing was outlandish or mystical.
in terms of factual claims, i don’t have time to go through the whole post now, but i did go through the first list of bolded claims earlier.
the part where you claim (lay) ordination is a lifelong commitment to maple is an obvious factual innacuracy. not only is buddhist ordination in general a commitment to the dharma, rather than a specific monastery, but maple is fairly unique in that we are precepted by loosely affiliated teachers from different lineages rather than our own teacher, and so actually end up commiting to a lineage/tradition OUTSIDE of maple as a consequence of the ordination ceremony
this would be a horrible move if the ceremony was trying to bind you further to maple
Another huge factual inaccuracy is the claim that all significant decisions rest with Soryu.
As long as I’ve been part of the organization, the organization has had a 3 person leadership structure, which each person representing one of Wisdom, Love, and Power. Soryu as the head teacher has held the Wisdom Role, and the Executive Director has held the power role.
These roles can (and have repeatedly in my time) veto the Wisdom Role’s decision, and indeed it’s a running joke among the ED’s that half their job is vetoing Soryu’s crazy ideas.
Really appreciating your critical engagement here Trinley. Truly. Epistemic process ftw
Re: cyborgregore
I’m not going to argue about the merits of that particular theory. I am also not arguing that the theory you link is outlandish or mystical. But the concept as you taught it on tour and the claim that Soryu personally contacted these entities via samadhi and confirmed their suffering are two different things.
The main claim here is that Soryu refers to these cyborgregores as distinct, suffering entities and that he has claimed to come into contact with them and confirmed their suffering via deep samadhi. That is clearly mystical in nature.
I have updated the language in my post from “semi-supernatural deity” to “semi-supernatural entity.” Deity was not the appropriate term.
I say semi-supernatural because it is simultaneously an emergent phenomenon like a flock of birds (within the bounds of conventional materialist perspective), as well as a distinct entity with qualia (suffering) that is accessible via samadhi (outside the bounds of conventional materialist perspective).
Re: ordination
You’re right that as written, that sentence could be read as referring to lay ordination, and read that way it would be inaccurate. However I was in fact speaking about full, not lay, ordination. I’ve amended the letter to specify full ordination and noted the correction. Here is the amended sentence:
During a period when at least one person in the community was considering becoming a Forall, an actual monk in the tradition, and around the time Soryu told us that MAPLE needed at least one fully ordained monastic to be formalized as a monastery, I remember Soryu—during an exhortation—speaking of this commitment and saying “I know some of you are thinking about it, so why aren’t you? Come on! It’s just your lives!”
Your point about lay preceptors from outside lineages is accurate.
Re: power
First, the current ED in particular seems particularly unequipped to challenge Soryu in substantive, non-performative, ways. He has said out loud that he trusted Soryu to such a degree that the best way for him to do the most good was to give his life over to Soryu. I am aware of numerous people in the community that find him to be considerably sycophantic towards Soryu; that he functionally serves as an extension of Soryu.
(I appreciate him as a friend and find him to be a very good and intelligent person, and that his aspiration of service to all is sincere and commendable. I feel conflicted about sharing the above, but in this moment where honesty and accountability are important, I decided to share.)
Also, the current ED’s oversight body—the board—consists of three people. One is Soryu, the teacher he has trained under for years. Another is the ED’s wife. Whatever one thinks of the individuals involved, that is not a structure capable of independent oversight of either the ED or Soryu.
Additionally, electing a new ED is something that has an actual hard-constraint: any board member can disapprove. Soryu routed around this constraint. A former board member related to me that when the current ED was selected, Soryu deliberated with the other board members and finalized the approval before this member—who would have objected—even knew the process was underway. They first learned the ED had been selected when Soryu announced it to the whole community as a decision made “in deliberation with the board.” When they later challenged Soryu on this, he only mildly acknowledged some unskillfulness on his part, but the decision stood.
When the previous Executive Director stepped into the role in 2022, they were promised significant creative liberty and spent months developing a plan for the organization. Their predecessor told them that Soryu “was gonna tear their plan apart,” in ways Soryu had historically done. Indeed that’s what happened. Soryu publicly ridiculed their plan, then unilaterally announced a new direction for the community—including potentially founding a for-profit AI company, developing a superintelligence that would turn the world into a monastery, instituting a “benevolent surveillance system,” and having the community listen to his recent lecture series on Buddhism and AI “twelve more times.” The new executive director had ethical objections to this, but Soryu oriented to them merely as an implementer of his agenda, not a peer.
Multiple former members of leadership have told me privately that the letter matches the dynamics they experienced. Many more residents have explicitly called MAPLE authoritarian, with Soryu atop a sharp power asymmetry, regardless of whatever formal governance structures there are. The triumvirate you speak of is equal in form, but not in function.
where are you getting the term “supernatural entity” from. Why super natural? what is supernatural about the entity? what is “semi-supernatural”?
I have not EVER heard of the term “Forall” or of monastic academy doing full ordination. Was this before my time? All talk of a potential ordination path in my 5+ years here has been offering something similar to the lay ordination path, where you would go to another monastery, get fully ordained, spend time there, and then return. Again, this would be a horrible scheme if the goal was to bind people to maple.
re specifics about people at maple/relationships etc, this is something i don’t feel comfortable discussing/representing the org on. i get why you’d bring it up in my factual correction about org structure, but it’s not something i’d want to discuss publically while here. again, if people want to talk privately and not share the details online, i’m happy to do so.
Are you saying that a claim that one has interacted with a collective mind via samadhi does not involve anything supernatural (or at least very, very weird/implausible on priors, from the materialist/naturalist perspective, like having a sufficiently high-fidelity copy of the mind dormant in one’s brain)?
what are you talking about? what does the entity being supernatural have anything to do with how you interact with it? you could claim you interacted with the guy you saw on the street in samadhi. would that make him supernatural?
i would like to eventually address the claims about being able to connect with a being in samadhi and see that it is suffering, but this rests first on acknowledging that there’s nothing magical about that being.
Insofar as you believe that Soryu has actually interacted with this cyborgregore, what is the medium in which you think the interaction happened? Telepathy? Some LLM-foo? Does he claim to have a copy of the mind dormant in his cortex? All of those seem crazy improbable to me, but what you believe to be the medium of the interaction is a crux for whether the label “super-natural” is appropriate.
Kyle wrote the following in the OP, and also quoted it in a footnote of his response to your top comment, to which I don’t think you meaningfully responded:
On the most straightforward reading, this involves some telepathy stuff, i.e., either supernatural or we are very confused about how minds or whatever works or some weird scifi tech that we don’t expect to exist in the present. Is there a reading of this that I would consider non-straightforward that you think is more accurate?
But also, “super-natural” is not the point. The point is making bonkers claims detached from reality/not backed by evidence appropriate for his (implicitly) stated epistemic status or something like that. If he claimed that an ancient alien civilization had given him a telepathy device to interact with collective minds, that wouldn’t be “super-natural”, but would be roughly equally bonkers and bad, barring extraordinary evidence, which I don’t expect him to have.
Supernatural IS the point, to start. If we can start with the claim that this is not some magical entity, but a normal one, like you or I (of course, a very different sort of consciousness, but still a consciousness) then I can answer the next question.
However, Kyle’s use of supernatural already assumes the conclusion by calling the entity supernatural. So interaction with it would HAVE to involve something supernatural like mindreading, since how else do you interact with a supernatural being except through supernatural means?
So what is the entity according to you or your model of Soryu and how do you think he interacted with this entity?
i’ve already explained what the entity is above, in non-supernatural terms. kyle’s use of supernatural after me giving that clear explanation reinforces my sense that there is a narrative spin thing going on.
my own experience with Samadhi says that at least three thing happen as you begin to enter it.
you begin to see the boundaries you implicitly draw between different objects, abstractions, and beings as more arbitrary instead of implicit
you can more clearly see your moral msitakes, and forgive them. because of 1, the same for others.
you can see directly how your clinging to abstraction, concepts, divisions is leading to conflict and suffering
given these 3 facts, it seems fairly straightforward how one would be able to more clearly see an entity that’s not where we normally draw the boundaries of entities while in samadhi, and how if such an entity is based on creating larger abstractions and is causing untold issues through it’s moral choices, it would be suffering.
such insights would require being able to do inquiry while in samadhi, which is hard but not impossible
There is nothing supernatural about this. You can claim that interacting with it through Samadhi is supernatural but that would not make the entity itself supernatural.
You can also claim that you’re clear on the correct theory of consciousness that would make such an entity supernatural, but would have to make claims far beyond simply materialism to do so and imo it wouldn’t be remotely justified
It reminds me how Leverage Research first started talking about “demons” as a metaphor for something, but people gradually took it more and more literally, to the point of trying to exorcise them.
Some corroboration of your intuition, from a “MAPLE Tale”, written by a resident:
https://tales.monasticacademy.org/tales/merging-with-the-algorithm/“Through practice the mind becomes quite malleable and can merge with or encompass other minds. With this malleable mind, I merged with, completely met and took on, the mind of “the algorithm”, or as I call it, the mind of the machine, this collective mind, (or cybregor), that drives the global “machine” of this system of destruction.
However, this mind (cybregor), is very powerful, and some of it got stuck in “me”; I was unable to fully let go of the mind I had taken on and met.
I soon came down with a series of bad symptoms. I lost the momentum I had had in my practice. I felt like I had been hit by a truck. I was extremely exhausted, had this terrible energy stuck in my head, I was experiencing weird emotions that I couldn’t regulate well, and I was having strange physical symptoms as well. I told someone who had asked about the symptoms I was having, and word made its way to Soryu.
Soon after, Soryu called me into Turtle, the room where he has meetings, and he asked how I was doing. I told him the situation as best I could given the brain fog from this mind still stuck. He understood. He said, it’s like meeting a horrific murderer rapist and inviting them in, except it is magnitudes of times worse.
Yes, it’s like that.“
So I guess we can add dangerous (possibly long-term-debilitating), ambiguously-consented tulpamancy to the list of harms?
Seems like a fine thing to want but means I don’t really see how the conversation would help anyone much.
i should qualify that—you’re welcome to share my models and attribute them to me, but i don’t want to be like quoted in a new post that is sharing my views, recorded for a podcast, or something like that
Do you mean “fine to share in person but not write up publicly online?”
yes, maybe i’ll edit to that.
Nod. That seems like a thing I can imagine some readers wanting, but, I am wondering if there is a way to avoid the things you are worried about while being able to meaningfully contribute more to public sensemaking, which seems like the actual thing that needs to happen.
while i’m still here, i’m obviously implicitly representing the org, so would want to discuss with people here before starting to effortpost or have others do so on my behalf
once i leave, i think i’ll have a bit more credibility to post/talk about this stuff without needing to talk my own book, and also be less constrained from the dimension of representing the org