Kyle Hubbard

Karma: 367

Kyle Hubbard 4 Aug 2026 19:17 UTC
16 points
0
in reply to: Trinley Goldenberg’s comment on: The High-Control Dynamics at MAPLE
Soryu’s asking us if we should take on those “recommendations” from Shinzen were, by my understanding at least, largely rhetorical. With Soryu’s statements and tone within that talk it was clear he did not favor abiding by them at all.
The talk was so inappropriate^[1] and derisive of Shinzen that the executive director and head of Care (the two other branches of the triumvirate you spoke of in another comment) immediately held a meeting with Soryu the next morning pressing him to begin receiving “help,” of the professional kind. Soryu didn’t concede to this.
I heard and was a part of multiple conversations with residents the next day who were either worried about Soryu’s mental health or were questioning if Soryu was truly as trustworthy as he claimed to be. One resident told me “well, I guess that’s the end of that long friendship (of Soryu’s and Shinzen’s).”
I named two of Shinzen’s demands, I can’t remember the third. Could you please share it? And what are the changes that you speak of that were implemented following this talk?
Also, I believe you phrasing them as “recommendations” from Shinzen as misleading. I understood them to be red-lines for Shinzen’s support. That Shinzen could no longer support MAPLE if these “recommendations” were not met.
If I’m wrong, one thing that could help clarify this would be finding and publishing the recording of the session (as all lectures at MAPLE are recorded). If that’s too public, we could also pick a few other people like Kaj Sotala to listen and give their takes.
1. ^
  I use the term inappropriate because hosting a community wide flash-impromptu meeting to berate someone with big standing in the community (helped found MAPLE, hosted multiple retreats there, ordained many MAPLE residents), without them there to represent themselves was not a healthy medium for resolving the situation

Kyle Hubbard 2 Aug 2026 22:14 UTC
22 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: The High-Control Dynamics at MAPLE
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.“

Kyle Hubbard 2 Aug 2026 22:10 UTC
26 points
4
in reply to: Trinley Goldenberg’s comment on: The High-Control Dynamics at MAPLE
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.
[[EDIT Aug 9th: The story previously detailed here about board resolution of an executive director has been redacted. I’ve been reliably informed that the story was false as stated. Will potentially update further with more details.]]
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.

Kyle Hubbard 1 Aug 2026 23:20 UTC
35 points
1
in reply to: Trinley Goldenberg’s comment on: The High-Control Dynamics at MAPLE
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.
1. ^
  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.”
2. ^
  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.