Mistakes / Edits

Corrections and edits to the original letter

Since publication I’ve made the following changes to the letter:

Maitrī’s name. For roughly a twelve hour period, the letter accidentally used a former, non-ordained first name. Corrected.

Soryu’s account of his early life purpose. Amended for accuracy on both the stated justification and his own framing of what replaced it.

Was: …killing every human on Earth was his explicit life purpose from ages nine to nineteen…until his vision shifted to awakening all beings as a superior alternative.

Now: …killing every human on Earth to protect the rest of life on earth was his explicit life purpose from ages nine to nineteen…until his vision shifted to “killing them spiritually” (a way he frames awakening) as a superior alternative.

He has said explicitly, to multiple people I’ve spoken to, that he first wanted to kill all humans and then shifted to the higher aspiration of killing them spiritually.

Zak Stein described as a former student of Soryu’s. Removed. Two passages identified Zak Stein as a former student of Soryu’s—one describing the board’s composition, one describing the 2023 board turnover. I’ve recently learned Zak does not consider himself to have been Soryu’s student. What I knew was that Zak had sat multiple retreats and attended interviews with Soryu while living at MAPLE, and that when I was head of admissions I was trained to tell newcomers that entering the interview room for the first time meant they were formally entering a student-teacher relationship with Soryu. What I did not do was establish how he understood that relationship, or ask him. He does not see himself as Soryu’s former student, and I updated the letter to honor that.

Board composition in the opening section. The letter originally described the board as “Soryu as chairman and two former students.” That characterization was inaccurate as applied to Zak Stein (see above), and I replaced it with the board’s actual composition and each member’s relationship to MAPLE.

I also labeled him as one of two “loyal” former students that became board members in 2023 later in the letetr. That was a reasonable characterization for the other board member, but not for Zak. Removed.

“Joy and enthusiasm is demanded at MAPLE.” Retracted. This is supported by the contractual agreement residents must sign about being “joyful, blessed, and honored” to be in the training, but it is much less substantiated by Soryu’s words or behavior, which is what the sentence implies. I added the line the day before publishing, after my final review pass, and it didn’t get the scrutiny the rest of the letter did.

“Semi-supernatural deity” → “semi-supernatural entity.” Deity was the wrong word.

Soryu describes “a vast superorganism that includes economies, technologies, and most people […] This delusional, suffering entity decides the future.” He had claimed that he has contacted it via Samadhi and therbey confirmed its suffering. I use “semi-supernatural” because this entity can be simultaneously described as an emergent phenomenon like a flock of birds (within the bounds of conventional materialist perspective; thus “natural”); as well as a vast superorganism that includes economies, technologies, and most people, that is such a distinct entity with its own consciousness and qualia (suffering) that is accessible via samadhi (thereby outside the bounds of conventional materialist perspective and thus also deserving the term “supernatural”). This is the language I have chosen, you are welcome to contest it.

“Former friends” → “friends” in the first sentence of the letter. They are still my friends.

A few grammatical and non-substantive edits that I won’t list here.