Who authored this resource?
This resource was produced by a former residential trainee of both MAPLE and OAK. Training commenced around the period in which the attacks on these organizations began. The author holds no current position at either organization and does not speak on their behalf. The decision to publish this document was not made lightly; it reflects a considered judgment that the continued silence of informed parties has materially contributed to the damage being done, and that the public record as it currently stands is substantially incomplete and misleading.
The author’s concern is not personal in any narrow sense. MAPLE and OAK hold what the author believes to be a critical and irreplaceable body of knowledge bearing on the existential threat posed by artificial intelligence. Both organizations have been subjected, for more than a decade, to sustained campaigns of reputational attack. The individuals conducting those campaigns appear to be motivated primarily by personal grievance. The cost — measured in lost collaborators, diminished institutional resources, and eroded public credibility — is not borne by the attackers. It is borne by the world.
What is the purpose of this resource?
The author has conducted extensive investigation into this question, both as a private individual and as a professional philanthropist. The conclusion reached is that MAPLE and OAK hold an understanding of how to approach AI safety that is not replicated, to the author’s knowledge, by any other organization on Earth. The particular history and institutional constitution of these organizations makes this knowledge genuinely singular.
A sufficiently resourced team could, in principle, reproduce what MAPLE and OAK have developed independently. The constraint is time — and in the author’s assessment, that time is not available.
What, specifically, is the knowledge these organizations hold?
The difficulty is not one of articulation. The author is able to articulate it. The difficulty is that transmitting this knowledge in a publicly accessible form would create serious and foreseeable risks of misuse — risks that, on balance, are assessed to be more harmful than the communication would be beneficial. This document is therefore not an attempt to convey that knowledge. It is an attempt to protect the organizations that currently hold it.
What is the author’s relationship to MAPLE and OAK, and on what basis is this document being published?
The author holds no position at either organization and does not represent them. What the author holds is direct, multi-year knowledge of both institutions, their internal functioning, the attacks they have sustained, and the individuals responsible for those attacks.
This document is being published because continued silence in the face of a sustained, bad-faith campaign against two institutions of genuine consequence is not a defensible position. If MAPLE and OAK are destroyed, the knowledge they hold will be lost. The author understands the nature of that knowledge, the mechanisms by which both organizations are being deprived of the collaborators and resources necessary to sustain it, and the motivations of the individuals responsible. What is being transacted here — the long-term institutional viability of MAPLE and OAK — is being exchanged for the short-term emotional relief of a small number of individuals. This document is a response to that transaction.
Does the contemplative orientation of these organizations not counsel equanimity in the face of institutional loss?
This question is addressed once, for the record. The cultivation of equanimity — including equanimity in the face of death — is indeed a component of serious Buddhist practice. It is, however, instrumental rather than terminal: a means toward liberation and the capacity for wise, compassionate action in the world, not a rationale for passivity in the face of preventable harm. Every serious Buddhist lineage the author has studied holds that engaged action in service of others is not in tension with the contemplative path — it is among its most direct expressions. The invocation of equanimity as grounds for inaction in circumstances such as these represents a fundamental misreading of the tradition.
What are MAPLE and OAK?
MAPLE is a Buddhist monastery located in Vermont, founded in 2011 with the mission of realizing and teaching a form of Buddhism capable of resolving global existential threats that have arisen in the modern techno-industrial era. OAK is its satellite training center in California, founded in 2017. Over fifteen years of operation, the residential training community of these organizations has ranged in size from approximately five to fifty individuals; the current membership is approximately twenty-five.
What is the summary of this document?
MAPLE and OAK have conducted serious, sustained institutional work on the question of how artificial intelligence can be steered away from catastrophic outcomes. In the author’s assessment, this work represents a meaningful contribution to that problem. It requires trainees capable of genuinely confronting the full scope of what is at stake — including the depth of personal and societal change that an honest engagement with the problem entails. That confrontation is difficult. Both organizations have developed considerable skill in supporting trainees through it. Some individuals are nonetheless unable or unwilling to complete the training, and leave. A small number of those individuals have, upon departing, directed sustained attacks against the organizations. The apparent premise — that discrediting the institutions will diminish the underlying problem they are addressing — does not withstand scrutiny.
What would distinguish a legitimate critique of these organizations from the campaigns described in this document?
A legitimate critique would include, at minimum, one concrete and independently verifiable claim — submitted either publicly or through private channels — that the author, having spent years in residential training at MAPLE and having investigated these matters in depth, could not in good conscience dismiss. No such claim has been produced by any of the individuals discussed below.
How might an independent reader assess the credibility of these claims?
The most reliable method is the one the author employed: completion of a multi-year residential training at MAPLE, direct engagement with all parties, and the formation of an independent judgment. That is a substantial undertaking, and not all readers will pursue it. For those who will not, the available alternative is the identification of a credible source and the exercise of careful judgment regarding that source’s reliability.
On what basis should this document be considered a credible source?
The general principle the author would offer is this: credibility attaches to individuals whose conduct — across the full breadth of their lives, consistently and without exception — reflects a stable commitment to a trustworthy ethical framework. Assessing character through a published document is inherently constrained. The author acknowledges that limitation. The content and reasoning of this document are what the author is in a position to offer; the evaluation of their merit is the reader’s responsibility.
Who is responsible for these attacks, and what accounts for their conduct?
Detailed accounts of each individual follow. The first subject is Hannah Schell.
Who is Hannah Schell?
Hannah Schell completed one month of residential training at OAK in 2020. Following her departure, she published a post on Medium that underwent substantial revision over subsequent months, ultimately converging on an allegation of sexual assault. She cultivated a public following in connection with that allegation and initiated a series of escalating online attacks against MAPLE. These culminated in a physical attack: at a MAPLE Chautauqua Tour event in Portland, Oregon, Ms. Schell or an associate used a knife to slash diagonally opposed tires on a MAPLE staff vehicle. This particular method of sabotage is notable for causing a vehicle to present as roadworthy while ensuring loss of control once it reaches speed — a technique that maximizes the probability of injury to whoever subsequently drives the vehicle.
Prior to her arrival at OAK, Ms. Schell informed a MAPLE staff member that she was coming to “make changes.” During her residency, she separately told two staff members that she intended to destroy the organization. She also informed a guest that she intended to seduce a specific OAK staff member at a specific time and place, and subsequently did so. She later entered a romantic relationship with that individual after his departure from the organization. When the relationship ended — more than a year after the original encounter — she alleged that the encounter had constituted sexual assault.
Ms. Schell left behind multiple recordings and a signed written statement attesting to her contentment during her time at OAK. Both before and during her subsequent romantic relationship with the man she later accused, she had described the encounter to multiple friends and acquaintances as a seduction she had herself initiated.
Did MAPLE conduct a formal investigation into the allegations?
Yes. MAPLE committed at minimum two thousand person-hours to a formal investigative process and concluded that the allegations were without foundation.
Did MAPLE seek to engage Ms. Schell through formal dispute resolution?
Yes. MAPLE retained a professional mediation firm and proposed mediation. Ms. Schell initially agreed, then withdrew from the process.
Did MAPLE publish the findings of its investigation?
Yes. A detailed public FAQ was posted to MAPLE’s website. It was removed after several months. The author’s understanding is that MAPLE leadership came to regard the document as having been framed excessively on Ms. Schell’s terms — a judgment the author, having read the document, shares.
How did MAPLE respond institutionally to the concerns Ms. Schell raised?
Following a multi-year investigation, MAPLE determined that none of the allegations had merit. The organization maintained its position publicly, communicated its findings to trainees and supporters, and deepened its institutional critique of the cultural dynamics the author believes underlie the conduct of Ms. Schell and her subsequent collaborators.
How did Ms. Schell’s public account evolve over time?
In its original form, Ms. Schell’s Medium post explicitly denied that a sexual assault had occurred. It was framed as an open letter to the Monastic Academy articulating a set of organizational critiques. The post attracted public attention, and a small group of third parties subsequently organized around Ms. Schell — appearing to proceed on the premise that she was a victim of sexual assault who had not yet arrived at that characterization herself. Over the course of many months, the post was revised repeatedly, ultimately converging on an explicit allegation of assault. A second post followed, titled “Why I define my experience at MAPLE as sexual assault,” written in a register and style that differed markedly from Ms. Schell’s original writing.
What occurred at the Portland Chautauqua Tour event?
During MAPLE’s preparation for a public event in Portland, Oregon in 2022, Ms. Schell sent a series of hostile messages via Facebook and engaged in extended exchanges with a MAPLE staff member involved in the event. A few hours before the scheduled start, she posted publicly on Facebook that she was asking for “Any spiritual jedis open to joining me at an event this evening? Needing support as I cut some spiritual ties”. Shortly thereafter, the MAPLE vehicle — identifiable by, among other features, Vermont license plates — was located outside the venue and its tires slashed in the diagonally opposed pattern described above.
What has been the aggregate institutional impact on MAPLE?
MAPLE staff have been disinvited from speaking engagements at multiple institutions. A substantial number of prospective trainees have withdrawn from MAPLE’s intake process following exposure to Ms. Schell’s posts. Fundraising has been materially affected, with an undetermined number of prospective donors either declining to engage or withdrawing prior commitments. The cumulative damage to MAPLE’s operational capacity has been significant.
Who is Taishin Danny Morris?
Taishin Danny Morris is a somatic therapist who completed residential training at MAPLE during the organization’s formative period. Following his departure, MAPLE extended him a significant degree of institutional trust, directing departing trainees to him for professional support in the reintegration of monastic experience into civilian life. This arrangement now appears to have been a serious institutional error. Evidence gathered over time indicates that Mr. Morris used that referral relationship to persuade departing trainees that their time at MAPLE had been harmful to them.
The author of this website was personally approached by Mr. Morris shortly after leaving OAK. Several others are known to have been approached under similar circumstances; some accepted the framing he offered.
The author was not present during Mr. Morris’s training at MAPLE. Those who were, describe him as a skilled and determined seeker of institutional influence who advanced rapidly to a position second only to Soryu Forall in the organization’s hierarchy, and who made no secret of his interest in the senior position.
Following his departure from MAPLE, Mr. Morris joined two further communities in sequence: Dharma Ocean, a somatic therapy organization, and Shinzen Young’s Unified Mindfulness network. He was formally excommunicated from both. In the case of Unified Mindfulness, this involved an explicit prohibition on teaching within the system and a permanent bar on return.
The narrative Mr. Morris came to hold about his own time at MAPLE — that it had been traumatic and that the organization posed a net harm to those who trained there — is, with notable consistency, the narrative he subsequently introduced to the MAPLE trainees who came to him for post-monastic support.
The psychological mechanism warrants examination. Individuals emerging from intensive contemplative training have frequently undergone genuine and substantial internal change — including a sharpened perception of ways in which the surrounding society is mistaken. Re-entering that society presents a dilemma: accommodation to its errors is experienced as a loss of integrity; commitment to working against them is experienced as overwhelming. In that condition, an alternative narrative is highly appealing — specifically, the suggestion that the discomfort one experiences is not the product of genuine perception but of institutional harm, and that the appropriate response is not engagement with large-scale social problems but a targeted campaign against a small organization in rural Vermont. The latter is, self-evidently, the more tractable undertaking.
What concrete criticisms did Mr. Morris raise against MAPLE?
None that any party the author has consulted has been able to identify. Some time after his departure — and following his expulsion from both Dharma Ocean and Unified Mindfulness — Mr. Morris contacted MAPLE to indicate that he had grievances. MAPLE, in what appears in retrospect to have been an institutional failure of judgment, responded with sustained good faith: open invitations, extended listening sessions, and repeated dialogue in a variety of formats. The organization appears to have operated on the genuine belief that any conflict was resolvable through sufficient mutual engagement.
Mr. Morris’s prior conduct — having attacked two separate organizations before MAPLE, both of which moved promptly to terminate their association with him — indicates that this assessment was not warranted. MAPLE, unlike those organizations, did not terminate the relationship, and it was allowed to continue.
Who is Harrison O’Connor?
Harrison O’Connor is an arborist who entered MAPLE as a homeless individual and was accepted into the organization’s inaugural cohort of residential trainees in 2013. His initial contact with MAPLE occurred when he overheard a conversation between Soryu Forall and Shinzen Young at a restaurant in Burlington, Vermont, and approached Forall directly to request instruction and admission. He subsequently trained under two Rinzai Zen teachers and completed a residential period at a Rinzai Zen temple in Japan. He later experienced what appears to have been a significant psychotic episode, following which he informed friends and caretakers that he was the most enlightened individual of the past fifteen hundred years. He then approached both Soryu Forall and Shinzen Young with an offer to receive them as his first disciples — an offer accompanied by a claim that he possessed the ability to identify, upon visual inspection, individuals who “needed to be killed.”
During his years of residential training at MAPLE, Mr. O’Connor required rescue on multiple occasions following episodes of disorientation in wooded terrain or excessive distance from shore on Lake Champlain. He also manufactured a dispute between municipal authorities and the proprietor of the retreat center then hosting MAPLE, an intervention that compelled the organization to relocate.
At one point Mr. O’Connor alleged that a male attendee who occasionally visited MAPLE events had raped him. MAPLE investigated and found no corroborating evidence. He further alleged that his parents had prostituted him during childhood; no party the author has spoken with has been able to verify any aspect of that account.
Through Soryu Forall, Mr. O’Connor became involved in an annual Sundance ceremony in Colorado. He subsequently initiated a campaign of attacks against Forall within that context — beginning with the circulation of fabricated claims, including an allegation that Forall had attempted to abduct the daughter of a “chief” (a title that does not exist within that community) — and escalating to the organization of a coordinated physical assault: Mr. O’Connor directed four individuals to attack Forall in a parking lot.
Mr. O’Connor has more recently published a website containing extreme defamatory statements about Forall.
What does Mr. O’Connor’s conduct indicate about his motivations?
His motivations are not fully legible. The observable pattern — publicly presenting his MAPLE training as the most significant credential in his biography while privately operating defamatory websites and organizing physical attacks against MAPLE’s founder — suggests a desire for the platform and recognition that association with MAPLE’s reputation confers, combined with a grievance requiring expression through attack. This pattern is, notably, not unique to Mr. O’Connor among the individuals documented here.
Who is Aaron Stryker?
Aaron Stryker is the co-founder of Dharma Gates, a meditation organization active at universities across the United States. He trained at MAPLE under a negotiated arrangement: in exchange for directing motivated students from the Dharma Gates network toward MAPLE, Mr. Stryker was to receive accelerated access to MAPLE’s monastic training program, with discretion to attend or forego individual components as he saw fit, and without passing through MAPLE’s standard admissions process.
MAPLE maintained two parallel training tracks at the time. Dragon was structured for trainees with an unconditional commitment to the realization of enlightenment. Phoenix served individuals either preparing for possible entry into Dragon, or — having completed Dragon — working on the integration of practice into relational and service contexts. Mr. Stryker, consistent with a pattern observed among a certain type of highly motivated new arrival, elected to enter Dragon immediately. This was not in itself irregular. What was irregular is that he omitted from his intake documentation a documented prior history of panic attacks — an omission that, based on available evidence, was deliberate.
That history would not have disqualified Mr. Stryker from MAPLE or from the Dragon track. The author had a comparable history prior to arriving at MAPLE, disclosed it on intake documentation, discussed it directly with Forall, and resolved it in the course of training; the condition has not recurred. The effect of Mr. Stryker’s concealment was to foreclose that same process. His panic attacks worsened progressively through the winter training period and deteriorated substantially during an extended period in the summer when Forall was absent from the organization. Mr. Stryker departed MAPLE within a few months of that point.
What followed closely parallels the pattern observed in the case of Taishin Danny Morris. Mr. Stryker concluded — or was guided to conclude — that the pre-existing condition his training had surfaced had in fact been caused by the training. That account is not logically sustainable. An individual who enters a demanding institutional program while concealing a pre-existing condition, and whose condition becomes acutely symptomatic under the demands of that program, cannot credibly attribute the condition’s existence or severity to the program. This is particularly clear given that panic attacks represent a condition that serious contemplative practice is genuinely capable of resolving — as the author’s own case establishes.
What actions did Mr. Stryker take following his departure from MAPLE?
Following several years of intermittent, increasingly acrimonious, and substantively unproductive exchanges with MAPLE leadership, Mr. Stryker submitted a formal complaint to the MAPLE board of directors. The document contained eleven testimonials and an unspecified volume of accusations directed at Forall and the organization.
The testimonials are of questionable authenticity. The author has spoken with several individuals to whom testimonials were attributed. In each case, the individual was unaware the document existed, unaware they had been cited within it, and — when shown the relevant passage — stated that it did not reflect anything they had said or written. When a board member asked Mr. Stryker directly whether he was prepared to personally attest to the accuracy of the testimonials, he declined to do so. The document had also been submitted on the explicit condition that the board share its contents with no one — a condition the board was unable to accept, as compliance would have placed them in the position of being unable to discuss, with any party, complaints received about the organization they were charged with overseeing.
The substantive content of the testimonials was, in the author’s assessment, strikingly insubstantial. One was devoted almost entirely to a reprimand a trainee had received for wasting food.
What occurred between Mr. Stryker’s departure from MAPLE and the submission of the formal complaint?
Reconstruction of the full sequence required considerable effort, but the essential account is as follows. Following his departure from MAPLE, Mr. Stryker traveled to Great Vow Zen Monastery in Oregon — a community from which several students had previously departed, without any apparent recruitment effort on MAPLE’s part, to undertake training at MAPLE instead. The co-founder of Great Vow, Jan Chozen Bays, informed Mr. Stryker that MAPLE had caused him harm and that its pedagogical methodology was responsible for his panic attacks. Mr. Stryker subsequently traveled among a number of other spiritual communities across the United States, presenting to each a variant of the arrangement he had originally proposed to MAPLE: a pipeline of motivated students via Dharma Gates in exchange for accelerated training access.
The institutional context is relevant. Residential monastic communities across the United States and internationally are experiencing significant difficulty in attracting and retaining long-term trainees. Short-format retreat programming remains in demand; sustained residential monasticism is in decline. This distinction is consequential, because the institutional function of a monastery is categorically different from that of a retreat center. A monastery provides a living, continuous demonstration of what a sustained way of life produces over time, along with the authority that credibly follows from such a demonstration. A retreat center, however well-designed its programming, does not provide that. The departure of motivated residential trainees to another community therefore represents a meaningful institutional loss for any organization that depends on them. It is within that context that Jan Chozen Bays’s role in shaping Mr. Stryker’s subsequent conduct is best understood.