In early 2026, as part of the training at the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth, all trainees began creating more online content in order to share the wisdom and clarity we’ve gained through our practice with the world. We had regular all-hands discussions about our progress as well as challenges in this process. In a particularly intense one where we discussed the biggest hang-ups that obstructed us from sharing, I brought up a severe one for me—I’d feel bad when just even one person ghosted me, let alone potentially an entire audience.
“It’s weird,” I remarked. “They ghost me, but I feel like I'm the ghost.”
Our teacher who was facilitating the conversation, Soryu Forall, looked a bit nonplussed. “Oh, I always thought that it was a transitive verb. Is it not?”
We were puzzled by this. Renunciate Renshin asked, “What do you mean?”
Fellow student Joshua explained, “When you ‘ghost someone’, that means that you suddenly become a ghost.”
“Oh!” Forall said with some wonder, “I always assume that when you ghost someone—”
Renshin finished, “Oh, it turns them into a ghost?”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “It’s a transitive verb—you make them into a ghost.”
I disagreed, “’To ghost someone’ means you're the one disappearing.”
Forall looked at us and replied, “Well, not really. You attack the person by refusing to disappear. When you ‘ghost someone’, you're forcing them to have unresolved experience so that they become a ghost. That is what is happening. That's why I always thought that ‘ghost’ was transitive—you're forcing them into an unresolved situation so they can't leave. You're not a ghost, they are. It's an attack on their humanity.”
Excited by this explanation, some of us started talking all at once. Villager Maitrī remarked, “I never thought about it too much. That's more sophisticated.”
“Or maybe I’m just right,” Forall replied. Some people chuckled. He continued, “Maybe that is what is meant, whether or not people admit that is what they mean.”
A few of us conceded this was likely so.
“It's a Freudian slip—you're saying the thing that you mean without wanting to, and you admit the truth whether or not you know you admitted it. Ghosting is an act of violence. It's the attempt, conscious or unconscious, to harm someone so that they can never recover. It's an act of domination in which you attempt to remain central to their life without caring for them.”
As the conversation continued, I felt happier and less ghost-like to have finally been seen.