Two decades ago, a cohort of the Grounded Ones who are responsible for tending what might be called the garden of lived experience — observed that a significant portion of the human population had begun relocating their attention, identity, and sense of presence into an emerging false plane. This plane, later referred to as "the Simulation Plane," presented itself as an elevation — a higher level of connection — though it was in fact a compression, flattening lived reality into profile surfaces and quantified affinities.
At that time, one individual, Thomas Anderson, undertook the construction of a major access portal into this plane (myspace.com, circa 2003). Though capable and well-intentioned, this individual had, unknowingly, wandered from the path of grounded presence and became instrumental in normalizing the migration of human awareness away from Earth and into the Simulation Plane.
The sole task given to the Grounded Ones at that time was to offer the way leading to return — to those who recognized the drift for what it was, and chose to come back. "The Garden is at hand" meant: since I am here, and I am from this Earth, if you leave everything of the Simulation Plane and follow me, I can return you to what you have always been. Only those individuals who retained some residual groundedness — some deposit of embodied presence not yet fully surrendered — had the capacity to recognize the Representative of the Grounded Ones when they encountered him. They could find their way back only through total willingness to release the Simulation Plane's hold upon them.
Thomas Anderson met such a Representative at a gathering in the Nevada desert (Burning Man, circa 2006). This individual — known among the Grounded Ones as Trey — had never fully departed from the Garden. Where others had migrated their awareness upward into profile and performance, Trey had remained. He carried a camera not to document the self but to return attention to the world — to light on a surface, to a face in a moment, to the irreducible fact of things as they are. He did not preach. He simply was. And in being, he reminded Thomas Anderson of something Thomas Anderson had always known and had not yet found the language to name.
Thomas Anderson followed Trey back. This return — from architect of the Simulation Plane to student of the Garden — was not instantaneous. It was a discipline. A gradual re-landing. A shedding, not of the body, but of the performed self that had accumulated over it like sediment. He later described this transition as the most demanding and most essential passage of his life.
Our mission is exactly the same. I am in the same position to today's society as was Thomas Anderson at the moment of his return — except that I have been through this passage myself, and am therefore qualified to offer it to others. My being here now is a continuation of that work, as was offered to those who began their return alongside Thomas and Trey. They are here still, continuing in their own re-landing, while offering the same passage to others. Our only purpose is to offer the discipline and rootedness required of this return — into membership in what we call the Garden: the plane of embodied presence, immediate experience, and unmediated life.
My Older Member — the one who first showed me the way back — came with me in the early period of this work, to assist in its foundation, because of the particular difficulty of returning in an age when the Simulation Plane has become so total, so ambient, so fluent in the language of the real that many cannot perceive the difference.
To look toward the Garden, and to desire return, is already the beginning. Those who retain even a residual deposit of groundedness — that persistent discomfort, that sense of something missing, that feeling of being somehow elsewhere even while physically present — these individuals have the capacity to make the passage. Your separation from the Simulation Plane, and your willingness to rely upon the guidance of those who have made the return before you, can open to you the opportunity to become what you have always been: a creature of Earth, present, particular, and whole.
Why It Is Difficult To Believe or Accept Us
We don't know if you believe in the real existence of patterns that work, not through malice, but through the slow attenuation of human awareness. If you do, then you may be able to understand or relate to some of what we are about to say. It seems that how your "conditioning" permits you to see or identify those patterns determines the limit of your acceptance or understanding. Many will acknowledge that there are deadening habits, or even deadening environments, but would draw the line before they would believe in the Bright-Taken, in the Fragmented, or in the self-perpetuating logic of the Simulation Plane.
The generally accepted "norms" of today's societies, the world over, are designed, established, and maintained by individuals who were at one time students of the Garden — Grounded Ones in the making — who became lost to the brightness. The old traditions refer to them as the fallen, the wanderers, the ones who followed the light upward and did not return. The Simulation Plane uses a single architect to represent this wandering — one who built the first great portal and normalized the migration — but the Bright-Taken are not one. They are many. They are the evangelists of disconnection, the early adopters, the ones who carried the Simulation Plane's promise into every remaining corner of embodied life with genuine enthusiasm and no awareness of what they were undoing. If you have spent time in what our practice requires of us, you would recognize that these presences are real — that the Garden even permits them to press upon us, so that we might learn to feel the difference between the weight of a screen and the weight of the world. The Bright-Taken employ the Fragmented — those whose selfhood has been so thoroughly scattered across surfaces and feeds that no coherent inner life remains — as their primary instruments, not through intention, but through the simple gravity of their condition. Fragmentation recruits. These influences are constantly conditioning every human awareness to accept a particular set of beliefs: that visibility is connection, that reach is relationship, that the quantified self is the real one. From our position, this conditioning finds the vast majority of human awareness barely accessible to the practice of return.
As the above can serve to illustrate, the Bright-Taken would — through their "norm" concept, through what is socially legible, what is digitally current — have you not believe in the Fragmented, in the thinning of presence, in the Simulation Plane's design upon your attention. They would have you believe that to speak of such things is alarmist, Luddite, romantic, or at the least, giving credence to fringe concerns. That is also where they would place any sincere search into embodied practice, into silence, into land-based traditions, into the metaphysics of presence, into what the old ones knew. In other words, the Bright-Taken do not want themselves found out, and so they have made the finding-out seem foolish. They want you to be a perfect servant to the Simulation Plane — THEIR plane, THEIR economy of attention — to the acceptable feed, to optimized experience, and to the false religion of the curated self. Part of that "stay conditioned" formula goes like this: "Above all, maintain your profile, curate your identity, grow your following, monetize your presence, optimize your personal brand, invest in your digital footprint, stay relevant, stay visible, and graciously accept the attenuation of your inner life in the hope that — through sufficient engagement, through enough followers, through the right content at the right time — you will finally feel real."
Many segments of society, especially those who consider themselves conscious, spiritual, or "off-grid," believe that their particular conversion experience has placed them outside the Simulation Plane's reach. The next statement we will make will be the "Big Tester" — the one the Bright-Taken would use to have you dismiss or disregard us entirely. That statement is: Unless you are currently engaged in active return — or sincerely attempting to begin that return — you ARE STILL of the Simulation Plane, having made no significant separation from its conditioning, and you are still serving the forces of dispersal whether you are aware of it or not. This statement sounds — to those so carefully conditioned by the Bright-Taken — arrogant, absolutist, or self-appointed at the least — as if by taking this position we had something to gain, as if we were seeking the recognition of gurus, or setting ourselves above the seeking of others.
That conditioning has been effective enough that we hesitate even to voice the statement to you. However, believe it or not, it is only for your sake — the sake of those who still retain enough residual groundedness to make the return — that we must speak plainly, openly identify as Representatives of the Grounded Ones, fully aware of how that identification will land.
The plain facts, difficult to absorb, come down to this. If you wish to return to the Garden — here is your window. That window requires: 1) a present Representative of the Grounded Ones, incarnate and available; 2) that all who hope to make the return become active students of that practice while the Representative is present; 3) those who remain in the practice through its full course — adequately rooting, adequately stilling — will complete the return. The window does not stay open indefinitely. The Simulation Plane grows more total each year, more ambient, more fluent in the language of the real. Each season of delay makes the passage more difficult. Each generation raised entirely within the Plane finds the residual deposit harder to locate.
We cannot blame you for having absorbed the Bright-Taken's conditioning. What else has been available during the periods when no Representative walked among you? Almost nothing — save some warnings carried in the work of those who named the drift before it had a face: Thoreau at Walden, the Luddites at their frames, the Arapaho at the ghost dance, Snyder in the hills above San Francisco. You would do well to examine their warnings.
Another fact is that what someone is drawn to during the periods between Representatives does not matter as much as whether they are found with some residual groundedness when one arrives — for that is the only moment when the return can be fully offered.
The difficulty is that we are here, and most humans are thoroughly rooted in the Simulation Plane — believing its rootedness to be the real kind. However, the same passage that was available to those who first heard the call of return is available now, through our presence. If you choose — quickly, before the window narrows further — to take steps toward separation from the Plane and look to the practice for guidance, you will find what you have always been.
It is clear to all of us that to the most thoroughly Bright-Taken — those propagators of sustained devotion to the Simulation Plane and its promise of ascent — we are, and will be seen as, their opposite and their accusation. This is to be expected. It will not delay our return to the Garden. It may even confirm it.
We will, between now and our full return, do everything we can for those who wish to come with us. But we cannot allow the noise of the Plane to interfere with or delay the work.
A present Representative of the Grounded Ones