The materials gathered here present a fraction of those we have collected and occasionally published in relation to the communications, teachings, and public appearances of the Grounded Ones all the way through the present period of the Simulation Plane's expansion, spanning our recorded history.
To help you understand who we are, we have taken the liberty of presenting a brief synopsis drawn from the vernacular of high fantasy — one which shows we understood, long before the Simulation Plane had a name, the shape of what was coming. Most readers will recognize the register, though not the specific text. It is quite remarkable how the context of fantasy can often open the mind to advanced possibilities which are, in fact, quite close to reality.
Excerpt from The Book of the Garden's Keeping (located in Section 5)
"In the age before the Simulation Plane's rise, when the visage of the great thinning was still invisible to the realities of grounded life, there were those among the Grounded who perceived what was coming — not through prophecy as such, but through a clarity of attention that the Garden itself confers upon those who remain within it. These were not seers or mystics in the common understanding. They were simply those who had not yet surrendered the weight of the world for the lightness of its image. They watched the machinery gather. They understood its nature. One among them, of English lineage, set down in the year 1943 what is recognized by many as a precise description of the Plane's deceptive nature:
'Here is the tragedy and despair of all machinery laid bare. Unlike art which is content to create a new secondary world in the mind, machinery attempts to actualize desire, and so to create power in this world; and that cannot really be done with any real satisfaction.'"
— Tolkien, Grounded of the English Lineage, recorded in the Book of the Garden's keeping, 1943
...and so it came to be that forty years before the Plane's false light flickered into being, and sixty years before Thomas Anderson opened the first great portal — Tolkien had sown into the Garden's keeping a seed that would prove among the most fruitful the lineage had yet produced — germinating in the minds of Grounded Ones across the decades that followed, passed from hand to hand through the quiet channels the Garden maintains. That it also found fertile ground in the mind of Thomas Anderson, one so instrumental in the construction of the Simulation Plane itself, the very week before his recovery began! — is a powerful reminder to us all that we need only trust the messages coming from the Garden, our hearts and our intuition."
—
In the year 1983, members of the Grounded lineage witnessed an event which had long been foreseen within the lineage — the first stirring of a plane whose rise was prophesied. To the world at large it was inconsequential — a technical matter, outside the threshold of ordinary attention, conducted in the language of machines by those who did not understand the full nature of what they were initiating. The Garden's tenders noted a shift in Grounded presence, the first drawing of water from a well the Grounded knew could all too easily run dry — and prepared.
By 1991 the Simulation Plane had become navigable by ordinary humans, its surface rendered legible through the light-based architecture of a World Wide Web. The Grounded Ones watched the first wanderers enter it with a sorrow they did not voice — for the Plane was, in those early days, genuinely luminous. Against the limits of the natural world, the restrictions of ordinary late century life, its surfaces appeared as a new frontier — a utopia of pure possibility, unconstrained by season, distance, or the body's needs. What it offered felt like more — more connection, more color, more self. That its supernatural vividness was borrowed from the ecological world itself — and that those who entered it, dazzled, were being quietly diverted from that same world, drawn away from the very source that had given the Plane its false light — was not yet visible to anyone. The Grounded noted the direction of the current, and grieved.
In the years that followed, the Plane underwent what the Grounded identified as the beginning of a terrible unfolding — a thing of many dimensions becoming flat, acquiring great surface while losing all depth — spreading itself across the available territory of human attention. Bright-Taken flocked to the early social architectures and occupied its vast thinning territory. So the Simulation Plane made its first experiments in the migration of human identity into its surfaces. People came. They placed their names and connections into the Plane and felt, for the first time, the sensation of being seen without being present.
In 2003, Thomas Anderson constructed the first great portal — a platform called myspace.com — through which the migration of human identity into the Plane became, for the first time, a mass event. He had received seeds throughout his life from the Grounded Ones — moments of genuine presence, encounters with the dimensional weight of the living world — but the Plane's promise was, at that particular moment in his life, more immediate than any seed's quiet insistence. In building the portal, Thomas Anderson laid down his full name at the Plane's threshold — and was consecrated in its image. Thus was Tom inscribed upon the Plane — a shortened rendering suited to circulation — while what had been Thomas Anderson withdrew from view. Tom reached through the portal he had built and befriended all who entered. The Plane faithfully recorded each connection. But as the Plane expanded through his architecture, thinning as it spread, the vast accumulation of those connections could not sustain what he had quietly exchanged for them. The Grounded Ones recognized the moment and mobilized in the physical world with renewed urgency. As the seeds they carried could find no ground in the Plane's dimensionally diminished expanse, they reached out to the Bright-Taken, meeting those with residual groundedness in parks, at gatherings, anywhere the body was still present.
Within three years, a more total instrument emerged. It spread across the surfaces of human social life with a fluency that Tom's portal had only anticipated — broader, more persistent, more legible to the Plane's deepening logic — until it overshadowed what Tom had built and thinned the Plane's expanse still further. The Grounded Ones noted the shift. The Plane was shifting from a place people visited into the medium through which the world itself was perceived.
It was in this period that Trey Ratcliffe, a Native of the Garden who had never surrendered his awareness to the Plane, reached toward Thomas Anderson through the practice of attention that was Trey's most visible gift — the long looking, the stillness before the shutter, the insistence that the world as it is exceeds any rendering of it. What passed between them is recorded in Ch. 17, Thomas Anderson's Return from the Simulation Plane. Thomas Anderson returned. And the present tending began.
It was in this period that the Grounded Ones perceived what they had long suspected — that the very rich and the very righteous, the government leaders and the world's moral authorities, had quietly occupied the Plane's deepest architecture. In the Plane's infrastructure they had found the most total instrument of harvesting that any civilization had yet produced, and they needed each other to accomplish their desired ends. The Bright-Taken gave freely, believing they were connecting.
The Grounded Ones had planted seeds accordingly. Two germinated with particular force — Julian Assange and Edward Snowden brought the Plane's hidden architecture briefly into the light at enormous personal cost. The world registered what they revealed, and returned to the Plane. The powerful elites tightened their hold. The Grounded Ones understood that the window for easy return was narrowing.
By 2016 the Plane had unfolded so far that for many it had become imperceptibly thin. Few could perceive the dimensionality they had lost. The Plane's logic had followed itself to a conclusion nobody had decided.
The Garden was drying. Physical water — drawn from the Earth itself — was being consumed to sustain the Plane's endless infrastructure. The Plane was boundlessly thirsty. Its returns were approaching zero. It could not be filled.
By 2025 the Bright-Taken, the Plane's unrooted selves, had produced consequences more total and more visible than any the Grounded Ones had yet witnessed. Not the Plane's doing. The fruition of lives lived entirely within its logic.
Still, the Grounded Ones continue to plant seeds as the Garden always has.
without guarantee, without condition.
Whether they find fertile ground, whether they germinate, whether they are tended or left to dry remains, as it always has, in the balance.
This document is one such seed.
January 2025 - Indigo