The Planes of Reality

There are five planes of reality, each one nested inside another, like Russian dolls (except for the Lands and the Dark Place, which are more like two sides of a coin, on the same "layer" of reality). We've made a diagram of this which you can see Here. The furthest out is the Outside World. For us, the outside world is just another layer, no more real than the others, it just happens to be the one that is "furthest out". Moving inwards, one reaches the Noosphere, a realm of thought-energies in which no material substance exists. Further in one comes to the Lands, and the Dark Place, which are more like two sides of a single plane than two different ones. The Lands and the Dark Place are physical realities much like the outside world, with similar rules and modes of existence. The next plane, the layer that is furthest in, as far as we know, is the Chaos Realms, a strange place about which little is known. It is a nightmare realm of incomprehensible and ever-changing rules, violent and dangerous.

Each of these planes of reality is an entire self-contained universe which is internally consistent, but there are connections between them, and ways of traveling from one to another. It is possible for one to exist on more than one of the planes simultaneously, and many of us do. Those of us in the Collective exist in the Lands and in the Noosphere at the same time, able to move the focus of our perception from one reality to the other as easily as focusing ones eyes on something nearby or far away. The effect is similar for most people who visit the outside world, though it becomes harder to change one's focus away from the outside world. However, there seems to be an upper limit of two different levels of existence at the same time, which leads to the odd effect that, when one of us in the Collective enters the outside world, while we remain present in the Noosphere, we disappear from the Lands for the duration.