The future is not a blank slate awaiting our arrival or something popping out of thin air, ready-made, but a living potential, seeded by our choices and actions now.
Codex Nine shatters the paradigm of the future as a distant, passive outcome. It introduces the future as a presence —an ancestral being that we are in the active process of becoming. We do not "create" the future; we *remember* it from ahead of time, and then live backward from that memory to make it real.
Most people experience the future as something that *happens to them*. They wait, hope, fear, prepare, leave it to others. They do not necessarily participate. The Dominator Matrix has trained us to be passive recipients of whatever comes next—consumers of a future that is manufactured by those with various skillsets, power, technology and capital. We are told to wait, adapt, survive, brace for impact or wait for the next portal or planetary transit.
Codex Nine says: no.
You are not a passive recipient of the future, but an ancestor in training, and the future is not something you await, but something you consciously and actively remember forward into being.
This is the work of the Ancestor-in-Training.
We cease living as orphans of time, desperate to survive the present or leaving the future to others to enact, and begin living as stewards of a timeline we may never see. We ask: "What does the world I love need from me now, so that it can exist seven generations from now?" The answer to that question becomes our most potent guide.
The Living Future is not a utopian fantasy; it is a rigorous, loving obligation to a reality that depends on our courage today.
To be an ancestor-in-training is to recognise that you are not the centre of the story. You are a link in a chain. A strand in a web that stretches backward and forward beyond your comprehension. Your life is not solely about you as taught in the more hyperindividualistic West, but about what you carry, what you tend, what you pass on. The future does not belong to the powerful. Rather, it belongs to the faithful who plant seeds they will never see grow, who build communities and tell stories they will never see completed, who will build businesses and infrastructure or who will build cathedrals they will never worship in.
What Must Be Carried Forward
To become an ancestor-in-training is to ask: What must I carry forward? What must survive the winter? What must be planted on the other side?
The answer is not abstract or etheral or wishful thinking, but specific, sacred, and tangible:
- The old instructions. The codes of reciprocity, reverence, belonging, and kinship.
- The living systems. The rivers, the forests, the species, the soil, the seeds.
- The silenced voices. The stories that were buried. The peoples who were erased. The truths that were suppressed.
- The children. The ones who will inherit whatever we carry through—or fail to carry through.
- The possibility. The vision of a world that has not yet arrived, but is always waiting to be born if we choose to act.
- The people. The community of those who have chosen to act.
Stewardship is about carrying what matters most through collapses and rebirths, so it can be planted on the other side.
This is what the Living Future asks of us: not to save the world, but to carry what must survive.
The cosmology of Codex Nine is one of Temporal Kinship.
Time is not a linear arrow, but a spiral—a field where past, present and future are in constant conversation. The wounds of the past bleed into the present, and the visions of the future pull on the present, creating a torque that can be used for transformation. Our work is to align ourselves with the pull of the healthy future, to become a conduit for its arrival. This future is "living" because it is embodied, here, organic, adaptive and rooted in the same sacred principles as the origin—beauty, justice, kinship and reciprocity.
In this cosmology, the future is something we participate in. The future is not a destination; it is a relationship. And like any relationship, it requires attention, care and fidelity. The future is a living being that depends on our choices—and our choices depend on our ability to remember what is possible.
The ethical stance is legacy as devotion.
We plant oaks knowing we will never sit in their shade. We clean rivers we may never swim in. We tell truths that may only bear fruit long after we are gone. This is the ultimate antidote to the short-term, extractive thinking of empire or the escapist magical thinking of some sectors of the spiritual community. It is love stretched across centuries, with working commitment to the unseen, the unborn, the not-yet. This imbues our present actions with eternal significance.
Legacy is about ensuring that something recognisably human—and recognisably alive—survives the winter. It is about becoming the kind of person who, when the dust settles, has left behind more life, more connection, more possibility than they took.... even in the midst of enormous civilisational change.
The disciplines of the Rememberer:
First, vision. You cannot remember what you cannot see. The first discipline is to open your eyes to the future that is already trying to emerge—not as a fantasy, but as a memory. What does the world look like when it is healed? Not perfect. Just whole. See it clearly. Feel it in your body. Let it become more real than the headlines.
Second, fidelity. Vision without fidelity is escapism. Fidelity is the discipline of staying true to the vision, even when everything around you tells you it is impossible. It is the commitment to act as if the future is already true—because in the spiral of time, it already is.
Third, generativity. The future is not something you hoard. It is something you generate. You plant seeds, tell stories, build relationships. You create conditions for life to flourish ... perhaps in your lifetime, but most certainly in the lifetimes of those who will come after.
Fourth, grief. You cannot remember the future without grieving the present. Grief is the love that remains where something beloved has been taken. The future you are remembering is not the future many were promised of 'love-and-light' and endless growth and convenience. It is a future that requires us to let go—of comfort, certainty and the world as we knew it. Grief is the gateway to that future.
Fifth, love. Not disembodied 'love and light' ... Fierce love. Love that acts. Love that endures. Love that is willing to be inconvenient, uncomfortable, and costly. Love that remembers the future and will not let it go.
Our anchoring practice is the council with the unborn:
Close your eyes and in your mind's eye, journey forward seven generations. Do not imagine a tech-fantasy or a New Age fantasy. Imagine a world that has remembered origin and healed its wounds. Feel the air, see the water, witness the ways people gather, grow and grieve.
Now, imagine a child of that time turning to look back at you, here in the present. Feel their gaze. Silently ask them: "What must I do, or stop doing, for you to exist?" Listen. Receive the assignment in your heart. Open your eyes and write one tangible action that answers that call.
This practice collapses the distance between now and then. It makes the future an embodied, consequential, relational reality, not an abstract concept. It transforms anxiety about tomorrow into clarified purpose for today. It is the practice of becoming an ancestor.
This Codex is a seed from the future, planted in the soil of the present.
It is written for the moment when despair about "what is" threatens to suffocate all hope for "what could be", or when others believe the future will instantly materialise out of the thin air. It is for the visionary who is tired of having their dreams called naive or in despair over those who leave it to others to take the risks or do the labour involved in creation. It is for the one who knows that the future is not a prediction, but an active choice made over and over again. Not just once, but every day.
It is the ninth threshold: the shift from being a victim of time or disembodied .... to becoming a parent of time and an ancestor in active service.
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Once you begin to remember the future, you cannot pretend you haven't. You will feel the pull of what is possible and you will see the seeds of the future in the most unlikely places. You will be unable to participate in the cynicism of those who say "it cannot be done." You will be asked to carry a vision that others cannot see—and to hold it with grace, not contempt.
You will also be tested. The world will offer you the seduction of escapism or bypassing. It will offer despair and the comfort of giving up. It will offer you the seduction of cynicism—the safety of not hoping. It will offer you the seduction of busyness—the distraction of doing everything except what matters.
Do not fall for these and stay faithful to the future you have remembered. Plant the seeds. Tell the stories. Build the relationships and communities. Do the work and trust the spiral.
The future is waiting for you to remember it into being and become an ancestor of the Living Future.
The future is not what happens to you. It is what you remember to build.**
(c) Fatima Bacot. All rights reserved.