A shorter, public version of this lives on Substack.
Codex One – Core Transmission for Membership
The world is not broken and in need of fixing: it has been violated.
There is a difference between something that has been shattered by accident and something that has been deliberately, systematically wounded by design. To call it “broken” is to invoke the language of repair manuals and quick fixes. It is also to imply that with the right tool or technique, the right prayer or the right party or leader, it can be restored to its former function. However, in this case, we are not talking about a machine that malfunctioned or a bone broken. We are talking about a living body – the Web of Life – that has been intentionally violated and assaulted, over and over, by forces that do not believe in its sacredness and / or by lack of understanding of the interconnectedness of all Life.
Naming is not diagnosis or an act to fear and avoid. Naming is recognition and testimony.
To name is the courageous, clear act of standing before the wound or violation and saying: This happened. This is happening. It is the calculated, deliberate refusal to call a genocide a “conflict” or "complicated", to call ecocide “progress,” to call war “peace”, to call the starvation of spirit “enlightenment", to call dehumanisation "self-defense".
"Tragic, complex, controversial, extraordinary, a few bad leaders": we've heard them all before. They're familiar terms in the chapters of perpetrators' playbooks and scripts.
Naming is the first break in the spell of complicity, bypass, feedback loops, historical amnesia and the sanitisation of harm. The banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt termed it. It is how we wake up from the anesthesia and sleepwalk of normalised predation, theft and violence that provides perpetrators with a free pass. That allows predators to walk free, facing neither accountability nor consequence.
The wound is not abstract or illusion.
The wound lives in the poisoned river, in the silenced tongue and cognitively dissonant mind, in the child burned alive or buried under rubble, in the forest cleared for profit, in the spirit trained to seek transcendence while the body of the world bleeds. It lives, most intimately, in the war on the Feminine, not as a concept, but as a living, lived reality.
It is the body of the Earth, the body of human beings, the body of indigenous wisdom, the body of intuition, the body of life itself and that has been raped, dismembered, monetised and stripped of both voice, protection and agency.
To name this is to recognise that the desecration of the Feminine is the desecration of the Source of Life. Where and when She is wounded, all of Life hemorrhages, as we see mirrored in global polycrisis.
This is the cosmology of the wound.
We live inside a system and ideology that was built to extract, separate, dehumanise, control, pillage and dominate. It is not flawed: it is functioning perfectly according to its own anti-life logic. Empire, colonialism, capitalism, fascism, supremacy, spiritual bypass and others are not isolated, calculated pathologies. They are expressions of the same root: the ignorance of the interconnectedness of all, the refusal of embodiment and sacred relationship, a commitment to hierarchy over kinship, vertical over horizontal leadership and a profound abandonment and contempt for the living Web of Life.
To name them is to see the savage architecture of the wasteland and to see perpetrators and the pathological doctrines and systems within which we have been enmeshed, enslaved and been taught to consider the pinnace of organisation, democracy, civilisation.
It is to recognise that our grief, rage, depression, anxiety, addictions, apathy, numbness and suicidal ideation are not personal failures. In fact, they are accurate responses to a world at war with life to which the system says the solution is more numbness and distraction, gaslighting and scapegoating, or to be medicated or to turn away, lest you are also affected by your seeing.
The ethical stance of Codex One is this.
We choose to see and we choose to speak what we see. We do this not from a place of hatred, but from a place of fierce, unwavering love because love does not look away from what is true or from the beloved’s suffering. Because we cannot heal what we cannot see or refuse to see. Love names the violence done to the beloved as part of the protection and restoration thereof.
This naming is the foundation of moral clarity and healing. Without it, we wander in the propagandised fog of “both sides,” “complexity,” and “spiritual neutrality”... which are often just the luxurious disguises, masks and veneers of complicity.
We don’t choose to see to simply gather information or to cultivate despair. Seeing is an act of spiritual, social, cultural and political health and integrity. It is the first step out of the bystander’s trance and into the circle of responsibility and effective engagement and impact.
When you speak a wound aloud, you return a piece of stolen truth to the collective body within which you have your own being. You begin to mend the tear in the Web of Life by acknowledging it exists.
This transmission is the bedrock.
It is written not for a month, but for the duration. It is here for the one who finds it today, and for the one who will find it in ten years, when the wound has taken another shape. It is doctrinal not because it demands belief, but because it describes a territory: the territory of awakened, courageous sight. It is the first threshold. Cross it, and the journey of personal and collective return becomes possible.
Your anchoring practice is simple and non-negotiable:
Find one wound in the world that you have tried not to see. Speak it aloud.To yourself, to another, to the wind. Let it be plain. Let it be without euphemism or spin. Be human, be here and be courageous: speak the truth about the wounding and the wounded. Revolt against the normalisation.
(c) Fatima Bacot. All rights reserved.