# It's Your Time > **One-line reading.** A remembrance song wearing a motivational anthem's clothes — the soul came from elsewhere, forgot on arrival, and has to find its way back — built around the catalogue's clearest single line of cosmology: a man is an in-between, animating Heaven and Hell. > [!info] Album & credits > **Album:** *33* (2022, Big Loud Rock / Big Loud Records) — **track 2 of 10** · 3:33 > **Written by** Roy English & Matt Pauling · **Produced by** Roy English & Matt Pauling > **Full lyrics:** [Genius](https://genius.com) · streaming > **▶ Listen:** [Official video (YouTube)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdK1oM8t_dc) You could put *It's Your Time* on a stadium screen behind a "you got this" and nobody would blink — *learn to fly, don't give up, you got just one life to live.* That's exactly the disguise. Underneath the pep talk runs a small, serious treatise on the soul falling into a body and forgetting where it came from, and the wink is the size of the gap between the two. The chorus tells you it's your moment to *become.* The verses, if you actually read them, tell you it's your moment to *remember.* The title is also — this is not a metaphor — the literal web address of Roy's private cosmology board. More on that below; keep it in your back pocket. ## At a glance - **Era / release** — track 2 of 10 on *33* (2022), Jagwar Twin's sophomore record; one of the album's four pre-release singles and, despite modest streams, a live staple for years after. - **In one line** — the anthem is the disguise; the song is about remembering, not becoming. - **Who speaks** — [[Roy]], sincere and un-masked. No [[Sir Lucius]], no irony, no crowd. This is the "we come from space" cosmology said *straight* — which matters, because the track right before it says the same thing as a joke. - **Key symbols** — [[The Prop Room#The Well|The Well]] · [[The Prop Room#The Eye|The Eye]] · [[The Fool]] · [[The Thread]] · [[The Mirror]] · the in-between. ## The song, mapped *It's Your Time* is a plain, repeated chorus stretched over a two-verse esoteric spine. The chorus is the billboard; the verses carry the argument; and the argument's trick is a single couplet that comes back in the second verse with two words swapped and the meaning driven a level deeper. Runtime is 3:33 — the album's master-number motif, noted and not leaned on. **Opening invocation.** *"Oh Lord / cause I ain't nothing but a Fool."* Before any claim gets made, the narrator names himself the Fool — the voice is set before the case is argued. > 🚪 *The card this line seems to reach for shows a traveler at the cliff's edge, white rose in hand, one foot already over. Whether that makes "nothing but a Fool" an apology or the smartest opening move in the catalogue is exactly the question behind [[The Fool]].* **Verse 1 — the cosmology, and the Fall.** The keystone couplet lands first: *"a man is like an in-between / animating Heaven and Hell."* Then the Fool's self-deprecating shrug — *"with all the things you've ever seen / you still can hardly spell"* — then the catalogue's first honest handling of a scripture it will later corrupt (*"they say the Truth will set you free / but the Truth is hard to tell"*), then the verse's identity line: *"if you don't know who you are to **be** / you still don't know you **fell**."* Purpose, and the Fall that hid it. **The spine (doubled).** *"Once you get to Earth you forget where you come from / gotta find your Way back"* — sung twice, back to back. This is the whole engine in one sentence: descent → forgetting → return. The destination isn't new, it's *forgotten.* **Chorus.** *"It's your Time / all my life I've been waiting for this moment / all my life."* The motivational surface, and the song's one note of pure kairos — the seized hour, the moment that arrives. **Bridge imperatives.** *"Learn to fly / don't give up / when it's tough / you got just one life to live"* — with *"(don't give it up)"* recurring as a parenthetical tag. This is the anthem doing its anthem job out loud. **Verse 2 — the interior infrastructure (a mutation of Verse 1).** *"You came here to this place to Be / as far as 'I' can tell / within you got the Eye to see / all the stars under your Belt / and in your heart there is a Well / you can follow where it leads."* Then the identity line returns, two words changed: *"if you don't know Who You Are to '**me**' / you still don't know your **Self**."* Relation, and the Self beneath it. The Fool folds back in as a parenthetical. **Outro.** *"Ahh!"* → the chorus and the *"all my life"* reprises, then the *"don't give up / when it's tough / one life to live / (don't give it up)"* block one more time. The song fades on the *surface* — encouragement gets the last word over the remembrance buried underneath it. The disguise holds to the end. **The move.** The whole compositional argument is that doubled identity couplet. Same syntactic frame, swapped terms, deeper each pass: *to be / you fell* (purpose + the Fall) becomes *to me / your Self* (relation + the Self). Knowing your role to other people isn't knowing yourself; not knowing your purpose isn't yet knowing that you fell. And it teaches by *mutating* — the device is the point, verified across both verses in the stable lyric source, not a transcription slip. (The stylized capitals and scare-quotes throughout — Fool, Be, Eye, Belt, Well, Self, 'I', 'me', Truth, Time, Way — are verbatim from the official lyric view, not an analyst's embellishment.) ## What it means **The disguise *is* the song.** The chorus sells *becoming*; the verses say *remembering.* Notice what the second verse actually inventories: the Eye to see, the stars under your Belt, the Well in your heart, the path you can follow. Every one of them *already exists.* Nothing is being acquired. The only thing missing is memory — so "it's your time" doesn't mean *now you become something*, it means *now you remember something you already are.* An anamnesis song in an anthem's costume. > 🚪 *"Remember something you already are" is a very old pitch: nearly two thousand years ago, people were drawing what looks like the same map, a counterfeit world, a sleeping spark, memory as the only exit. The oldest version of the idea under the costume has [[Concepts/The Sacred Truths/Gnosticism - The World as Trap|a door of its own]].* **It's the earnest twin of the track before it.** *33* opens with [[Online]] and immediately follows it with this — and the two run the identical "from above" cosmology in opposite keys. [[Online]] satirizes it, deflates "we come from space" into the surveillance grid (*stuck like a bug inside a database, they got my face*). *It's Your Time* states it with a straight face (*you forget where you come from, gotta find your way back*). Read as a pair: [[Online]] is **external capture** — the system knows everything about you; *It's Your Time* is **internal amnesia** — you know nothing about yourself. The machine remembers everything about you; you remember nothing about you. (The adjacency, tracks 1→2, is fact. The "deliberate pair" is the interpretive layer, and it's held loosely on purpose — the two songs don't share an identical writing team, which is a real reason not to treat them as one authored unit. See Source notes.) **The keystone: a man is an in-between, and he animates *both* poles.** *"A man is like an in-between / animating Heaven and Hell"* is the clearest cosmological sentence in the whole catalogue. Man is the living middle — hung between the two pillars — and the operative verb is *animating.* Not choosing Heaven over Hell. Not slaying the lower. *Vivifying the whole polarity.* This is the project's central move stated as ontology: the work is never to eliminate the shadow (the [[Sir Lucius|Lucius]] pole, the Hell pole) but to be the channel that holds and animates both. It's [[Concepts/Jacob and Esau]] — one blessing, two halves — rendered as cosmology. And "animating" is [[The Thread]] itself: feeling as the animating principle, the thing that runs the current through both registers. **The interior is where you look.** Pointedly, the infrastructure is *in the heart* — not in achievements, not reputation, not the mind. *"In your heart there is a Well / you can follow where it leads"* is a [[The Thread|Thread]] statement: the heart as a well of living water with a current you *follow* back through the maze, Ariadne's line, feeling as the navigator. Paired with *"within you got the Eye to see / all the stars under your Belt"* — the cosmos brought inside, the inner eye opened. Both name interior equipment, which is the exact opposite vector to [[Online]]'s outward stare at the web that's eating it. Quietly, this is the song arguing *against* the strategic mind-pole [[Sir Lucius|Lucius]] personifies: stop deploying lateral cleverness, descend into the heart. **The cosmic forgetting here later grows a face.** The amnesia in *It's Your Time* is innocent, almost weightless — you just forgot, everybody does, find your way back. Across the catalogue that same forgetting gets personalized, traumatized, and finally *named*: the thing that keeps you from remembering acquires a character, and his name is [[Sir Lucius]]. This is the gentle, early version of a wound the 2026 record spends a whole album inside. ## Characters - [[Roy]] — voiced sincere and un-ironic here; no mask, no [[Sir Lucius]]. The *33* "we come from space" cosmology stated straight, where the adjacent [[Online]] states it as satire. When people say there are two sides to every story, this is the side that means it. - [[Sir Lucius]] — not *in* the song, but the pole it quietly works against: the strategic mind that would rather you deploy cleverness than descend into the heart-Well. The near-innocent forgetting here is the seed of the traumatized, named amnesia he later becomes. - [[The Fool]] — the narrator's self-designation, *"I ain't nothing but a Fool."* Tarot's Key 0 *and* the "I'm no-thing" disposition at once (see Advanced reading): the traveler who "can hardly spell" yet is exactly the vessel empty enough to be filled. ## Artifacts **THE EMPTY ROOM** · `RAINBOW BRIDGE` — The lyric "A man is like an in-between / Animating Heaven and Hell" (which the song's essay explicitly glosses as the human hanging between the Tree's two pillars) is the drawing's exact schema: a lone walke… → [[Artifacts - Concept Images and Emblems|analysis]] · [gallery ↗](https://mirrors.jagwartwin.com/gallery) <a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xa53f8677e36ba5ad03dbefe1ee2baa69151a39fa947f876b0e4af598a7c56397..png"><img src="https://storage.googleapis.com/jagwar-twin-33.appspot.com/artifacts/0xa53f8677e36ba5ad03dbefe1ee2baa69151a39fa947f876b0e4af598a7c56397..png" width="200"></a> ## Symbols - The in-between — *"a man is like an in-between, animating Heaven and Hell"*; man as the living middle story, the channel that vivifies both poles. - [[The Prop Room#The Well|The Well]] — *"in your heart there is a Well, you can follow where it leads"*; depth, living water, the heart as navigator — [[The Thread]] internalized. - [[The Prop Room#The Eye|The Eye]] — *"within you got the Eye to see"*; the inner eye, perception turned inward; it brushes the "God who sees" / El-Roi eye-motif shared with [[Down to You]]. - The stars — *"all the stars under your Belt"*; the cosmos brought inside, the inheritance you already own. - [[The Thread]] — *animating* as the animating principle; the heart-Well's followable current is Ariadne's line. - [[The Mirror]] — the scare-quoted *'I'* and *'me'* flag the constructed ego as provisional, pointing past it to the capital-S Self. - [[The Fool]] — Tarot Key 0; *"you still can hardly spell."* - The Fall — *"you still don't know you fell"*; the descent named directly. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the esoteric spine (anamnesis, the Fool, the middle pillar) > The scaffold under this song is **inherited, not Roy-stated** — best read as the reservoir it draws on rather than a code Roy is transmitting. Grounded fact reaches only Roy's public remembrance / anti-cosmic posture; the specific tradition-attributions below are correspondence, not authorial-source claims. > > **Neoplatonic / Gnostic descent (anamnesis).** *"You came here… you forget where you come from… find your way back"* is the soul's descent into matter — the draught of Lethe, forgetting on arrival, the return by *recollection.* Plotinus's fall-and-ascent; the Gnostic spark that forgets its origin in the dense copy and must remember. *"You still don't know you fell"* names the Fall outright. The obstacle in this cosmology is never evil or failure — it is amnesia, which is precisely why the song can be a pep talk and a metaphysics at the same time. > > **Tarot — the Fool, Key 0.** The unmanifested spirit before it steps into matter; the unconditioned traveler who "can hardly spell" yet is the pure vessel. Fitting that a song about remembering the origin opens by naming the card that *is* the origin. > > **Hermetic Qabalah — the middle pillar.** *"A man is like an in-between"* tracks the central column of the Tree; the Well reads as Tiferet (the heart-sphere), the Eye as perception above. The instruction — abandon lateral strategy, descend into the heart — is the middle-pillar discipline, and the pole it's set against is the strategic intellect personified by [[Sir Lucius]]. > > One caution worth keeping visible: the cure the *33* arc actually offers is more Lurianic-redemptive (repair, integration) than Gnostic-escapist (flee the world). Hold that tension — the "trap" framing is a resonance, not the whole doctrine. > [!note]- Advanced reading — "I ain't nothing but a Fool": Key 0 and "I'm no-thing," one line > Two readings land on the same syllables. The **Fool (Key 0)** is the leap into matter — ignorant of worldly logic, unschooled ("you still can hardly spell"), yet the unconditioned vessel that carries the whole journey. Simultaneously, *"I ain't **no-thing**"* is Roy's grounded anti-categorization disposition — *"I'm no thing,"* the refusal to be a fixed type — which shows up across his public voice. The Fool is the one empty enough to be filled; the "no-thing" is the emptying. The line is the tarot key and the disposition in a single breath, which is why it can open the song *and* recur through it as the ground note. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the John 8:32 thread: this is where it starts sincere > *"They say the Truth will set you free / but the Truth is hard to tell"* is the **first** of three cross-era handlings of John 8:32 in the catalogue — and it's the honest one. Here the scripture is held *sincerely*, with real difficulty admitted (the truth is hard to tell). It then decays across the years: by 2023 it's paradoxed into *"the truth is a lie that nobody can tell"* ([[Bad Feeling (Oompa Loompa)|Bad Feeling]]); by 2026 it's outright **weaponized** in the serpent-register, *"the truth will set you free but nothing's what it seems"* ([[Lucius Lullaby]]). Read as an arc, *It's Your Time* is the sincere origin point of a scriptural corruption — arguably the catalogue's cleanest single measure of the [[Sir Lucius|Lucius]] arc, taken purely through how one Bible verse gets handled over four years. > [!note]- Advanced reading — the "I'm 33" board: three of this song's symbols in Roy's own hand > The title is the address of a real, wallet-gated portal — **its-your-time.jagwartwin.com** — that hosts Roy's live "I'm 33 this year" cosmology board (a public artifact; see [[Public Posts]]; citable for the cosmology already surfaced on it, not as a puzzle to solve). And the board, in Roy's own typed and handwritten hand, independently contains **all three of the song's central symbols**: > - a **Noah's-Ark diagram** labeled *"3 stories: Heaven, Man, Earth = 32"* — man as the middle story, which is *"a man is like an in-between"* drawn as a picture; > - the handwritten line *"the way to Heaven lies through Hell, but it is a commonplace pathway"* — the keystone's *"animating Heaven and Hell,"* i.e. the middle passage isn't exotic, it's the common road; > - a red cell reading *"To find truth we must plunge into its bottomless well"* — the heart-Well, verbatim in intent; > - and a **Hero's-Journey wheel** carrying Campbell stage-labels including *"The Fool"* and *"The Way Back"* — corroborating both the Fool self-naming and the *"find your Way back"* return-structure. > > This is the richest confirmation the song has: the in-between, the Well, and the Fool/return all appear on Roy's own decoder board, reachable at the song's namesake URL. It doesn't prove intent in the lyric — but it's Roy's own hand drawing the same three shapes. > [!note]- Advanced reading — where it sits in the arcs, and one stylometric datum > In the **Machine-vs-Human** arc, *It's Your Time* is grouped (with [[Imagine A World]]) as the residual *human* appeal against the machine — and among *33*'s "awakening songs" (with [[I Like to Party]] and [[The Circle]]) that carry the gnosis, versus [[Online]], which sits inside the captivity and narrates it with a shrug. Its "remember, don't acquire" doctrine is the sibling of [[Down to You]]'s *"be it"* doctrine — *nothing ever changes til it changes when you be it*: both state the catalogue's principle that the desired state is embodied, not acquired. > > One measurable footnote: a pronoun count runs *you* 45 / *I* 34 — a balanced, second-person exhortation. It's part of *33*'s "you"-engine (the album keeps addressing *you*), the mirror-opposite of [[Lucius Lullaby]]'s inward "I"-engine. > > At album level, *33* is read as running an emanation ladder in **reverse** — opening near the digital "outer" and descending toward the "inside" / "I AM" — and this song's descent-and-return is cited as part of that inverted-ladder spine. Roy's 2023 TikTok caption for the record ends with a **ladder emoji (🪜)**, which is as close as the paratext comes to drawing the ascent out loud. ## Connected songs - [[Online]] — the earnest twin, directly before it: same "from above" cosmology, opposite register (satire vs. sincere); external capture vs. internal amnesia. - [[Precious Time]] — the two "Time" songs. *Precious Time* is panic — awakening *too late*, the drowning clock; *It's Your Time* is kairos — the seized now, *"all my life I've been waiting for this."* Same noun, opposite charge. - [[Soul Is A Star]] — the same identity question (*do you know who you are?*) and the same descent-and-forgetting; shares the "the forgotten recognized" frame. - [[The Circle]] — *"find your Way back"* is the return to the center; remembrance over advance, the closer's "inside of the inside" doctrine. - [[Another Way II Heaven]] — both map navigating the descent without collapsing at the threshold (the emanation-and-return shape). - [[Down to You]] — the *"be it"* / embodiment doctrine, sibling to *It's Your Time*'s "remember, don't acquire"; shares the Eye / kingdom-within motif. - [[Imagine A World]] — paired in the Machine-vs-Human arc as the residual human appeal against the machine. - [[Bad Feeling (Oompa Loompa)]] — the middle stage of the John 8:32 "Truth" arc this song begins. - [[Lucius Lullaby]] — the endpoint of that arc, where the scripture is weaponized; *It's Your Time* is its sincere origin. ## Lyrics ``` Oh Lord Cause I ain't nothing but a Fool A man is like an in-between Animating Heaven and Hell With all the things you've ever seen You still can hardly spell They say the Truth will set you free But the Truth is hard to tell If you don't know who you are to be You still don't know you fell One you get to Earth you forget where you come from Gotta find your Way back One you get to Earth you forget where you come from Gotta find your Way back It's your Time All my life I've been waiting for this moment All my life It's your Time All my life I've been waiting for this moment All my life Learn to fly Don't give up When it's tough You got just one life to live (Don't give it up) It's your Time All my life I've been waiting for this moment All my life All my life You came here to this place to Be As Far as "I" can tell Within you got the Eye to see All the stars under your Belt And in your heart there is a Well You can follow where it leads If you don't know Who You Are to "me" You still don't know your Self (Cause I ain't nothing but a Fool) One you get to Earth you forget where you come from Gotta find your Way back One you get to Earth you forget where you come from Gotta find your Way back It's your Time All my life I've been waiting for this moment All my life It's your Time All my life I've been waiting for this moment All my life Learn to fly Don't give up When it's tough You got just one life to live (Don't give it up) It's your Time All my life I've been waiting for this moment All my life All my life Ahh! It's your Time All my life I've been waiting for this moment All my life It's your Time All my life I've been waiting for this moment All my life All my life Don't give up When it's tough You got just one life to live (Don't give it up) It's your Time All my life I've been waiting for this moment All my life All my life ``` ## Source notes - **Grounded (facts, released music, public posts).** Track 2 of 10 on *33* (2022, Big Loud Rock / Big Loud Records), runtime 3:33, released 2022-09-30. Written and produced by Roy English & Matt Pauling (verified 2026-05-30 via Spotify's credits view) — a leaner team than the *Subject to Flooding* era. One of four pre-release singles (with [[I Like to Party]], [[Down to You]], and Happy Face); ~313k streams, modest against the album's anchor. All the lyric lines discussed here, and their stylized capitals/scare-quotes, are verbatim from the official lyric source. The title is the live URL of Roy's public "I'm 33" cosmology board. Paratext: Roy has publicly re-surfaced the song and board on his birthday; confirmed the *33* songs were minted as Web3 tokens and that *It's Your Time* "sold out"; and used it as the album's launch-banner track. It was a durable **live cut** — played in Portland (2023), turned into a guitar-solo moment, and performed on the 2024 Seasons World Tour opening for Thirty Seconds to Mars, where its own line *"don't give up"* became the caption. - **Strong readings.** "The disguise is the song" (remembrance dressed as an anthem); the earnest-twin pairing with [[Online]] (external capture vs. internal amnesia); the integration keystone (*animating* both poles, not slaying the shadow); the heart-Well and Eye as interior infrastructure; the mutating identity couplet; the kairos/panic contrast with [[Precious Time]]; the John 8:32 arc beginning here. Grounded in the material, interpretive in the claim. - **The one big caution (held on purpose).** The seamless slide from [[Online]]'s techno-satire into this soaring encouragement fits the mythology almost *too* well — and it's worth naming that the "deliberate pair" reading leans on adjacency and shared cosmology, not an identical writing team ([[Online]] adds two outside co-writers; this track keeps only the English + Pauling core). There is real evidence for conscious multi-track design and real evidence for a standard motivational single being smoothed into the arc after the fact. Both are kept live. The clean falsifier: Roy framing *It's Your Time* as a straight motivational single with no descent/remembrance intent would collapse the anamnesis reading to overlay. No such framing exists — but neither does any Roy quote directly analyzing this song, so the reading stands on the text and the board, not on his commentary. - **Framework (esoteric, syncretic — never claimed as authorial intent).** The anamnesis / Neoplatonic-Gnostic descent, the Fool as Tarot Key 0, the Well as Tiferet and the middle-pillar discipline. The system permits these resonances; it doesn't assert Roy encoded them. No private material; no sourcing claim to any single occult author. ## Read next - [[Online]] — the satirical twin this song answers. - [[Sir Lucius]] — the face the innocent forgetting here eventually grows. - [[The Prop Room#The Well|The Well]] · [[The Thread]] — the heart-as-navigator symbols the second verse turns on. - [[Down to You]] — the "be it" sibling doctrine: embody, don't acquire. - [[33]] — the reverse-ladder record this sits near the top of.