# 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/Jagwar-twin-its-your-time-lyrics) · 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 [[Artifacts - Gallery 1 (1-37)#16 · THE EMPTY ROOM|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) echoes the drawing's arrangement: 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]]. > > The Hall of Mirrors draws an in-between too, and it sits on the bestiary's seam. *The Rainbow Bridge*, the one English entry on the board's ladder of soul-words, is set on the row of the [[Hall of Mirrors/The Bestiary - The Vulture|unnumbered vulture]] between the whale (3) and the dolphin (4), and as a code it opens *The Empty Room*: an uncoloured rainbow between pillars lettered J and B, an empty doorway, three forked-tongued serpents above, and a figure with a split face looking both ways. It reads as this song's man in the middle, drawn at the one gap on the ladder that has no number. > > 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, from the project > 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 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 decoder board, reachable at the song's namesake URL. It doesn't prove intent in the lyric — but it's the project itself 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 > [!quote]- Full lyrics<br><span class="jt-drawer-summary">The song's full released lyrics, kept folded.</span> > ``` > 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 > Once you get to Earth you forget where you come from > Gotta find your Way back > Once 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) > Once you get to Earth you forget where you come from > Gotta find your Way back > Once 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 [[Albums & Eras/33/Happy Face|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.