John Michael Greer | Druidry, Being Your Magical Best, & Dark Age America

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01:56 Happy days are here again, Hireside Chatters as we dive back into the world of magic, the occult and the material one might refer to as the rejected knowledge of Western civilization. Because whether you're examining shamanism, cultures immersed in nature, award show ceremonies or the secret orders on the edges of society... The esoteric toolbox is there! And we would be wise to educate ourselves, engage with it and strengthen those mental muscles necessary for nudging our lives towards unfolding in accordance with our will as opposed to the will of corporate oligarchs culture shapers marketers and the modern day priest class in the shadows of the empire. Because if you don't take charge of your own life there's always someone willing to give you a low roll on some payroll totem pole for improving their own

02:42 And the more I have learned about magical potency, the more I feel like our overcrowded concrete cities make it difficult to see the esoteric energy of the natural world. Couple that with the coming decline of western civilization, the waning worldview of infinite industrial growth in a finite reality and some troubled times of turbulence ahead for loyal subjects of the American empire...and with this context I think the crossroads of magic and nature are more important than ever And that is when, dear people you go and find the headmaster of the druidic order of The Golden Dawn who is today's guest John Michael Greer. If you're unfamiliar John is a lifelong student and teacher of the esoteric ways whose work focuses primarily on the overlap between ecology spirituality and the future of industrial society

03:30 For 12 years he was the Grand Archdruid of the Ancient Order of the Druids and he is the prolific author over 50 books as well as The Archdruid Report Journal. You can find even more of his writings at his website, ecosophia.com And I am psyched to spend some time with him today A master mage for the modern age an ecological educator extraordinaire John Michael Greer Welcome to The Higher Side Thank you it's great to be on Yes man this is really gonna be a good time i've had many magical guests but none whose emphasis. Is hundred dream obviously that makes things like respect for nature paganism and lord of the rings even come to mind but maybe to kick this off you can elaborate on what drew a dream means to you what makes it stand out amongst the other magical boxes a person could be in

04:20 Primarily the focus on the natural world, on the environment and ecology. On the fact that we are each of us every human being is actually part of nature We think were outside it were never outside it And so from childhood I had a very deep connection with the natural world My idea have a good time was to go someplace green and hide It was really a very good fit when I finally encountered A Druid organization that was able to do some instructions in teaching this kind of thing You know, I'd done various other things before then. I've done some various other things since but Druidry because of that green focus really became the central to my own spiritual path. I think that makes a lot of sense and what can you tell us about say the history of druidry? Because as I understand a lot of the original material is just lost in modern druidy is more like a reinvention in the spirit of rather than some type of ongoing continuation Is that fair to say yeah That's entirely fair

05:13 The original Druids were the priests, the intellectuals, the occultists and so on in the old Celtic countries of Northwestern Europe. Ireland Britain Gaul what's now France Of course and a few other places that's where the druid's war they were there until first the Roman Empire And then the Christian church squeezed them out and that was the end of story except that in these very early 18th century In England, mostly. There were a lot of people who were looking at the options that were provided at that time you have the choice between a very narrow kind of dogmatic Christianity on one hand and a very narrow kind of dogmatic scientific materialism on the other this may sound familiar and there are a lot of people who are going I want door number three and when various opinion holders and so forth said well there isn't a door number three their response is okay we'll invent

06:01 There were various things that came out of that period of ferment, but one was what we call the Druid Revival. The reinvention of druidry as a nature-centered spiritual path and it involved drawing together what little is known about the activities of the ancient druids, what their traditions were, what we can get from old Celtic legends and so on but it was also very much from the beginning focused on paying attention to nature and learning the spiritual lessons that nature has since, you know the ancient Celts may go away but trees still grow. So it just kind of picked up from there. The first documented Druid organization we know of was in the early 1740s. There are traditions that was one founded in 1717 nobody's found the paperwork yet. It reached to the United States in 1798 when the first druid organization in this country was founded in the Hudson River Valley and it's been here ever since.

06:54 That's so fast and so my initial interest in magic maybe this audiences interesting magic comes from sort of a weird place it comes from. Long and deep dive is down conspiratorial rabbit holes you know obviously magic and ritual can bump up against the conspiratorial at times but, To see it as a strictly negative thing I think is really naive and in terms of its value to the individual who might be a bit wary of magic, something that I've heard you say that rings true to me is that one of the main lessons of occultists is we have value and potential beyond how much money we can make for some employer. And to me, that's the real conspiracy affecting most people – that we've been kept ignorant of our own value and potential

07:39 Yeah, the thing is people talk about secret societies as if they're a bad thing. Some of them are no question but secret societies have also been the toolkit of the secret society of secrecy of doing stuff using ritual and form and using occult teachings and so on that has also been used over and over again by people to get out from under this sort of overarching structure of our society that wants to cram us into little pigeonholes where we can work to make someone else rich That's been going on for a very long time. And one of the projects that I've just recently finished is A History of Conspiracies in Secret Societies, and it talks about both sides of that

08:19 You have organizations that are dedicated to maintaining the status quo, and you have organizations that are dedicated to overthrowing it or subverting it. Or simply easing outside its reach where you can do things that don't necessarily benefit your employer. Cheers to that! Always good to be measured and motivated to take the reins of life And I've also heard you say that it's not very wise to spend so much time brooding over the evil actions of the elite, and maybe that is something where a conspiratorial audience would say hey wait a minute what do you mean? But elaborate on that for us. Why is that unwise why shouldn't we spend too much time on that?

08:59 The thing is, you only have so many hours in your life. You only have so much energy. Do you want to spend your time brooding over what the other person is doing wrong? Or do you want to spend your time changing your own life now it's useful to be aware of what's going down in the world but if you're putting 24-7 into fixating on the evil evilness of those evil people over there being evil What are you doing in your own life Mm-hmm. How much energy do you have? What do you want to put it towards you can put it towards brooding over them You can put it toward doing something else, but there's also a magical principle here what you contemplate you imitate Whatever you spend most of your time brooding over that's gonna shape your thinking that's gonna shape your emotions It's going to shape your behavior And so all of your energy is focused on the evil evil evilness of those evil people over they're doing evil

09:48 You're going to become like them bit by bit. Not a good idea, again be aware of what's going down focus your attention on the alternative basic rule of magic if you're doing or working to make change in your life don't focus on what you changing away from focusing on what you changing toward build up the positive energy towards that that's gonna work. along those same lines, I've also heard you say that if you didn't have the traps of the empire, you probably wouldn't be fueled to get out of it. And I think that's kind of a wise way to flip it on its head and think about it as a positive. Yeah. The thing is one of the other principles of the occult tradition is that everything happens for a reason we didn't just land here in the mess were in now enough thumping great message is, of course, just at random. Okay? There are reasons why we backed ourselves into this corner an

10:39 And this is the process by which we learn not to do anything stupid in the future. So again, what's your alternative? What do you want instead of the empire and that's crucial if you look at what's going on I'm gonna go political here briefly for a moment If you look at whats going on in American politics right now okay The Democrats are losing because they haven't articulated an alternative It's all those people are evil. Those people are bad, you know and that's fine but if you don't articulate an alternative you can't take people to it right if you don't have a direction to go You can't go And so this is the thing is this applies to people lives also If you're stuck in a rut you're working a dead-end job because that's all you can get and you know Here's this problem here's that problem? You're feeling crushed I get that it's a reality. I've been there

11:31 But that's when it's most crucial to say, what do I want instead of this? And how can I get there not you know. Well i'm going to win the lottery so they know your not lotteries attacks on people who don't understand math How are you going to make change happen and once you start thinking in those terms where do I want to get to and how am I gonna get there all of a sudden there's an exit door and it may take you a long time open it It may take you a long time pass through but there is way out and you can make change in your own life And as people make changes in their own lives, the empire falls apart because all the empire is is the sum total of all our acts of obedience. That's what the empire is and if we stop obeying, if we look at no I'm going to do something else with my life, I'm going to walk out of a cubicle

12:19 I'm going to walk out of the Skinner box where sitting there like a rat pushing on a lever. I'm going to walk away because there are doors, there are exits. A piece of the empire falls off and goes splat into the mud." Yes and i agree with what you said there in the beginning people do seem more attracted to a bad vision than no vision at all it's just kind of the way we're wired. And in terms of manifesting your own reality, a lot of people might have doubts about that but then I would ask how well defined are your own goals? How well defined are or the things you want if you visualize them in your head a lot of people don't do that very often. A lot of people have no idea

12:59 All they know is that they want something other than what they've got and that's fine. That's a good place to start, the dissatisfaction with power but you need in it so its not just sitting there grinding at you and so yeah actually take time to think through what do I want in life? Not this okay! What do I want in life and how might I get there now theres another concept here thats very useful Theres a spectrum of power that extends from you to the empire okay And the empire is at one and because the empire controls collectivities it controls the big picture you control the details of your own life. The closer you can make change toward your end of the spectrum the more power you have, further you go into the empires under the spectrum or power the empire has and that's why almost consistently when people try to make big changes with a big level all at once but they haven't changed their own life they fail

13:54 Because they're trying to make change on the Empire's turf. When they change their own lives first, then change unfolds from that people who've adopted changing their own life they get together, change happens on the level of families and small groups communities and the empire falls apart because everyone has turned back and walked away Good lessons all around that dissatisfaction point is key because knowing how lazy i can be if i didn't have that extreme dissatisfaction with where i was i wouldn't be, where are you and that really isn't important some days i'm like maybe i should thank the system for giving me so many terrible options that i was forced to do something else on my own. I get that i ended up becoming a writer because i couldn't stand it there option that i had

14:40 That was what drove me back to the keyboard over and over and over again until i finally got into print. And kept me writing while I was going through the you know your discerning pizza money stage working on the side, If you're perfectly satisfied with a nice little padded cell they've got you in, that's fine. For the rest of us we need to harness that dissatisfaction and do something with it." Right! That's the whole point of the ignorance is bliss thing I had friends who were totally satisfied with mundane job and i would look at them like man im almost jealous because it'd be so much easier

15:16 But you know the rapture it's very easy if you have a little bottom me to. Indeed so let me ask a little more about that relationship between, the natural world and magic because since it is something you folded into your magical life because a lot of westerners Are pretty non participatory i want to say remove from nature but we don't participate in it very much and that seems like that might be why a magical world view is an immediately obvious to us but. It seems like if we were to live within the wilderness i guess i suspect that would start rushing back with you agree,

15:54 Well, to some extent. The thing is I've seen counter arguments. I watched people move out into the middle of nowhere and keep on living stuck in their own mental things. The thing is it's not so much even that we're separated from nature. It's that we ignore nature just as we ignore magic. And going to start with a magical example and go to a natural example. Most people have experienced what back in certain period or generation past used to call the vibes People have vibes places have vibe you feel a certain thing when you walk into a place we need to person don't know if you pay attention to it and over the long term of course a lot of us did back in the day.

16:35 you realize that you're actually sensing something. It's not just a purely imaginary, purely subjective thing. You're actually experiencing something and you can sit down and talk to someone else saying man did you get the vibe at that party? Oh man it was heavy! So you're actually perceiving one of the things that magic works with but people are taught not to pay attention to it. You don't talk about those things in childhood most of us are bullied into silence about things like that. You're not supposed to pay attention so to the things that aren't supposed to exist even though they do and so it takes things like a counterculture, but when i came in on the tail end up to give people freedom to actually say no i felt something. I really didn't notice that kind of creepy vibe that person had and i'm gonna pay attention to them. So that's an example of how we actually live within the magical world view but ignore it all the time in the same way exactly the same way

17:29 Nature is around us everywhere. We literally cannot get outside it, you have a physical body presumably and it's not a robot that body is a bundle of nature It has its own cycles, it interacts with the cosmos on various levels You're constantly being influenced by that bit of nature that carries you around everywhere And yet people ignore that they avoid it They don't want to talk about it Anytime it gets too obviously obtrusive where there's a definite cycle or a definite process that is natural, that is not conscious. Well you get the reaction to pull out an obvious example the way guys respond to any talk about women menstruating okay? Oh my god! That's too natural I don't freak out but a lot of guys freak out about that I have no idea why

18:16 It's nature, okay? Deal. If you are male and heterosexual presumably you have a certain fondness for the part of the body in question get used to its habits it's friendly so this is the thing we're not outside of nature You can attune yourself to nature in the middle of the biggest city in the world because nature is right there all the time Okay, you've got the weather We never did manage to get those domed cities that I was promised when I was a child. You've got the weather, you've got the entire structure of the atmosphere shaping your lives. The city around you what's it made out? It's made out of products in nature

18:56 Iron from the mines, concrete. Mine from the ground all the other stuff here It's all just a reworking of nature now it's a reworking according to a really simple-minded sort of human plan That's why we have all these right angles and straight lines But it's also nature We just have to pay attention to that Awaken ourselves in nature in ourselves around us in other people in all things And if you do that, you're going to get a lot further than if you say go running out into the wilderness without... You gotta free your mind before you free anything else. Well said and ignoring nature is probably a much better term to use than being removed from it but something I've been kind of stuck on lately is just the fact that we don't know our own minds that well and we don't spend

19:45 Anytime overnight alone and i think you have to be pretty dense to not realize the world is more than just the material if u were to spend a night alone with your own thoughts no netflix know other people know electricity i think it's just kind of, emerges we are you hit a really important point here. And the point weekend summit up in the word alone people what their minds and environments noise I mean you probably remember this not that many years ago you to bar your restaurant if it's a sports car there be tv. Okay i think there was no tv tv on the walls of restaurants please we don't do that,

20:28 And they've spread to the point that you go into most restaurants and there are like televisions on every wall or television lined up side by side in a band. So you constantly have this jabber being focused on you. So why are people doing this? What's the point of that? It's to drown out their own thoughts. It's to keep from noticing what's happening, because the television gives you this imaginary world that's all nice and neat and clean where things behave the way our cultural mythologies insist they ought to behave. If you look away from the screen or walk outside, you're going to find out the cultural mythology is simply a lie

21:08 But that's why the television is there, because if the television is there you can pretend that we're still progressing. You can pretend the progress is still happening. You could pretend all these things that were promised by media and by the pundits and politicians are still happening even though they're not. Even though most of us experience it on a day-by-day basis So getting away from the noise, getting away from the jabber and the jerky little colored pictures on the glass screens that surround us all the time. Hallucinations crazier than the things you'll find most schizophrenics babbling about! You have to get away from that stuff right? And yeah spending it alone

21:49 No people, no TV. You know you can have a light bulb if you want but seriously one of the basic practices not just of Western occultism or Druidry but actually nearly all spiritual traditions is meditation And meditation can be defined very simply as sitting down, shutting up and doing something that forces you to be alone with your thoughts for a while. That's incredibly powerful because that's exactly what you're not supposed to do. That's why you have the television yelling at you all the time to distract you from your own thoughts if you set aside 15 minutes today Do one of the many different kinds of meditation as long as it's not the kind that involves shutting off your thought and of course those are very popular in corporate world these days. But any kinda meditation that forces you to encounter what your thinking i will do marvels, loosen grip up the system on your mind and imagination.

22:43 Well that is exactly what I was going to ask you about because i've heard you talk about this empty mind meditation versus a more focused attention for deep thinking and I think most people really only hear about that empty mind stuff like you said. And there's a good reason for that, exactly maybe you can elaborate on those differences in the importance of the latter okay? The current version of it is being marketed under the label mindfulness meditation What happened was that they took a specific technique used by some Buddhist schools in Southeast Asia, okay? They stripped of all of its spiritual content ripped it out of context and started marketing it to corporate flacks as a tranquilizer.

23:21 You know, this is the one where you sit there and you empty your mind and you allow thoughts to rise like bubbles and just let them flow away from you. It's very much like being under a heavy tranquilizer. And it has become extremely popular because if you do that it does decrease your stress. And if you're a corporate flak, you have a lot of stress. You're constantly worried about clawing your way further up the hierarchy and not being shoved down by someone clawing their way past you and all the other things that if you are a corporate flak you would worry about but it also makes you numb. I tend to call it mindlessness meditation because you'll routinely get people, certainly back in the day we saw them all the time, people who did that or mantra meditation one of the other thought stopping meditations and some of them reached some very impressive states of spiritual enlightenment but they couldn't think their way up a wet paper bag and so they sort of bumbled through life being all enlightened and blissful walking out in front of cars and things like that

24:14 The kind of meditation that I tend to teach, I teach pretty conclusively. There are two modes and you practice both of them. The one is called discursive meditation and that is meditation on a thought the basic version is You sit down in a comfortable position not too slouched so sit down in chair put your hands on your thighs breathe deeply for awhile And then you call to mind some concept some image some symbol something you want to think about you hold it before your mind for little while just sort Not thinking about it, but just having it in your own. And then you let various trains of thought rise. Say you choose the empire. That's your subject of meditation. You think about that for awhile and then there are various trains of thought connected to it and maybe you think okay the role of media is propping up the empire okay? Let me think about that! And you follow that train of thought out until you reach a conclusion

25:06 And then you stop and get your notebook to write down any conclusions you can put away you take a few more deep breaths to clear up on today really simple but you're spending that time inside your mind doing your own thinking not thinking what the television tells you too, and we should do that again fifteen minutes today. Amazing things happen. The other kind, the distinctive druid meditation but of course we do both just go outside someplace Do this at least once a week Go outside some places in the most natural environment you can find and that could be an empty lot covered with weeds That's nature You do not have to go to the Rocky Mountains Any place where you can see the sky and where there are green things growing And either stand or sit depending on what you have and just watch Pay attention Notice what is happening

25:54 Open all your senses and perceive. Don't pay attention to yourself here, you're paying attention to the natural world If you're still enough The very small animals that are there may come out and go wow that's not acting like a human being It's not jumping around all the time You know amazing things happen when you do that so these are the two ends of druid meditation We have the discursive meditation the concentrated thinking on subject And we have the awareness meditation where you are being aware of nature And both of those pop you out of the empire, pop you out of the official mode of thinking. Discursive meditation by teaching you to think your own thoughts and the other kind by being aware of something that's not invented by human beings, something that is part of a natural order thing again what you contemplate right so you fill your mind with nature

26:44 And all of a sudden you start moving and acting or thinking a little more naturally. I keep it up strange things happen i love that at such unique advice or to rare description of meditation in terms of what i've been told so i think that's pretty important i like it Yeah, the thing that happened and it's very unfortunate. Back around the turn of the last century there was an organization called The Theosophical Society that was very into the idea of teaching Eastern mysticism to Western people a good idea but they were so popular their idea meditation which is more of the thought stopping sort Their idea of meditation became just universal And other traditions including traditions going in the western world for very long time

27:27 Just kind of got ignored. It's only been in recent years that people have started to dig things out from the heap and say, wow you know this is really interesting this has potential but these sort of thought stopping meditation doesn't have at all I feel a lot of times like a dumpster diver going down the back alleys Western civilization pop open it up to go Wow look at this I bet that still works. I like that and i've also heard you say that you don't really need a lot of the tools of ceremonial magic, that you could actually progress through the tradition of the golden dawn stark naked in an empty room and i found that little surprising but why was it important to you to incorporate druidry into that what did you see missing from the golden dawn? Of course the nature stuff but about that synergy between them and uh fact that you don't really need those tools

28:13 Okay, let me talk first of all a little bit about ceremonial magic because the point of ceremonial magic that the way that it works is that you externalize things. You take patterns in your own mind and you externalize them into objects. You do this ritual to consecrate a wand okay? That wand represents your will. That wand is a physical expression, a symbol an emblem of your will and you work with that one to help you build the capacity of will In the same way, each of those other fancy working tools all the complex hardware of ceremonial magic. They're all representations of things that are present in your own consciousness it's useful to do the tools many people find that a very effective way to do it you don't actually need them now I did them I've done the whole classic golden dawn thing with the whole turkey with all the trimmings if you will and It did me a lot good when I was reworking tradition for the Celtic Golden on specific tradition at work in these days

29:08 I decreased the number of tools significantly because, you know all things considered the Victorian period did have this mania for clutter and you can get the same effects with fewer pieces of hardware. These days i think there's a little less need for the clutter and I don't know that I'd recommend doing the entire Golden Dawn system from start to finish stark naked in an empty room You can if you want to but you certainly do not necessarily need all the clutter or all the knickknacks and bric-a-brac Now, in terms of Druidry and the Golden Dawn—again a little background here. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded in 1887 as the source for most of the really effective methods of ceremonial magic we've got these days. It's publicly available now if you will open-source. There are books I edited Israel Gardy's big collection a few years ago so you can find out all about it and it is a systematic method of learning how to use the secret potentials of yourself that's what its about

30:02 It is Victorian. It is full of bric-a-brac and knickknacks, but it works." And so the one thing that I found a little less than pleasing about it is that it's very much focused on Judeo Christian model of spirituality which is fine if you happen to be Jewish or Christian which I'm not So as a Druid I was going this ought to be convertible. It ought to be possible to take these techniques these tools these methods and put them into a context where they use a druidical spirituality rather than a Judeo-Christian one. Now, I was kind of mulling over this when I was doing some research on some other things that found out somebody had got there first. The original Hermetic Order the Golden Dawn as mentioned founded in 1887 blew itself sky high in a series of internal political quarrels between 1901 and 1903

30:52 It was a big mess. The entire British occult scene was thrown into turmoil by this, there were a couple of fistfights. Alistair Crowley got shoved down the flight of stairs. It was a Donnybrook and so a lot of people who had been in the Golden Dawn basically fled for shelter to other organizations that weren't going through that kind of mess. If so happened at the Druid scene in England at that time it's very calm There are a bunch of druid orders. They all more or less got along, everyone was doing the rituals and this kind of stuff in your head. And so the bunch of golden donkeys ended up there because they wanted a nice place where they could practice alternative spirituality without having to be screamed at by opponents and this kind of stuff. So they came to the Druids scene and brought all these golden things with them

31:38 And so between the two world wars, you had a whole bunch of little organizations that fused the Golden Dawn methods with Druid nature spirituality. They did not survive as far as I know there may be some out there hidden because secret societies are secret guess what? There maybe some out there but i was not able to find any record of any of them surviving after Wicca hit the big time and became so very popular as it did But I was thinking, okay this really sucks that there were all these marvelous things being done by these people and no trace survives. And then of course it sank in okay well i'm a golden dawn initiate, I've done the golden dawn system from top to bottom. I'm a druid, I've been fully initiated and done complete training of three different traditions of druidry. I can reverse engineer the thing so I did. It took me about five years of very hard and intensive work but that's where the book The Celtic Golden Dawn came from-a system of golden dawn magic for people who are into druid nature spirituality

32:32 And I'm very pleased that it got a lively response from other people who had the same interest. And so an organization titled, of course, The Druidical Order of Golden Dawn has come into being. It's very quiet we don't advertise and anybody who buys the book The Celtic Golden Dawn reads it carefully will find out how to get in touch. And here we are! So basically that has made it possible for a lot of people who aren't comfortable with Judeo-Christian versions of spirituality to really get into the very advanced, very powerful methods of personal transformation that the Golden Dawn system has to offer. I'm actually working on some other versions of it. I'm working with a guy named Sven Eriksson—I'll let you guess where he's from! Sven and I are working on one for the heathen community people who worship the Old Norse or Germanic gods Odin Thor and so on So that's one project. And i've also been doing some stuff for other people who are into polytheist faiths that worship many gods

33:28 So that seems to be going pretty well and the results have been very pleasant. Very cool I really like hearing people Reincorporate magic back into history because it is a third rail that is left out of the history books But it's very important, and it's also a huge chunk That's missing from American history cuz we're taught the boring parts And we think America as this Christian nation but there's plenty of sorcerers mystics and magic to fold back into the big picture isn't there The thing is when america got going. all of the misfits, all of the eccentrics. All of the people who couldn't stand what was...the situation they were in Europe packed up and moved here. Some of them were religious fanatics like the pilgrims we'll hear about them you know they were sufficiently totalitarian that they still appeal to our historians but how many people remember that in 1698 a couple of boatloads of German Rosicrucian mystics landed in Pennsylvania founded a commune

34:28 And communes go that far back. A lot of their practices ended up being passed on, on the one hand into Pennsylvania Dutch folk magic and the other hand into just the general magical practice up and down through the colonies. The United States was crawling with occultists. It was full of people who were practicing magic or practicing witchcraft who are practicing alchemy, who are practicing all kinds of strange things This notion that until 1967, everybody in America was this straight-laced Christian who kept their knees tightly together is consummate nonsense.

35:04 I mean, this was a weird country and still is. We need reclaim... You know make America weird again is the slogan I'd like to see." Amen! Amen! Let me ask you about the era of the Salem witch trials because hysteria is no longer a sufficient answer to me now that I actually think magic is more than just superstition so I'm curious your analysis of that time period? Okay, the thing is there was a lot of very messy stuff going on at that time. You had the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the archetypal Puritan colony which was a religious dictatorship okay? These people were the Daesh, the jihadis of the 17th century and they had this you know usual religious intolerant notion we have the right way and we have to force everybody gunpoint into doing exactly what we want. And of course not everyone played along

35:56 And so you had this whole cascading series of crises all through the history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony until eventually it was forced, the religious dictatorship was broken and it was forced to accept something closer. You know an elective government in a legislature rather than just the ministers running things. So The Salem Witch Trials was part of that. A lot of it seems to have focused around...you've heard of the slave Tituba who's from the West Indies who had a typical African diaspora knowledge of folk magic. And in all innocence, she taught that to some girls and of course it was whipped up from there. There were economic factors. There was a lot of quarrel between Salem village and some of the other communities around there. Then of course there was the attempt by the authorities clamp down on anything that looked like religious dissidents. Of course acquisitions of witchcraft are great for that because you can whip people up into frenzy and start hanging

36:53 or burning at the stake over in Europe, but here of course they use the rope. So was there magic actually involved? Of course there was! The thing is magic is practiced everywhere. There has never been a human society anywhere in history any place on the world where magic has not flourished this is something you will not find in the mainstream histories They always try to say no magic belongs for those superstitious past well... There are probably as many people practicing magic per capita today's America as their have ever been The superstitious past is right now. And so that was, I think the broader picture for the Salem witch trials this ugly combination of religious tyranny economic pressure desire to keep the Massachusetts Bay Colony under a religious dictatorship and some kids and a slave who happened to stray outside the bounds of orthodoxy and turn into an excuse to crack down for economic advantage on some poor people in Salem Village

37:51 It's a very old, very ugly story. One of the other things that happened and fortunately the people involved stayed on the right side of grass for longer... I currently live in Rhode Island. Rhode Island was founded by people who were bailing out to Massachusetts colony. This was the place where the idea of religious liberty first got proclaimed in the New World. There is strange guy named Roger Williams who was one of the first Baptist preachers back when the Baptists were left wing and Here in Providence, we have the First Baptist Church. It's not the First Baptist Church of Providence it's The First Baptist Church and that was founded by Roger Williams among others and his whole thing

38:32 put it in his inimitable terms, forced worship stinks in the nostrils of God. Yeah, exactly and so you have places like that you have Rhode Island, you have Pennsylvania, you have Maryland which was also founded as a state where or the colony originally were religious freedom was allowed and and it kind of spread from there. People don't talk about that in history, they don't talk about all the different alternative spiritualities, the different magical traditions, the incredibly rich history we have here in America of alternative thought and alternative practice because both the left and right get an advantage out of insisting no up until 1967 everybody was

39:17 was a cardboard cutout who did whatever we said. It's all so interesting and another thing on the subject of America, I have read a couple of your books most recently Dark Age America about the coming decline of industrial civilization that we could never have infinite economic growth in a world of finite resources that should be obvious that our exploitation and waste of these resources is coming back to bite us very soon. Well, I know you've studied the ecology of failing civilizations historically when you look at that can you talk to us about the reoccurring template and how America currently maps onto that? Oh yeah let's talk about how civilization fall okay The basic thing that happens is the civilization will build up all this infrastructure

40:06 in a rush when it's at its growth period and that can no longer pay to maintain it. Go look the streets in front of your house some day, you'll see what I mean. Infrastructure has to be maintained. Maintenance costs build over time. The more infrastructure you build the more your costs mount but also the more you draw down your resource base. Any given piece of land any given continent in any given country only has so many of any given resource You've got so much iron ore or you've got so much this you have so much oil or what have you And if your society can figure out how to live within the limits of the renewable resources, the crops that it can grow with wood that it can produce sun and water and wind for power. Then what's going to happen? It's going to go build up a lot of infrastructure. The infrastructure is going to cost too much. This civilization basically goes bankrupt. A lot of the infrastructure goes down. You have a normal historical cycle but there's a bottom because you've got that continuous supply of resources

41:01 If you're like americans and you say hey look at all this oil on these minerals we can mine everything let's use it all. Then you build up the immense infrastructure, any burn all the easily accessible oils to your left pumping out stuff some cracks in shale and you're left with a men's bills which you can cover And declining resources and declining environmental quality. Everything just costs more and more and more until nobody can pay it anymore, and you slide down into a dark age that's what happened with rome that happens with most civilizations do the up with the rocket down with stick routine the thing to want to look for is first of all looking at your working people. How are they doing

41:52 When they go from, you know your average working person can afford a place to live and whatever the vehicle of choices at the time in three square meals a day and all the usual stuff. When that was true say fifty years ago and nowadays the average working person is struggling to stay off street, you know you're in trouble because that shows you how much wealth is having to be siphoned away to maintain that failing infrastructure it's not there to pay people anymore You want to pay attention to the quality of environment because that's a dumping ground where people dump their costs and then they're wasting. When you get to the point where even basic infrastructure like bridges can't be maintained adequately anymore, then you know your sliding down the slope again the roman empire is a great example

42:40 You talk to an archaeologist and they'll take you to some of the old aqueducts, and they'll say okay now this is a section that was built when the Roman Empire was doing really great. And here you can start seeing repairs, and repairs get cheaper and shoddier and more temporary. Then in 411 it simply stopped working and nobody had funds ever started again. So that's the history of the Roman Empire one aqueduct at a time. Of course all these things are going on in our own society right now We've gone from the sort of gleaming new cities with smooth pavement on the roads and everything looks fresh and clean to, I mean the last time i was in New York City it looked like a third world slum. And im not speaking about skin color or people involved, Im speaking about living conditions that people were having to put up with. It was gritty, it was dirty there were people sleeping on the streets everywhere

43:33 Oh yeah, I live in San Diego. America's finest city they say but there are tents all over the downtown area next to people paying $3,000 a month for rent walking past tents on their way to the car Exactly That kind of division, what's happening is that the privileged classes are maintaining their status of living at all costs and letting everyone else fall into extreme poverty. That doesn't last well because the society depends on its working people not on the people in $3,000 a month penthouses it's the people who actually do the work who are the people on whom society depends and when they decide screw it and stop doing the work

44:14 or when they can't keep doing the work because they're being paid half what they need to keep themselves fed, or what have you. There are various ways it can play out but things start really falling apart and of course they can also end up voting for somebody that the $3,000 a month people don't like just despite the $3000-a-month people and then life gets really interesting. That's how Julius Caesar got into power by the way in the last days of the Roman Republic. The upper classes running the Senate everything was fine as far as their concerned. The average people were starving Julius Caesar comes out, you know he was a rich guy but he made the case that he was going to support the common Roman people and they flocked to him. End of The Roman Republic followed promptly

44:54 It's an old story. And the cycle repeats and, and the cycle repeats even the people here that I know who are doing well or well enough they're still kind of just treading enough water to give themselves some breathing room. Uh huh. Yeah. And that's all yeah. And yeah i don't know it's kind of like The system is set up so ingeniously because we're all responsible for our own individual bills individual rents So it's like Very compartmentalized, but I don't know how guilty should we feel about our own successes in the wake of what's going on? Go to the waste of time teaching people to wallowing guilt is a very effective way of controlling them. Yeah guilt is irrelevant It generally means you take yourself too seriously The thing to do instead of wallowing guilt to say okay How do I want to change?

45:43 What changes do i want to make in my own life. I got this success ok is it actually six that's why enjoy it, is the way i really want spend you limited number of years i have before i start pushing up daisies and then we can make changes because i've noticed an enormous number of people getting water miserable A lot of them are just totally missed, you know All they have to look forward to at this point is to keep on treading water Increasingly frantically until they retire without enough money and very few of us will see a dollar out of Social Security at this point So what is that to look forward to? Look at the plastic smile though. They've stuck on their faces. Look at the eyes You'll see the pain you'll see the wretchedness that hides there and

46:34 Most of them will keep doing that simply because it's too frightening to do anything else. To actually turn your back on the empire, turn your back on the official version of what is supposed to be real and think your own thoughts? That is scary! That is crap-your pants scary! And so...to do that takes serious guts. To actually look at everything you've been taught about the world and say, You know what if that's a lie?! And then say, OK. You know here I have this supposed success you know i've got this three thousand dollar a month apartment for which. Here is what i have to do to maintain the thing curious everything that's actually involved what is my life worth at this point and that's when you get people who walk away. I had a slogan for while but it was doing a lot of talking on the future industrial society with the slogan collapse now and avoid the rush

47:27 The idea is we're on a declining arc in the society. We are all going to be a lot poorer than we are now, okay? So if you accept that momentarily and start living now as though you were poorer than you are then you have a bunch of free money which you can use to prepare yourself and you also get used to the skills you need because being poor is not easy. Being poor is hard work frankly I've done it my wife and I got by on absurdly little money when she was working fairly poorly paid jobs and I was trying to break into print It takes work. You have to know what you're doing to actually get by comfortably on a very little bit of money and take the time to learn that, but do it as the economy continues falling apart because you already know how to do it and you will have that extra money and use that to get yourself out of debt top priority right away.

48:20 Get yourself out of debt, develop some skills that will enable you to exchange things with other people. Provide them with goods and services so that you can keep yourself afloat in a declining economy. Good advice! I was going to ask about that collapse first and avoid the rush because I do... Collapse now and avoid the rush? It really is crucial back in the day when progress was actually happening when things were growing we had economic growth and so on it made all sense in the world to try to live At the level that you were going to achieve and people get it. Digital time but we lost track of the fact that it works the other way too when society can decline, you need to drop down a lover two or three get used to living with a lot less comfortable with it learned not a problem. Many of the things you are spending money on didn't actually make your life any better

49:10 And then you've got that extra money, you've got the extra time, you've got the extra resources. You can make something yourself. You can detach yourself from the corporate structure from the empire and actually have a life worth living I like it. And, you know, Dark Age America does a great job of identifying the problems and making the case that this decline is coming. And I didn't get to read Green Wizardry but the description sounds great. Green Wizardry is a hands-on guide to home scale energy conservation backyard food production and other common sense responses to scarcity while we know we have these massive problems can you talk to us about some of those solutions if people were to pivot away from the system what would they do?

49:49 Okay, I'm gonna have to put some context here. One of the things that nobody talks about now is the catastrophic failure of NERV in the United States in the early 1980s during the 1970s and then the late 60s and all through the 70s a lot of Americans were gearing up to deal with the crisis of our time to deal with declining energy resources declining other resources environmental problems that was when The Clean Air Act and The Clean Water Act were passed and things like That was also the golden age of things like solar energy, small-scale wind power, super insulation of houses. All of these local scale technologies that people figured out how to use to get by and have a decent lifestyle when you're not burning umpteen million barrels of oil a day

50:33 And the problem was that what we got instead was the Reagan counterrevolution. It's morning in America and an entire generation cashed in their ideals at that point, well almost an entire generation, and basically catching their grandchildren future to have a better time than present. I was doing my first pass through college when Ronald Reagan was elected. And I remember in the years immediately afterwards, I was studying ecology and you started hearing from people that there are no more jobs in any of the fields we're preparing for and all of the government funding for alternative energy is being cut but there are all these nice corporate jobs doing useless and environmental destructive things and they're offering money. You could just watch people sink and cringe and sell out. There were not many of us but some of us did

51:23 I was a kid underfoot in the last half decade or so of the appropriate tech scene, the scene of people who were doing these things. I'm going to help build a wind turbine with my own hands." You can do it! We're not talking about gargantuan corporate monstrosities here. We're talking about a wooden propeller and an old truck alternator and a little bit of wiring put on top of a borrowed telephone pole it got us six volts pretty steadily to keep the light on in the chicken coop. Yes, I lived in a little hippie farm in those days and this kind of stuff was all over the place and then nobody wanted to talk about it because once you sell out, it's awkward to have to talk about all the hopes that you had been praising to the skies before you sold out. So these few of us who didn't sell out clocked at this stuff. I still have a very large collection of books from that time. Green Wizardry was my book on that movement

52:13 And it wasn't focused on what happened back then. It was these are the things that we learned, these are the tools that we came up with all of them or things you can do yourself. You do not have to lobby a big corporation or get the government to do something. You can do things to decrease the amount of energy use produce some of your own energy produced some of your own food especially the high value thing they have lots of items minerals like backyard vegetables and chicken cooper rabbit hutch You see, you've got this range of skills, this range of techniques that were all worked out in great detail in the late 60's and 70's. And so my Green Wizardry book was talking about how people can blow the dust off these things and put them back to work. I'm very pleased to say there has been some real enthusiasm toward that. There are a lot of people who have taken that book and done as I advised going out to these bookstores and found some of the remaining old books from that period and they're doing things with it

53:05 And so there has been a modest revival in the old appropriate tech stuff, which I think is great because these are things that can actually be preserved for the long term. As I said, they're things you can do yourself your family your friends your community. These are things that don't depend on the empire that can make your life a lot easier in tough times indeed and it's It's one of these things where we know that the american system is declining and we hear a lot of people talking about what we as individuals should be doing differently and sometimes i wanna kick that back in the like look most of this damage is probably done by two dozen corporations,

53:44 What about them and you know then from there it's like well these corporations make their money or get their energy from our money so we have kind of been feeding these beasts and now we probably do share some responsibility in how big and totalitarian they've gotten. Kind of like a parallel to the internet. It used to be a wild west now it's all Google, Facebook Amazon Well how did they get so big? We use these things every day and now it's just a military surveillance platform And we probably could have not given them so much of our attention and so much of our money So it is a cycle A synergistic kind of thing Pretty much so This is one of the reasons that the whole issue of guilt doesn't matter The thing that I would say

54:26 Ultimately, those of us who are awake, those of us who have figured out what's going on or at least have gotten some glimpses and want to make changes in our lives. We are a small minority we're always gonna be a small minority so those big corporations are gonna keep on doing what they do because that's what they do you and I are not going to be able to affect that we can decide and arguably should decide not to give them our money unless something is important for the worth doing because when you buy things from them you were buying dependence on them okay And when you don't buy from them, you're not making yourself dependent on them. This is very important of course if you want to have any kind of independence in your life so don't use Google. Don't shop on Amazon but don't use any of the big corporate titans just cut yourself off and there are lots of alternatives just get used to them and then look at what you can do to change your own life in the direction of your own values and your own dreams

55:23 You may not be able to change the world, but if the world is going to be changed it's gonna change because enough people change their own lives. That's the only way real change ever happens right now if there was just some kind of unexpected vast revolution and the whole system were to be thrown down and everyone would have exactly the same mentality they have now something identical to the old system will be back in place in a matter of weeks The Russian Revolution is a great idea that throughout stars they put on the commissars big deal You know, you've still got the secret police. You've still got the civil rights problems. All of these are all the same problems that were in the tsarist government and communist government because until people change their minds, you can't change anything else about them. Right? And this is kind of one of those areas where as a conspiracy minded guy I usually start getting into the thoughts of suppressed technologies that are more harmonious with natural systems that if unchained could probably do some good we have seen

56:21 People have made water powered engines and then they sometimes end up dead. We hear about things like maglev trains and possibly UFO technology, but I guess it's kind of arbitrary to talk about things that just aren't on the table The thing is, if you can't get to them or if you can't get to them without ending up with a bullet in your head it may be useful to know about them. But focus on the technologies that can fly under the radar. Focus on the things that people don't know about. This is one of the reasons magic is especially useful because it doesn't necessarily draw anyone's attention.

56:59 The great thing about magic the way that it's been mocked and despised and covered up with hollywood crap of the harry potter variety is nobody takes seriously. And so you can do all kinds of things with it you can change your life completely using it if anyone hears about it magic right, So it's not necessarily a bad thing to be ignored and despised, and treated as though you don't matter by the right people. Mm-hmm provocative. Right on magic is magic is indeed Wow well John this has been a bit of a whirlwind of the magical and the practical And I got a ton of respect for your discipline and knowledge on pretty complex things so of course thanks for spending some time with me

57:49 Thank you for having me on. It's been a fun conversation. And before we call it in, let the good people know about your blog and any upcoming work you might have coming down the pike all the promotional things The reason we do this... All of the promotional stuff Okay! The blog is www.ecosofia.net You can also find my DreamWits journal at ecosofia.dreamwits.org My blog is regular on Wednesdays I do various stuff on my journal That's an easy way to keep track. In terms of stuff coming out, I mentioned the conspiracy book which will be out from Sterling. The big news though is that I've been doing some fiction of late

58:30 and it is of course magical fiction, and it actually riffs off the work of H.P Lovecraft in a funny way. This is a seven-volume series, Fantasies with Tentacles I call them, and The Weird of Halle is the title, and the first volume, The Weird of Halle Innsmouth will be out shortly—I'm not exactly sure but quite soon—and the other six should follow in due order Again, I'll be splashing the information all over my blog and my dream with journals. So pick up a copy and read it right on very cool Well, I guess that does it thanks again. I enjoyed every minute of it keep fighting the good fight and take care out there You're welcome And thank you

59:09 And just like that, friends. There it is! John Michael Greer the Big JMG The man has little patience for laziness, guilt, chicken littles and the television and I salute him for it mainly because he practices what he preaches and because of that discipline He's very knowledgeable about a lot of things and has written an insane number of books, and I always think that's respectable because it is just so difficult. And when you're gone, you really have left a mark on the world. Watching Netflix, playing Red Dead Redemption, this kind of stuff completely robs you of your potential and your impact on the world But it is fun! Fun is easy...and addictive....I'm as guilty as anyone but spending time with someone like John is helpful for me. I hope its helpful for YOU

59:58 He made a lot of good points too. I think this one was in the Plus show, but the CFR publishes a regular journal! Does anyone read it? It's easy to make a YouTube video that the sky is falling and it's all the CFRs fault and Obama's a CFR member and all that kind of stuff... But like many of our guests who talk about natural law and karma say they do tell us what they're gonna do And many of us don't even have the discipline to read through it Again, I'm guilty. But I think confronting these truths makes us better conspiracists if we level up the way that we go about things. I said something to this effect on Twitter but I get a lot of pushback when I criticize the conspiracy community—a community that I am always going to be part

1:00:48 But when I look at people who I used as examples growing up of how to think and how to navigate this world, I always cite George Carlin and Bill Hicks because I was young. And I thought these guys were really great! They were outspoken but well-spoken rebels who just blew my young mind with deep biting analysis of society I thought man i want to be like that and they both mentioned having their minds blown by magic mushrooms and so i knew. That i was not in a hurry but that i was gonna do mushrooms in the proper setting because this is a milestone for thinkers that i wanted to be like, and i was gonna go through that it was something that not a lot of people do when you consider the wider culture i don't think many people are doing that

1:01:35 But if you consider us as a community, I don't hear a lot of people saying man those conspiracy folks really have their shit together. Maybe i should think more like them! Instead we're ridiculed and we can't change that and I'm kind of thinking along the lines of Malcolm X when he wanted his followers to dress in suits and bow ties He wanted young black men to look like they had their shit together In the face of people who think poorly of them We can have that same mentality Be better as a subculture and make people think differently about the value of the conspiratorial perspective. It's not tinfoil hats in trailer parks, it's rebellious rugged entrepreneurs and rejecting the boxes and cogs of society and coming out better for it!

1:02:21 I mean that's my stump speech. That's my ambition for us as a community to navigate reality better than other groups so that we can lead by example because if we have a better grip on the truth and the lies of society, and we work to be our best selves, we should be better at navigating life then other groups or ways of looking at the world right? Shouldn't What if we really did reject the mainstream paradigm and fully embraced that, ditched the TV? Started getting healthy living better stopped letting corporate poisons into our body whether it's cigarettes or glyphosate. What if we stopped being addicted to the cell phones we criticize and started fixing our local communities maybe you agree with me maybe you don't but I want to be proud to say I'm conspiracy minded not feel like I'm the black sheep of the family

1:03:11 Thanks Alex Jones for making us all look crazy and irrational. But for me personally, I do get to exercise this especially around the holidays because i'm the conspiracy podcast king of San Diego! And yeah that title has a lot of qualifiers and it's whittled down into a very specific small pond of folks but I can stand tall in front of people who thought I was some rebellious punk kid who'd never do anything and eventually would have to get some shit job like everyone else I've gotten to show those people that i wasn't wrong and i'm retired at 30. And, I wasn't going to play ball in an abusive system any more than I needed to sure I had my lost decade of retail but that's a small price to pay compared to the price I've seen many others paying. And, I want that for everyone who listens to a show like this should be a key to living better

1:04:04 I want us all to be happy with how we navigate life, not burdened by the knowledge we have. Not depressed and defeated but creative nimble economically and successful and fulfilled what a rant right But JMG is an inspiration to me, even if I might disagree with him on some small things. That's true for everyone that shows up here but he is a committed druid so he will care about things like the environment quite a bit and so do I! It's a shame it's so politicized but there is truth in the fact we've supported and bought products from companies that are killing our home. We need to have better standards for them too

1:04:45 And of course with this episode today the magical thread was weaved in and out of the conversation but also a lot of practical advice was given too. It ended up pretty well-rounded actually, I think he had some good lines like The Empire is the sum total of all our collective obedience? I mean that's a raw truth it's poetic and it offers a useful outlook. I don't agree 100% but it's a productive thing to sit and reflect on We also touched on those ideas like if you didn't have the traps of empire, you wouldn't be so motivated to rise above and don't brood over what they're doing wrong. Instead do something right! It's not about being an apologist for the elite or turn a blind eye – putting them under the microscope is what we do here but we should also be careful not give them so much attention that life and opportunities pass us by

1:05:42 Maybe we can try to be a counterbalance and that means doing difficult work to be an exceptional person. It's not just knowing, knowing is not enough you know that's the stage I hope we're in and as he said focus on what the solutions to those bad actions would be rather than the bad actions themselves We need progress and we kind of need it fast so get your magic game right people You know imagine your life is Like a play. It's a tired example, I know but imagine it's a play that runs on a script and you're the only unknown factor You and your free will And for the best of the play you really need to sync up well with the script and how it's running... ...and thats kinda what keeping an astrological calendar is like

1:06:31 Imagine you had the script in hand and it might say, hey big opportunity on page 36. Well you better be prepared to pounce by page 36 You better get in sync with the rhythm and ride the tide because it's absolutely not hidden from you It's just not dangled in front of you well I'm dangling higher side chatters. I'm dangling And I'm hoping that some good, noble people start engaging with the tools to improve reality instead of mainly the assholes. You know? The psychopaths! And I think John is a great guest to give us some reframing of the whole magical issue and some better ways to think about it and just general good life advice

1:07:11 Of course, if you liked the first hour we talked for a whole second hour about things like what's coming for Americans in seeking techniques to avoid crisis third rail thinking and breaking that binary grip A beginners plan to betterment and starter magic The art of memory man I could use that We also talked about something called the raspberry jam principle of black magic Some of John Michael Greer's unsung heroes of magical history. Also, John's translation and thoughts on the Picatrix I think that is a real accomplishment! But then we got into translating ancient grimoires and resurrecting magical texts And how WE can actually get involved in doing it ourselves It really isn't that hard when you have software-based translators Just that nobody is doing it

1:08:02 And we also talked about my obsession of how to properly scale and think about entities influences on our world. All fun stuff! You know you can join the Hireside Chats Plus via my own website or Patreon, and I'm gonna love ya forever As for THC News, I hit a personal milestone this week that is another example that life feels like some kind of movie because when i was a kid 6th 7th 8th grade I was a big WCW wrestling fan which of course their major storyline was the good guys versus the nwo how weird that i'm a conspiracy podcaster and that was the term they used for the heels but one of my favorite wrestlers was always raven he used edgar allen poe quotes he was dark and emo he wore neil gaiman shirts to the ring I had his posters on my wall, I bought his t-shirts. well

1:09:01 A few months ago, he wrote me saying that he's a fan of the Hireside Chats and I was just blown away. Sure we have a decent audience but the chances of THE wrestler who is my favorite being a fan of what I do and then talking about it on his own show which is actually where I think I learned about it as a mutual fan told me well... He ended up interviewing me for his own podcast A podcast that does not have guests very often. So it was a real treat and a real honor, and not very probable because its not an interview show so its just a weird little subplot of my life that makes me feel in sync with the universe And now I can scratch two wrestlers off my media promotion list Chris Jericho & Raven Any other wrestlers out there with podcasts? Im ready! Lets do it

1:09:55 But life is just weird. And if you're interested, he did put the first half hour of our conversation at the end of his latest episode and he put an extra hour on Patreon. Just figured I'd say something about that. Tell Raven you liked it if you check out and do! And lastly, the Hireside Chat's joint session for this month will be on the 20th. 7pm Pacific Time I'll post the actual call-in links on Facebook and Twitter the day of Come join the fun! And i'll see you then Your move conspiracy community... your fucking move This is important hear what I said I'm trying to tell you

1:10:39 It's not paranoia, not in my head. It's just the hard truth. Knocked on your door while I still can to ask you a question cause i know your head is still in the sand Don't be sheep till ya slot up for the rest of your life Oppressed, oppressed but you're getting woke You say you don't want to be stressed until the day you die Tough luck my friend Did you get the memo? Can't you see that we're so screwed? Don't you know, we're our Kung Fu? Can't you just admit we're screwed I'm gonna tell ya this anyway It's a scary world, and it's scarier every day So won't you say okay? Can't you see that we're so You sit and wish but we don't have a choice It seems we're stuck here But you can find no sis, drown out the noise

1:11:55 Now use that altar, and up your magic game And listen to THC you know You go with the entities if you ever see a ghost Don't be sheep till ya slaughter for the rest of your life Oppressed oppressed but you're getting woke You say you don't want to be stressed until the day you die Tough luck my friend Did you get the memo? Can't you say that we're so screwed? Don't you know we're all Kung Fu'd. Can't you just admit, We're Screwed! I'm gonna tell ya this anyway It's a Scary Dog World, I'm scarier everyday. I don't know what to say, Scary Dog will be okay. Can't you see that we're Screwed? Yeah-eh-eh.

1:13:08 Don't be sheep to your slaughter for the rest of your life Oppressed, oppressed but you're getting woke You say you don't want to be stressed until the day you die Tough luck my friend Did ya get the memo? Can't you see that we're so screwed? Don't you know we're our Kung Fu'd? Can't you just admit we're screwed I'm gonna tell you this anyway It's a scary time, so much scarier everyday Okay Can't you see that we're screwed?