Asatru Folk Assembly - 6⧸24⧸26 Victory Never Sleeps, Ep 207 - Bits and Pieces

00:00:00.000 We'll be right back.

00:00:30.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:01:00.000 Thank you.

00:01:30.000 Thank you.

00:02:00.000 We'll be right back.

00:02:30.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:03:00.000 All right.

00:03:30.000 .

00:04:00.000 and welcome to this week's edition of victory never sleeps um anyone who is listening and

00:04:16.240 not watching this broadcast today started out with a moment of silence for a deceased member

00:04:23.880 of our afa family who passed away since the last broadcast travis selley

00:04:32.680 said situation and he will definitely be missed

00:04:38.440 but it's not a grim broadcast today but i do think it's important that we acknowledge the passing of

00:04:46.440 members of our community and if we can honor them great if we can learn something from the situation

00:04:55.720 even better and uh i think it starts a

00:05:02.280 show of bits and pieces that we are going to try to put together

00:05:06.920 Alan has the loudest chair on this broadcast, but we have bits and pieces that will hopefully

00:05:19.880 we can put together into something useful and helpful to everybody who's listening.

00:05:27.880 So, Alan, welcome to the program. Thank you for being on and sharing your wisdom with us this

00:05:32.760 evening i think a really good place to start if i may because we're on the topic is a couple few

00:05:40.440 things that i want to say and i think you may have some some input specifically on the second piece

00:05:47.080 of this first um unfortunately uh travis's method of passing was that he took his own life

00:05:57.000 that is something that is all too common amongst specifically our men and uh in particular in the 0.55

00:06:07.960 astro folk assembly we have seen far too much of that um like to

00:06:20.360 it goes without saying but it needs to be said

00:06:23.320 it's what our goals are here for if you are struggling please talk to one of us if you know

00:06:32.920 hopefully long before you get to the point that's something you're thinking about

00:06:37.560 but specifically if that's something you are considering please talk to one of our good

00:06:45.640 it's one thing that we talk about on the back end that we always want to make ourselves

00:06:51.160 available at a moment's notice we have that conversation with someone if that's where they

00:06:56.680 are feeling they're at uh something else that i think we all know but i think it's also my job

00:07:03.400 to say out loud i get that things can be extremely bleak in the moment and one thing that i do learn

00:07:13.400 more and more as i get older is that things that seem devastating and impossible to get past

00:07:22.760 when i was 21 or 23 or 35 or whatever i now look back in the rearview mirror and you know

00:07:31.720 they don't seem nearly as big when you make permanent choices to temporary problems

00:07:38.440 i think logic tells you it's something that down the road you would regret getting the opportunity

00:07:44.980 um but another thing that i'd like to you know suppose to be selfish about it

00:07:52.060 if you've made that decision i'd ask the favor please give us a shot at talking yadda

00:08:00.520 something you're going to do you can do it 10 minutes later and make phone call first so that

00:08:07.100 we at least felt like we could try to make it a little bit better and who knows

00:08:12.640 but if you would please do us the favor of reaching out and letting us take a swing at it

00:08:23.360 before you finalize that decision but yeah and the second part of that

00:08:29.840 I've mentioned on broadcast a lot of times the importance of doing the will

00:08:35.580 not only importance doing a will first you know do one have it with your lawyer have it with

00:08:42.560 trusted family members trusted friends do all of that in particular to people on this broadcast

00:08:48.720 and ask to focus on members get a will done and get a original copy registered with our law

00:08:59.120 speaker here because alan has agreed to be the keeper of those things and if they're in his

00:09:04.840 possession to act on your behalf to try to see that your will is executed in the way that you

00:09:13.740 want it doesn't have to be costly doesn't have to be difficult do your own will.com yes it really

00:09:25.140 is that simple do your own will.com i think i did mine in 10 minutes

00:09:35.220 yes go the extra step of printing two out and having a notary and witnesses sign them and

00:09:41.940 do that and send it to alan does not have to be a difficult thing but it is a very important thing

00:09:49.700 it is important if you have assets it's important if you have children that you want to take care of

00:09:56.660 who is going to see to their raising but it's also extremely important on your funeral service

00:10:04.680 and what you would like done with your remains and how you would like to be remembered

00:10:08.880 i would urge all of you to please take me seriously and please do that i have known a

00:10:16.000 great many people in my time was also here you go feed who saw it coming and continued to

00:10:24.600 procrastinate until they ended up passing without a will done and most of those people did not get

00:10:33.320 what they wanted because they did not have a will like i am talking about please do your will

00:10:40.980 and please if your life is looking so bleak that you are considering ending it please talk to one

00:10:50.560 of us and give us the opportunity to talk to you while you're still with us thank you for that

00:10:57.040 alan this is kind of kind of your your show though i did think of some notes and stuff i'd like to

00:11:03.340 talk about when appropriate but go ahead and take us on the journey that you have planned for us

00:11:09.180 well plan would certainly overstate it for tonight um i wanted to sort of do like i would

00:11:16.640 say the year in review or maybe the episodes in review that we've talked about so far um and just

00:11:24.200 to reiterate a couple things that first of all let me you know certainly to back up what you said

00:11:31.220 absolutely talk you know if you feel despair talk to one of us i mean i've been there you've been

00:11:41.500 there um life is struggle um especially for those of us of a traditionalist bent um in this era of

00:11:55.640 Kali Yuga and you know in the decline of all western civilization you know we are an island of

00:12:05.560 correctness in an ocean of madness so it often does seem like that we are alone but you're not 0.97

00:12:15.720 I mean the there are lots of people who feel the same there are lots of gothar who have fought that

00:12:21.640 struggle and um you know find meaning in life so um yes by all means call them call me

00:12:39.160 we will talk to you without judgment so another just a so you know proof of concept

00:12:46.440 there have been at least three people that i know of that have reached out at moments they

00:12:56.540 were considering that that are still with us because they chose to reach out at that moment

00:13:02.580 and maybe it's because they talked to really awesome gofi i think that more importantly

00:13:09.320 they created an opportunity for someone to try to help and for the gods to work in their life

00:13:18.980 in a very particular way that that opportunity wouldn't have been there if they didn't make the

00:13:23.380 phone call so it does work sometimes big time big time and um and just to know that you're not alone

00:13:31.060 that's i think that and that is a big part of the modern condition and one of the things that

00:13:36.200 we've talked about on the show before is that despite the internet connectedness that has

00:13:43.340 brought us together in this way that is kind of the best and worst of all worlds because of the

00:13:49.320 internet people are not connected to the people who are close to them physically maybe a little

00:13:57.320 more spiritually but it's hard to get a hug online you know what I mean so it so

00:14:05.620 this world is kind of

00:14:08.820 the best and worst of all times

00:14:10.400 one of the

00:14:12.880 reasons I started doing this

00:14:14.880 series

00:14:18.080 just

00:14:20.200 you know is I feel like that

00:14:22.680 the

00:14:23.660 you know

00:14:25.960 that

00:14:28.700 the purpose of our

00:14:30.860 faith the purpose of religious practice

00:14:32.940 is to

00:14:34.300 help us to be whole people. And I was actually watching a video from a friend of ours,

00:14:44.040 non-member, who talks about Germanic religious practice, and he reiterated something I already

00:14:50.720 knew that, you know, about whole, holy, holistic, those all having the same root words.

00:14:57.200 So part of the goal of certainly my personal religious practice and other stuff that I do and hopefully a part of the way that the church approaches these things is to make us all whole people that, you know, like, unlike Christianity, we don't think that you can believe the certain thing and be okay.

00:15:25.100 you have we are who we we are what we do um to quote oh god who's the guy in um

00:15:34.960 the arnold schwarzenegger movie the you are what you do um you know what i'm talking about the

00:15:42.840 it's quatto quatto um yes uh you are what you do so uh so i would rather quote swain

00:15:52.880 loading that we are our deeds but quato quato wisdom is welcome as well

00:15:59.600 i don't have a yoda appropriate quote so quato has to do um so being intact eating well

00:16:11.120 but not overdoing it exercising but not overdoing it acting as a good citizen

00:16:18.640 without necessarily going to extremes.

00:16:21.460 Those are the sorts of things that, it seems to me, make us hold people

00:16:27.360 because inside your brain, inside my brain at least,

00:16:34.880 I'm not comfortable with myself unless I can damp down the cognitive dissonance.

00:16:44.120 Okay. And cognitive dissonance comes about when you say you do one thing or you believe one thing, but you act in a different way from that. So mindfulness then being engaged in all the acts that you do on a day to day basis.

00:17:07.440 One of the things, you know, even though we divide the world into the sacred space where we do ritual, the rest of the world is still holy.

00:17:20.460 So the way that you act with other people, the way that you act with animals, those are all in their own way an exercise of your whole being, your holy being.

00:17:34.540 And so one of the things I try to do with myself and hopefully with all of us now is to engage that whole being in the way that you work in the world and make that more comfortable for yourself and for those around you.

00:17:54.680 And some of it, just like the people that you've talked about that were dissuaded from suicide from conversations with Kothar,

00:18:08.820 I think it's just a way of validating our worldview, the way that we, as a tour, view the world is, you know, is the proper way.

00:18:25.140 We are not the children of Descartes who think that the world is divided into man and not man, that, you know, that we are, you know, the whole world is holy in its own way.

00:18:36.720 Which doesn't mean I don't eat animals, but I just think they should be treated with respect.

00:18:44.760 So anyway, that's so that's that's part of it.

00:18:49.360 And then like to go through the like all a lot of the things we've talked about.

00:18:55.720 I would like to think that maybe there are some people who have questions that, you know, and would range on any topic that we've talked about or anything we haven't talked about.

00:19:02.620 But, you know, I always I think the thing that has resonated a lot with people is the discussion that I've done here and with several people personally about debt counseling.

00:19:17.260 And certainly, for those who don't know, I'm a bankruptcy attorney.

00:19:21.620 I practice debtor bankruptcy, file bankruptcies for people and companies.

00:19:25.740 um but um because of that i've developed a very skeptical eye toward credit of any type

00:19:39.180 in the modern world of course you can't get a mortgage you can't get a house

00:19:44.760 without a mortgage unless you're very lucky

00:19:48.020 but aside from a mortgage I strongly discourage anyone from taking on debt for any reason

00:19:58.460 you know

00:20:02.060 cars might be an exception but even then like so many people and I know the clients that I see

00:20:12.400 are the people who have um made a series of bad decisions but most of the time people trade in

00:20:19.840 for example they trade in a car that still have that still has years of useful life left in it

00:20:25.840 um as soon as they get it paid for or even before it's paid for they trade in negative negative

00:20:30.560 equity and start drag i you know i the analogy i use is i tell them you're driving around a big

00:20:36.400 anchor out there. You know, you've got $15,000 in debt on a car that's worth $8,000, or you've

00:20:43.660 got $40,000 in debt on a car that's worth $25,000. And there's no way that makes any kind of

00:20:49.740 financial sense. A friend of mine out here where I live is a mechanic. And I drove up there one day

00:20:58.160 And there was a guy up there in like an 83 Suburban that was rusted and, you know, three different colors of paint.

00:21:09.180 And that guy is a multimillionaire who owns tens of thousands of acres in Leon.

00:21:16.960 Sorry, that's probably wrong.

00:21:18.120 It's thousands of acres in Leon County.

00:21:20.780 But that's how you that's how you protect and preserve wealth is by not spending money.

00:21:24.740 I saw it again recently

00:21:29.760 you know we spend money we don't have

00:21:31.660 to impress people we don't like

00:21:33.240 and

00:21:34.820 we're finally getting to a point

00:21:37.600 I think certainly within the

00:21:39.160 community

00:21:39.820 maybe within the

00:21:42.940 traditionalist community

00:21:45.320 at large

00:21:46.160 that we're getting past that

00:21:49.360 who cares what kind of car you drive

00:21:51.700 you know

00:21:52.780 as long as it gets you to work

00:21:54.600 um who cares what kind of shoes you wear i certainly don't um not that i'm any gauge

00:22:01.380 um we also have to recognize the the have to wrong term we should also recognize the value of

00:22:12.160 quality over quantity um the um you know it's better to own one nice pair of shoes than 17

00:22:21.640 pairs of Payless shoes. It's better to own one nice jacket than seven that are, you know, seven

00:22:31.220 cheap ones. And again, that is an indication that, you know, that we, in the modern American

00:22:41.740 experience, one of the things that we do to validate ourselves is to go out and buy stuff,

00:22:48.580 right that gives us a certain power over our environment that we can take this paper that

00:22:56.560 fine we take this piece of plastic we have in our wallet and go out and change

00:23:02.640 buy bring in some new stuff it's not healthy that's not a healthy way of interacting with

00:23:10.800 reality that you know buying stuff doesn't make you a bigger person or a better person

00:23:17.120 It just means you've been trapped in the, you know, in the consumerist trap.

00:23:27.020 Rowdy, Roddy Piper, you know, borrow a pair of his glasses and you'll see that commercial advertisements are not doing anything other than trying to ensnare you in a terrible, terrible distortion of our culture.

00:23:47.120 And, you know, it still troubles me in one of my many troubles, the fact that it remains one of the biggest growth industries in the United States is these self-storage buildings, right?

00:24:10.280 and there are two under construction between my house and my job so you know and they're already

00:24:20.200 all over the place and that's because we have all this other junk that we don't need and can't use

00:24:26.440 and we're out of space for it so we first of all we have bigger houses bigger apartments than we've

00:24:32.280 ever had before and yet that's still not enough room we have all this other crap that we have to

00:24:36.760 find somewhere else to put it it's just absurd you know have less have better stuff and spend

00:24:46.040 time with your kids spend time with your dog you know do stuff get a get a hobby don't shop

00:24:55.000 so that's a big part of that um so a good segue in that vein well that will save you money

00:25:03.720 and what can you do with that money you can support the causes of the house of true focus

00:25:09.400 so a couple of people started off donating to the show i want to acknowledge them and give kind of

00:25:14.740 heads up where we're at on stuff we're raising money for um jeffrey in texas frequent donor

00:25:19.760 to the program donated 15 each towards siggerhane pavilion and the baldershoff steeple so we

00:25:27.260 appreciate you jeffrey thank you very much gilbert a constant donor on the program and very much

00:25:36.060 appreciated donated 150 towards phrase off uh towards paying off the uh phrase off thank you

00:25:43.740 for that we appreciate it um and brent in canada gave 60 united states dollars towards uh phrase

00:25:51.500 off we appreciate that we appreciate you thank you so much um kind of letting you know where

00:25:57.980 we're at on those things could you go ahead and put the pavilion situation up for us wonderful

00:26:05.260 um still got twenty six thousand eighty one dollars we're trying to raise on it

00:26:11.500 don't let that be discouraging we have already raised eight thousand nine hundred and nineteen

00:26:16.300 not including what has been generated through this program today so we're about a third of the

00:26:22.140 way there thank you very much everybody who has donated i'm looking forward to uh matter of fact

00:26:27.020 i was having a conversation today about getting the earthwork done and then plans on getting the

00:26:34.460 cement foundation board so we're making good progress you guys are awesome thank you for that

00:26:41.340 and then Nick where we at on paying off phrase off keep in mind we just dedicated phrase off

00:26:49.980 on the 6th of December and we are 42.6 percent paid off already so we got seventy one thousand

00:26:59.700 six hundred and ninety four dollars remaining comes out to just about ninety eight dollars

00:27:06.420 per afa member would pay that off instantly just for digestibility so thank you guys appreciate

00:27:14.100 y'all so much uh anybody who's interested in donating to any of the things we raise money for

00:27:20.580 runestone.org donate and we appreciate everybody's generosity

00:27:28.420 and one way to get there to interrupt your thought um one way to get there is like if your habit is

00:27:36.420 You know, you'd go by that green coffee place that I refuse to name and buy a $4 cup of coffee every morning.

00:27:46.780 You know, you could make your own coffee for 50 cents a day and donate us the extra buck 50 for a month.

00:27:54.980 And, you know, that'd be $50 a month. We'd be well on our way.

00:27:57.900 i think so one thing that i think is really important to the stuff that alan is talking

00:28:06.140 about and it relates to this um recognizing

00:28:15.580 small consistent goals that you can track and doing them and how big of an impact that they

00:28:22.140 do make over time you know one thing I get on the cares kind of car you drive

00:28:30.100 kind of thing no some people do I'm not that guy though I care about saving

00:28:34.320 money on gas this is my this is my Prius with my rebel flag on the front in our

00:28:41.660 current geopolitical times I'm glad that I have not been paying as much gas the

00:28:48.640 rest of you guys have been on this last little bit um that shocks me how much money i save in

00:28:55.320 gas for what would be the case if i was driving a different vehicle um but like on what alan said

00:29:02.220 a dollar a day every month it's 30 bucks that isn't nothing you know a small change

00:29:11.840 but added up to the day every day for a year makes a big difference.

00:29:17.480 A lot of things that you don't notice make a tremendous impact over time,

00:29:23.720 and that is on anything.

00:29:26.480 One of the things I've noticed a lot and something that we talk on here a lot about,

00:29:30.620 specifically on some of the shows with Alan and I,

00:29:33.800 is getting in better shape and physical fitness things.

00:29:38.100 Be that you're trying to gain muscle, be that you're trying to lose fat, or if you're trying to reach a performance benchmark, it is daunting to find yourself 30% body fat over where you want to be, and the only thing you see is the finish line, because it's a very long time to get there.

00:30:07.120 but if you take measurements and track those things on a scheduled weekly basis or monthly

00:30:12.560 or whatever your situation you can notice incremental progress and be encouraged to do

00:30:18.480 that next thing or to go to that next month and see where it is finding ways to make small changes

00:30:24.400 and small progress and then noting the difference is huge and i think that is a key to most any

00:30:32.080 change that we want to make is it comes i think in i think in goal setting and i think that's

00:30:40.320 important to our people as a whole we have a lot of people that wait until the perfect

00:30:47.200 opportunity to do things and don't do anything until they find it spoiler alert that perfect

00:30:54.000 opportunity usually doesn't come and they spend their life adorning couches if you don't wait

00:31:00.640 for perfect but you do have an attainable thing once you accomplish it you build a momentum

00:31:05.680 towards the next attainable thing i think that most often it's not the huge victory you get

00:31:13.120 there by stacking small victory upon smaller until you get closer if you're doing it no matter what

00:31:19.440 you're in an optimum position to jump if there's the big victory presents itself but realistically

00:31:25.600 success with any of the things we do is stacking small things one on another and i think another

00:31:32.240 piece to that is that you have to form habits and i say you have formed habits i don't know if you

00:31:40.080 do i have to form habits and i think that most of us have to form habits it is hard to change

00:31:46.800 a way of behaving be it a big way or a small way if it deviates from your norm especially the

00:31:53.680 older you are the more set in the ways you are the more you have other conflicting habits but

00:32:00.160 it takes a little bit when you develop a habit over the course of months you have a pull towards

00:32:07.920 that in case you forget you notice something's off you notice you didn't do a thing you were

00:32:13.360 supposed to do and you feel compelled to do it because it has become habit um so form habits

00:32:23.680 Right. Form good habits. And another thing, and I've been aware of this phenomenon without having a name for it. I still don't remember exactly what the name of it is. But I've got the idea from a talk that I watched recently.

00:32:43.160 and it's

00:32:46.200 it's like the abstinence

00:32:49.320 phenomenon

00:32:49.920 right and if you know if your goal is to

00:32:53.200 lose weight

00:32:53.720 and you're part of that goal like

00:32:57.120 you say I'm not going to eat any

00:32:59.060 carbs I'm not going to eat any

00:33:00.740 simple carbs at all

00:33:02.300 but then

00:33:05.200 you break that like you have a slice of

00:33:07.240 pizza or you have a piece of cake

00:33:08.600 then it's like you fall all the way off the wagon

00:33:11.080 so then you just spend the whole weekend

00:33:13.140 binge eating Doritos or Cheetos, which is my personal favorite, but either way.

00:33:24.860 The goal here too is to have kind of, like you said, incremental steps, number one, but also

00:33:33.740 recognize that you're going to make progress some days and some days you're going to slide back

00:33:39.960 And that's okay. You know, you can make coffee four days a week and then once a week you can treat yourself to, well, we have Lucky Goat here in Tallahassee, which is a local brewery.

00:33:53.600 So that's where I go on the days I feel like a frozen coffee latte or whatever it is they make.

00:34:02.160 You know, I go to a local place because that's what you're supposed to do. That's what you should do.

00:34:05.640 um but not very often most of the time you know i'm saving i'm saving that money by brewing coffee

00:34:14.580 at home um we cook at home i don't eat we don't eat out a lot we don't eat fast food which is

00:34:23.760 terrible for you all the way around so if we want to go out to eat and have a nice meal we go to a

00:34:29.900 local place some place that cooks the meat cooks the food on site fast food is terrible idea

00:34:38.620 corporations hate you um the food hates you it's bad for you um so you know you're much better off

00:34:51.660 making a ham sandwich and taking that to work instead of eating

00:34:57.180 whatever it is, fast food

00:34:59.300 slop is throwing out the window at you.

00:35:01.780 Is that the Domino's Chicken Ranch

00:35:03.480 Pizza? That loves you.

00:35:06.060 That is the exception.

00:35:07.320 It is only made with the most immaculate

00:35:09.200 ingredients that are the key to

00:35:11.300 good health.

00:35:14.460 No, point taken.

00:35:15.240 I'm random.

00:35:17.320 That is my

00:35:17.920 that has become my cure for

00:35:21.400 the sniffles.

00:35:23.600 If I got a cold or

00:35:25.280 something usually does not keep me down more than about a day or so because i hit it hard and fast

00:35:31.620 with junk food and the excess carbs and fast and fats cure me with their delicious magics

00:35:38.040 no it's the it's the over it's the sickness that is generating in your liver from the fast food

00:35:44.500 just overwhelms your like overwhelms your body it's like we're going to ignore this little sniffle

00:35:49.900 because now we have some really bad stuff going on.

00:35:52.720 See, science.

00:35:54.540 Trust the science.

00:35:56.640 Science.

00:35:58.100 But that's neither here nor there.

00:36:03.820 So while you're thinking of that,

00:36:08.820 I want to say one thing about this mug here.

00:36:11.960 This was an unexpected and wonderful gift

00:36:14.740 from one of our members.

00:36:17.480 I don't know if she'd want to be named or not,

00:36:19.360 but um she she said actually her husband bought it and um gave it to her to send to me so thank

00:36:27.040 you um for my wonderful mug i always drink my tea and honey in it um although i don't drink black tea

00:36:34.880 because black tea has fluoride in it you're not supposed to take the fluoride but the um so i'm

00:36:40.160 drinking top you know liver cleanse but you know with speaking of honey there yep there yep there

00:36:46.640 you go or alcohol if that's your thing um the um i pulled five gallons of honey out of my

00:36:56.560 hives last weekend um dug that and spun it so i'm sorry it's weekend before last because last

00:37:02.640 weekend the um so you know we had kind of a drought here in early spring so the honey crop is a little

00:37:12.400 depressed from where it was last year but we did make honey i'm grateful to my bees

00:37:17.200 for working so hard so i could steal their product i actually um one of the in the early days of the

00:37:26.560 pagan listservs um we had a um one of the members not afa members obviously but one of the members

00:37:35.600 of that listserv arguing that beekeeping was slavery because you know we got bees in there

00:37:41.760 and we're making them work so we can have the product of their labors exactly you know there's

00:37:50.960 that t-shirt on t-shirt hell with the picture of the pyramids slavery gets done

00:38:00.720 so that said um in our review of topics discussed you have a

00:38:11.760 scheme for that, or are we just shooting from the hip? We're basically shooting from the hip.

00:38:17.560 I've covered a couple, three things that I really wanted to re-emphasize. I guess, you know,

00:38:23.420 I could talk. The other thing that I think about from time to time,

00:38:29.060 we used to call, also true, the religion with homework. You know, like we expected,

00:38:35.060 and I think it was an expectation

00:38:38.100 like in the long time ago

00:38:39.760 in the ancient days of

00:38:41.700 2007 when I was first a member

00:38:43.900 like everybody

00:38:45.180 expected

00:38:47.220 there was this expectation of the

00:38:49.020 forerunners who had made it

00:38:51.760 into the faith that

00:38:53.480 everybody should understand

00:38:55.680 all this complicated intricacy

00:38:57.300 of the way all

00:38:59.700 these faith points interact

00:39:01.520 and

00:39:03.020 And, you know, I still believe that to be true.

00:39:06.940 I think it is absolutely valid.

00:39:09.320 And as I tell new people or people who are exploring our faith for the first time or considering, you know, inching their way into the door.

00:39:19.500 So, you know, you don't have to understand all these three levels that many of the myths address.

00:39:29.200 You don't have to understand, you know, how the staff works as the Axis Mundi and, you know, what it was that the board was trying to pull up when he's fishing Jormungand out from the bottom of the ocean.

00:39:43.880 You don't have to really grab all that stuff. 0.59

00:39:46.440 You know, if you are heterosexual, European, and, you know, believe in religion, then you're already one of us.

00:40:01.800 And so you don't have to dig into all the finesse of the religion.

00:40:09.100 I mean, you know, if you read, as I used to think I was going to do, like if you read the Apologia of St. Augustine or any of these other long-winded Christian theologians, like they dig down way into what Christianity means or what they think it means. 0.90

00:40:32.180 Most Christians don't understand any of that stuff and don't care. 0.56

00:40:34.800 you know and you don't and our practitioners um you know all you have to know is that there is a

00:40:44.720 place for you in the shield wall there's a place for you among the folk you are already us and

00:40:51.800 you know it is the job of all terrier go thee and um simon harrell to understand all this stuff

00:41:02.140 And the rest of us are just helping row the boat.

00:41:06.840 Well, so this is kind of a favorite topic of mine and something I would like to add clarity to.

00:41:17.380 I think I come off, or some people perceive me as being dismissive of study or education or whatever.

00:41:28.240 It's not that.

00:41:29.180 It is very much what Alan said, and I think that we need to, in our minds, understand what is essential to religion and what is a hobby or what is something fun that we like to learn about.

00:41:55.700 studying about our faith is only essentially religious if it enhances your relationship

00:42:07.020 with the iser um now that's not i don't specify

00:42:14.080 i love to study about alcatru i love studying about history those are fun things that i enjoy

00:42:23.220 I don't need those things to be an Ossetruer I do those things because I love them it's

00:42:31.260 fascinating and I do think that it deepens my faith and it deepens my relationships but

00:42:37.080 fundamentally you don't need all of that to practice Ossetruer there is a generation of

00:42:43.680 people that would nerd out about Ossetruer being the religion with homework and I think

00:42:50.520 a couple of things went on there. I was having a conversation. Oh, everyone who helped make

00:43:02.180 Midsummer at Odin's Off an awesome event, thank you guys so much. I had the pleasure of going

00:43:10.360 back out there this last weekend and celebrating Midsummer at Odin's Off. It was amazing. And one

00:43:16.420 of the conversations that I had with one of our folk builders up there was about this very thing.

00:43:20.520 It is surprising how little knowledge our people had about our lore or the history of our ancestors or any of those things when the first generation of our elders started doing this in the 1970s and 1980s.

00:43:44.320 And they had to do the homework so they could have things to build upon and context to practice within and to figure those things. To them, it needed to be the religion with homework because they were blazing a new trail and they were having to sometimes work towards getting these things out there.

00:44:09.600 There was a time that the Austro Free Assembly, our predecessor organization, had to do a write-in campaign to get the Hollander translation of the Poetic Edda republished, because you couldn't get a good English translation of the Edda at the time.

00:44:26.740 Their efforts, you know, in early editions of that Hollander Edda, they were noted in the acknowledgments at the beginning that the write-in campaign was part of what got that re-release.

00:44:36.580 so

00:44:37.720 religion with homework thing

00:44:40.040 starts out from a very good place

00:44:42.700 I think one of the things towards the end of that

00:44:44.900 though is you had a lot of basement

00:44:46.600 wizards that

00:44:47.740 wanted to do much

00:44:50.700 more study about

00:44:52.060 Alistair truth and practice Alistair

00:44:54.500 truth

00:44:54.660 and that's kind of where some of my

00:44:57.900 I don't know scoffing at that is

00:45:00.260 no studying about Alistair

00:45:02.340 truth is

00:45:02.900 one of the things I deeply love to do with my life

00:45:07.180 But this isn't a research project.

00:45:10.360 It is a devotional faith to gods that we build relationship with, that we exchange gift with, that we receive blessings from.

00:45:20.440 And if your study of it draws you away from that personal connection, then it's counterproductive.

00:45:29.980 If it brings you closer, then great.

00:45:32.260 But don't let the study get in the way of the practice.

00:45:36.560 And it ultimately, too, is a, you know, it is a tribal practice.

00:45:40.860 So, yes, you can do devotionals on your own.

00:45:46.940 But the modern condition is eons away from where, you know, certainly where it would have been even 200 years ago, much less 2000 years ago.

00:46:01.320 So, you know, for some kind of say I'm a sole practitioner of whatever faith it is that they're practicing would have been not only unknown, but like unknowable to, you know, I mean, there are there were a vanishingly few ascetic monks who lived by themselves or even then most of the time they were living in a community of monks.

00:46:27.820 So to say, you know, I'm going to go out here and do this religion by myself is a contradiction in terms.

00:46:35.820 You know, people need people, as corny as that sounds, and folk need folk.

00:46:46.700 And that's how we prevent despair and we prevent those, the feeling of loneliness that so many of us have struggled with because when we come together, we recognize each other as like we're the same ones.

00:47:05.260 the rest of the world, Disney World and CNN, that's the insanity. For those of us who are

00:47:17.700 together with a right understanding of history, with a right understanding of interpersonal

00:47:26.080 dynamics

00:47:29.960 with a right understanding of

00:47:31.980 our approach to the eternal

00:47:33.780 we're right

00:47:35.860 the rest of those people are messed up

00:47:37.680 and I say that

00:47:39.360 not to casual

00:47:41.960 friends but

00:47:42.680 I try to pull people back

00:47:45.600 into our side

00:47:47.760 they should join the team and come in for the

00:47:49.960 big win

00:47:50.440 it really is a team

00:47:55.960 sport the more you come to an understanding of any worldview that our ancestors found familiar

00:48:06.040 it's about community it's about finding your place in community it's about the sharing with family

00:48:14.120 with friends it's about the community structure and it's about practicing our faith as a group

00:48:20.040 if you are isolated on a desert isle sometimes somewhere okay and if all you have is to do this

00:48:32.700 by yourself a lot better than nothing given the opportunity it's always better to practice with

00:48:39.600 other sincere people it's kind of a fundamental to what this is this is all about right and so

00:48:46.340 this, this brings me to a rant that I wanted to do tonight. Um, lately there has been a,

00:48:55.800 I don't know, a criticism, a whatever on social media and the source of it isn't that important,

00:49:07.660 but the questions brought up are things that I do run into from time to time that I think

00:49:11.920 it's worth um addressing and i guess explaining a little bit and it's hard because we've developed

00:49:20.960 these short form arguments online that are tedious and faceless but i did want to present

00:49:29.680 like why we do some of the things we do that i think other people i think there's people

00:49:34.880 who genuinely don't understand and i think there's other people that just want to be contrarian

00:49:39.600 um no so something that has always been a source of confusion is the scandinavians or certain

00:49:50.760 scandinavians they make a basic assumption oftentimes that they are the experts on

00:49:59.580 house true because the place that stuff got written down was in scandinavia therefore without

00:50:09.780 any or sometimes very very little actual understanding of any of those sources or any 0.88

00:50:16.860 of doing this that they are the experts and that we must be clueless because we're silly americans 0.63

00:50:24.540 and don't understand one thing that i think is fun to know

00:50:31.260 you don't osmos house a truth through proximity that doesn't do that another thing that's important

00:50:40.860 we are exactly you know again i don't know the age of the person but within the reasonable

00:50:47.500 error of a human lifetime exact same number of generations removed are you know my ex-great

00:50:55.180 grandparents and their ex-great-grandparents from the original practitioners of our faith

00:51:02.780 we have been not also true in our family line for exactly the same amount of time

00:51:09.740 there's no proprietary relationship because a scandinavian ancestors stayed in scandinavia

00:51:20.140 whereas my ancestors traveled from there to other places

00:51:28.220 these logical things i think affect how we perceive what we do so another thing that they have

00:51:38.940 that i run into is a well this has to be just for scandinavians these are our local gods

00:51:46.700 without the critical thought of

00:51:51.260 what were these gods before your ancestors were in scandinavia

00:51:57.500 did these gods just occur when your ancestors linguistically developed like proto-norse

00:52:04.300 where were these gods before that for your ancestors that came before that your ancestors

00:52:10.480 live like in norway or do you do the gods rather live in norway these are things that i don't think

00:52:18.460 people think about i sat in on a or listening to a discussion people were having the other day

00:52:23.960 and something that's fundamental and would seem to go without saying but doesn't the gods are real

00:52:32.380 if the gods are like literary characters then i can see what you see often in works of scholarship

00:52:43.780 where they contrast the norse odin compared to the anglo-saxon uh woden well no those are the

00:52:52.280 same person they're obviously the same person if the person doesn't exist and it's just a

00:52:58.660 a mythological figure then sure you can bifurcate them and compare them as separate things

00:53:06.020 but if it's real and if we actually believe this which we very much do

00:53:11.460 clearly they're the same god of the same peoples that are separated by time and geography

00:53:19.620 if these gods are real which they are

00:53:21.460 they don't like cellularly divide every time our folk learn a new language or every time our people

00:53:32.400 conquer a new valley or discover a new continent that doesn't logically make sense these are the

00:53:39.540 gods of our race these are the gods that made us us and these are the gods that have been with us

00:53:46.080 since the very beginning of our existence.

00:53:50.420 They have traveled with us as our ancestors

00:53:53.660 migrated and conquered and explored from place to place.

00:53:59.020 That only makes sense. 0.60

00:54:01.680 And any thought other than that

00:54:04.120 does not treat them as though they are real.

00:54:07.880 It's speculative at an imaginary concept.

00:54:11.260 And that's not what we're doing.

00:54:13.500 So I think sometimes that is a

00:54:16.080 honest confusion but it's not one that's very well thought out I've also heard from a similar

00:54:23.740 group and it kind of originated out of this they think that it's really quote unquote weird that

00:54:30.480 we're dressing nicely when we do bloat and that it's strange why don't we look quote normal like

00:54:37.680 them. It's funny because when they posted a picture, there was a picture of a number of our

00:54:47.780 Gothar dressed nicely at Thorsoth. And then the bottom picture was some Scandinavians in ball

00:54:57.020 caps and hoodies and, you know, cargo pants. And it took me a second. I was almost going to like

00:55:08.280 the picture because it was so obvious that of the two, we look like we're doing something serious

00:55:13.340 and they don't. But no, I read a little bit further. No, we were the joke in the picture

00:55:19.640 because we had the audacity to wear ties and look nice.

00:55:27.020 It should go without saying it's ridiculous to mock other people for trying to look nice

00:55:33.680 when approaching the gods, but I think it talks about how it speaks to the fact that

00:55:40.900 we take what we're doing seriously.

00:55:43.040 scandinavians find it odd sometimes that we wear a tie to be blowed but a scandinavian wears a tie

00:55:52.440 to a wedding or to a funeral or to a job interview or to um the opera or to a you know

00:56:02.720 fancy holiday party for their work or to you know any special occasion

00:56:08.900 to me them not doing that when approaching the gods

00:56:14.600 is problematic because it says that they're not treating that as a special event

00:56:22.360 we are accused of wearing church clothes and doing church things and i think that's another

00:56:32.040 thing that often causes confusion and i know that we have an international audience on the show and

00:56:36.220 don't presume that every scandinavian thinks this way but swedes that i've known and talked to about

00:56:42.940 this their parents didn't go to church their grandparents didn't go to church their great

00:56:53.900 grandparents didn't go to church so they're several generations removed from people who

00:57:02.380 had a sincere faith whatever that faith might be religion looks a certain way and one of the ways

00:57:11.340 it looks is you treat it as something special not something casual you treat it literally we talk

00:57:19.340 about the sacred versus the profane you treat it as something special now that can look different

00:57:25.900 and certainly it looks different when indians practice religion or when

00:57:32.940 japanese practice religion or when native americans practice religion but in any of those cases

00:57:41.180 you dress ceremonially for something that's special that's all we're doing is wearing western

00:57:48.140 clothes that you would wear to something that is semi-formal something that's elevated in what you

00:57:54.060 do so that's why we do that and I you know respect that looks different to different people

00:57:59.180 you certainly don't berate people and demand they dress a certain way on it but that's the reason

00:58:05.160 we do what we do and I don't find that odd it's odd to me that others would find that odd and so

00:58:12.560 that kind of goes once you get in that mindset where you know I am in a formal it again it's

00:58:20.300 It's that you're elevating your mentation.

00:58:25.380 You know, you're elevating your mindset.

00:58:27.600 I am putting on my church clothes, if that's the way you want to say it.

00:58:31.540 I'm putting on my bloke clothes to go and meet the gods.

00:58:35.340 Like, you wouldn't go to meet the governor in a hoodie and flip-flops.

00:58:42.600 So you shouldn't go to meet your gods in a hoodie and flip-flops.

00:58:46.120 Now, and I know I see a lot of this stuff in being through this lens, but all of this attitude would have been fundamentally understood even 100 years ago.

00:59:05.180 What has happened is we've been overwhelmed by the communist ideology that the common people are the only thing that is worth celebrating.

00:59:23.820 And so that's where all this dressing down comes from, is from this anti-traditionalist, anti-elitist framework that has been foisted on Western civilization for the last 150 years or so.

00:59:44.980 um look at the pictures of like street pictures um from america probably sweden too like in the

00:59:57.060 you know in the 1910s the 1920s when cameras were first being developed see what i did there

01:00:03.380 developing cameras um so uh when photography was first coming into vogue like the street scenes

01:00:11.860 Even the 8, 10, 15-year-old kids have on suits and ties and hats.

01:00:19.640 So to even appear in public at all without a jacket on would have been anathema to a gentleman of any standing at all.

01:00:33.280 So to think that that you should go to your gods dressed in common garb is to portray and embody that lie that has been the underlying cause of the decay of Western civilization for the last 150 years.

01:00:56.420 Well, so I've got more to say on it.

01:01:01.160 there's comment over in the thing dress clothes are ceremonial attire loads of ceremony why

01:01:06.440 wouldn't we wear a ceremony no okay so no they're following what we're saying that's fine i misread

01:01:11.240 the thing that i want to say that this kind of came down to is them kind of mutually agreeing

01:01:19.640 amongst that camp that well well that's because americans are still struggling with the christian

01:01:24.920 mindset but as opposed to what i couldn't deny that a lot of the way that we approach religion

01:01:34.920 does go through a certain amount of christian lens because that's the lens that any of us have

01:01:40.920 a familiarity with but the other side isn't approaching it through a you know some kind of

01:01:47.720 authentic pagan lens they're approaching it through an atheistic secular humanist lens

01:01:56.040 and i would argue at least one is done through like faith and religion whereas the other is

01:02:03.400 inherently anti-faith anti-piety and anti-religion um church culture and we said it a lot on your

01:02:12.520 western the western church whatever that looks like to you be it you know roman catholicism be it

01:02:19.320 you know american protestantism whatever it looks like it looks extremely different than

01:02:26.680 middle eastern christianity and it looks extremely different than african christianity

01:02:32.920 when christianity developed you know again before the 20th century before

01:02:37.720 everything was was mixed up and cross-pollinated all the time you would see it take a very

01:02:45.640 different expression i would argue that any of the things that they would say are christian that we

01:02:52.120 do don't have any middle eastern components to them whatsoever they don't have a bible a biblical

01:02:59.640 point of reference they have this is how white people practice religion for the last you know

01:03:08.120 hundreds and hundreds of years and so that same level of piety and seriousness is something that

01:03:16.760 we want to apply to a religion that we find serious um i'm sure that if our house of true

01:03:26.680 ancestors were in a different part of the world in a different place in a different climate

01:03:32.200 the stuff they did would probably look different depending on the place but the attitude and the

01:03:38.040 reasoning behind it would be very very similar and i think it's very authentic the way we practice

01:03:46.360 i think it is a greater challenge for scandinavians to

01:03:49.320 rediscover what piety is because their society has lacked piety for generations longer than ours

01:03:58.680 and ours certainly has as well you see that regionally within the united states

01:04:03.640 i think southerners in areas where there is till much more recently very stronger in this presence

01:04:13.000 they access piety much easier than people that are a few generations further removed. They've

01:04:20.280 never seen it modeled. They've never been around pious people. But I would say that piety is not

01:04:27.720 a solely Christian thing. It's a people who genuinely believe the things they say thing.

01:04:34.840 And it's not, you know, oh, Christians are pious, so let's be crass and impious. 1.00

01:04:40.680 I would argue that any people of faith in the world, if their faith is sincere, they act piously. 1.00

01:04:49.440 You would see that with, you know, Hindus.

01:04:52.860 You would see it with practitioners of native faiths on all continents.

01:04:57.960 You would see that amongst any group of people that's not Abrahamist.

01:05:02.600 Once they're out of that rebellious phase and practicing sincere religion.

01:05:07.920 And one of the other, and I'll get off the topic here in a second, but one of the things that was also said, and again, much like the picture, it's funny because I 100% agree, but I think the implications are real different between the two people.

01:05:26.800 So the person who was bringing this conversation up was like, yeah, I think their problem is that, see, we're spiritual and they're religious.

01:05:38.400 Yeah, I think that is the problem.

01:05:41.320 And again, I think they see it in a polar opposite way, unfortunately.

01:05:49.000 But yeah, religion's not a bad word.

01:05:51.240 You're religious.

01:05:52.000 You can be spiritual and religious.

01:05:54.380 You can do both of those things.

01:05:56.300 religion is inherently spiritual but it is taking spirituality and putting it in a group context

01:06:02.700 it's elevating it to a practice for others to do that is institutionalized that is

01:06:12.060 built on something that's going to be there for our children there for our grandchildren

01:06:16.300 there for their children that builds something elevated as opposed to you know getting around

01:06:23.580 the fire and be allowed um i think that's kind of a encapsulation of the mindset right there

01:06:34.460 the rejection of the idea of religion kind of a non-starter if you're trying to practice a

01:06:39.340 religion and i think it's one of the things that holds a lot of people and even american

01:06:43.820 also to our back a reluctance to be part of a group a reluctance to the authority tell you

01:06:54.220 how to do something um which i think we've all been raised with a certain bristle to that we

01:07:02.460 need to overcome as grown people and as serious people but that kind of factors in a lot and i

01:07:09.260 just wanted to bring some attention to it because it's a conversation that's been going on in

01:07:13.580 a number of different places and i don't think that the people who the sincere people who have

01:07:19.740 questions about it understand where we're coming from but an american that spent their life trying

01:07:27.340 to do this to the best of their ability and has spent their life building a relationship

01:07:32.540 with the icr through the gift cycle has a better connection to the gods than somebody who just

01:07:38.220 happens to be in scandinavia and happens to have grown up with you know archaeology of pious people

01:07:45.900 surrounding them if they haven't chosen to make that a part of their life or to build that

01:07:51.020 relationship with the gods or to make this something they're devoted to you still got

01:07:57.820 to put in the work even if you live in scandinavia um but yeah that's my rant on that i know we've

01:08:04.220 We've got some questions to stack up on, do you have other stuff you'd like to present this evening?

01:08:08.740 Well, always.

01:08:10.360 So a couple of other topics that came to mind, and maybe I'll do them backwards now.

01:08:16.760 because one of the topics that crosses my frontier quite often nowadays

01:08:25.360 is the diminishing attention span of school-age young adults,

01:08:35.660 college students, high school students.

01:08:38.020 and it is the general consensus

01:08:45.360 that the cause of that is the cell phone

01:08:48.680 and the computer

01:08:51.440 that we're so conditioned

01:08:56.200 to consuming short form content

01:08:59.720 that we're unable to process

01:09:04.480 anything longer than a few minutes

01:09:08.300 of argumentation. If you go back

01:09:12.320 to the Douglas Lincoln debates

01:09:14.180 of

01:09:17.740 1860 or whenever that was, 1859, you know,

01:09:21.920 each of those speakers gave an opening

01:09:25.900 statement that was like an hour and a half

01:09:30.100 long.

01:09:30.600 And I don't mean this just in the sense of political discourse, although certainly the political discourse in this country has devolved markedly for a number of reasons and in any number of ways.

01:09:54.620 But, you know, when you, you know, people can't, if you can't follow a three-minute video, you're certainly not going to follow a 45-minute argument.

01:10:04.040 If you can't read two pages of explanation of the distinction between the sacred and the profane, you're not going to dig into the, you know, the, you know, the 300-page argument of why one is, you know, worthier than the other.

01:10:24.020 So, you know, I've got the anti-cell phone thing going on.

01:10:28.500 It's not just the, and it's not, I mean, it's like every time I hear or read something about it,

01:10:35.120 it just bolsters that discussion.

01:10:41.700 It is ruining our brains.

01:10:43.620 I mean, you know, people can't do simple sums anymore, you know, in your head.

01:10:50.700 And like one guy was talking about, like, how many of you can remember a phone number?

01:10:56.240 You don't have, you know, it's like walking around with a crutch all the time.

01:11:02.060 You know, pretty soon you forget how to walk.

01:11:07.120 Now, I am a veteran gloat scroller.

01:11:11.980 I don't call it doom scrolling anymore in the present connotations.

01:11:16.280 But I do try to keep abreast of the news and the pivots that are working for us, some of them, and some ones that are working against us.

01:11:31.840 Not that it has all that much impact on my daily life, but I like to know, you know, I like to have my finger on the pulse of how bad we're losing the war.

01:11:40.940 So those sorts of things, though, interestingly, perhaps, I actually watched in the background over the last couple of days.

01:11:55.520 I somehow came across the video is titled something like, you know, everything that they're teaching in history is wrong.

01:12:04.100 So I thought, hey, to myself, this is, you know, this is something I'd be interested in.

01:12:10.940 What it is, it's this writer who's an avowed communist who's talking about the way that they teach history and even other topics in universities and high schools is, you know, is incorrect.

01:12:27.960 and i'm like they got you know all they teach you know the entire methodology and curriculum in

01:12:37.240 these universities and colleges now is is all far left if not about communism it's certainly

01:12:46.840 more social activism than it is any real history and of course students

01:12:51.640 consume whatever the professors throw at them because they can't read a book that challenges

01:13:07.820 the, you know, the, the shared wisdom that they're being force fed. I mean, the, you know,

01:13:19.860 that's, that's what I, and the commenters in that video are talking, you know, over and over again,

01:13:25.980 man, this is great. This is, you know, I've never thought of it this way before. And it's like,

01:13:30.900 yeah, because you haven't read a book since you were seven years old. So this guy can get up there

01:13:37.020 and tell you anything you don't have any groundwork to prevent that from

01:13:44.900 polluting your brain stem because the because history is complicated and

01:13:50.900 intricate and if you don't understand the order of events and why things happen

01:13:58.820 certain and the way things happen sure you're not understanding why they

01:14:02.460 happen or why we're in this hand basket in the final stage of the Kali Yuga. That's one thing,

01:14:09.760 right, that you read a map, do sums in your head, blah, blah, blah, do all that sort of thing so

01:14:23.920 that, you know, to keep your brain sharp because that's what it's here for, right? One of the

01:14:29.360 things that attracted me to

01:14:31.040 Odinism, if that's one

01:14:32.900 word that we can substitute in here.

01:14:36.920 I see you flinch.

01:14:38.180 The,

01:14:40.500 you know,

01:14:42.440 is that Odin

01:14:43.900 lives at

01:14:46.280 the conjunction of thought

01:14:48.120 and memory. And so what is that?

01:14:49.940 You know, that's consciousness.

01:14:51.720 And if

01:14:52.320 Odin is the holy archetype

01:14:57.080 of

01:14:59.360 religious high manifestation then the more that you rely on your own wisdom and

01:15:08.600 your own memory your own thought then the the more that you the higher you

01:15:14.340 climb the axis Monday you know we are the pole between earth and heaven and

01:15:19.720 and as noble light seeking beings we should be reaching up toward the heavens

01:15:29.120 into the higher realms of consciousness.

01:15:32.400 So that's that part of that.

01:15:33.740 The other thing, and we can bring in discussion,

01:15:37.520 the other big point that I wanted to try to work in tonight,

01:15:41.560 review, is the idea of discipline.

01:15:46.620 You know, it is named as one of the nine noble virtues,

01:15:50.480 which is a distillation and not a set of commandments,

01:15:53.160 But discipline, self-discipline, again, is a way of manifesting the higher self.

01:16:03.940 I looked at a study that, fine, a review of a study that said that, that talked about if you teach children delayed gratification,

01:16:18.080 like the the more what they did is they tested kids who could demonstrate delayed gratification

01:16:29.060 in other words if if you wait five minutes before you eat this m&m i'll give you five m&ms

01:16:34.980 and some kids can't wait they eat the one m&m those kids don't do well but if you can teach

01:16:42.840 your children wait and we'll do something later those kids do better they do better in school

01:16:50.740 they earn more money lifetime and you know and part of that too and it relates to

01:16:56.140 being in debt right if you like maybe you do want a nice car well but if you if you wait and save

01:17:07.720 and pay for a nice car in cash in three years you can drive a nicer car than you would if you

01:17:16.700 were making payments for 10 years i mean most most car payments now are eight years long it's

01:17:22.520 just patently absurd but again that's the you know that's the idea of delayed gratification

01:17:27.520 i i don't i i want a better car but i'm willing to wait and you know put some new tires on this

01:17:37.640 junker so it'll get me to work safely for the next two years while I save up money and buy a

01:17:43.480 better car. So better stuff, but later is a way of manifesting discipline, as is all the other

01:17:53.860 things that, Matt, some of the things that you've talked about. Going to the gym when you don't feel

01:17:58.880 like it. Going to work when you don't feel like it. I mean, there are plenty of times

01:18:07.620 when they're I would rather be doing something else but you do your duty right

01:18:12.780 you get up and fight the good fight Nisha says we must imagine Sisyphus

01:18:21.660 happy so while we got a pause Steven in Japan donated $10 phrase off $5 towards

01:18:37.980 the pavilion thank you Steven appreciate you got a couple of questions lining up

01:18:46.040 up here. Nick in New Hampshire asks, if scientists say that 99.9% of species to ever exist have gone

01:18:56.440 extinct, we as a people could very easily be added to that list. How do we look at this information

01:19:03.620 from the perspective of our gods? Does it mean they don't care about those 99.9%? Or us as a

01:19:11.440 people if we went that route. I try to see it as every living thing lives under a fight for

01:19:17.540 survival. It is our job to prove that we are worthy of the gods and can come out of it

01:19:22.980 victoriously. Alan, what are your thoughts? I agree with that. You know, and I have even,

01:19:35.400 wow, there's so many places, so many directions I could go. First of all,

01:19:38.700 like if we when we talk about the gift cycle our gods give us strength and we give strength to our

01:19:46.160 gods and in the same way that 88 of the species that have ever lived have disappeared 88 of the

01:19:59.080 gods who have ever been worshipped have gone the you know gone the same way you know the gods of 0.55

01:20:06.280 Sumerians or the Hittites or, you know, all those other tribal gods, the Phoenicians,

01:20:15.400 where are they? They're gone. And yes, it is, 0.99

01:20:25.440 I don't like to use the term Darwinian, but it is certainly a struggle for survival, right?

01:20:32.180 And it comes back to that idea that the universe, like in the broader scheme of things, the multiverse, doesn't owe us anything.

01:20:45.920 We have to fight to maintain our place at the table.

01:20:55.440 This is a world of scarce resources.

01:21:02.180 made manifest thanks to the bounty of western so created by western civilization here lately but um

01:21:12.340 we

01:21:15.620 have to remember that our gods fight for us to the same extent that we fight for them

01:21:21.300 and so as we manifest our way into the future they can clear the way but it's up to us to

01:21:29.700 to do the grunt work and, you know, and dig the trenches and pave roads and fuel the rockets and

01:21:42.160 all that stuff that reach into the sky. You know, because if we don't, we will go the way of the

01:21:49.600 Sumerians and Hittites and the Phoenicians and be remembered as an ancient civilization that used

01:21:57.520 to be. But that's not what I want for my descendants. I want my grandparents to be 0.96

01:22:07.440 remembered. I want to be remembered. And the only way we do that is, you know, is to forge

01:22:12.700 a future that is friendly to the folk. How's that for some alliteration? Forge a folk-friendly

01:22:21.860 future. There you go. So before I get to it, GW Farmsworth donated $25 each to paying off

01:22:35.680 Sigurheim itself and toward the pavilion at Sigurheim. So thank you. He's late today. He's

01:22:41.960 usually first. Ah, we changed the time on him. That's not his fault. He's about 40 minutes

01:22:48.540 earlier than our previous start time so we appreciate you very much as always um

01:22:55.580 it's an interesting question there's a couple of things kind of packed in there um

01:23:03.660 does it mean the gods don't care about other species of gone extinct i don't know i don't

01:23:11.580 presume that our gods have some deep caring for all of the species on the earth i don't presume

01:23:18.140 to say that they don't care about particular species or whatnot what i do is they do care about

01:23:25.740 us they chose out of their benevolence and out of their far seeing that there is something special

01:23:33.340 there is a potential within our most distant ancestors they imbued those most distant ancestors

01:23:41.500 with the sacred elements of what makes us arian men and women they gave us that divine spark

01:23:49.580 that breath that animating force that goodly hue they gave that to us

01:23:57.900 for us to develop and become they saw through cultivating our ancestors

01:24:03.660 uh came with you know generations of our ancestors teaching them the steps to become more than they

01:24:16.060 were you know the potentiality raising from thrall to king they taught our people how to be

01:24:25.260 noble and how to be better they have taken an interest in us and our success

01:24:33.660 But yes, I think ultimately it is up to us to prove ourselves worthy.

01:24:39.300 I don't think that they cease to exist if we cease to exist.

01:24:44.840 But I do think they are empowered by our worship.

01:24:50.060 And I think that we are definitely empowered by our, you know, the benevolence they've bestowed on us.

01:24:58.720 I think that, you know, hopefully they would figure something out if we allowed ourselves to go extinct.

01:25:07.780 But I don't know how that works in that grand of a galactic context.

01:25:13.020 What I do know is it's incumbent upon us to do our part and not go extinct to the best of our ability so that we can be there to hold up our end of our relationship with God's.

01:25:27.720 Yeah, it's always uncomfortable to ponder extinction, and I think that we are specially enabled by our gods with abilities and faculties that give us the ability to stave off extinction and to overcome obstacles that we might otherwise not be able to overcome.

01:25:49.100 I think it's incumbent upon us to be good stewards of the intellect and the ability that we've been blessed with so that we don't find ourselves in that predicament.

01:26:00.240 But, you know, I don't apply that to other species of, you know, be it mammal or reptile or fungus for that matter that have gone extinct.

01:26:11.000 That's really outside my purview.

01:26:12.740 And in that context, and again, in like some of the idea of all these things working together

01:26:22.380 in a seamless way, one of the things that we talked about last month at Midsummer Bloat,

01:26:32.480 So one of the great things that came up for discussion is RK theory, and those two different theories of child rearing, of offspring rearing, not just for children, but, you know, but there are two species, sorry, there are two distinct ways of doing things when you're raising your progeny, right?

01:27:01.600 One is to have lots of kids.

01:27:06.220 I keep saying kids as if that's the only thing.

01:27:08.440 One is to have lots of offspring and invest very little in their rearing

01:27:16.880 and just hope that enough of them survive into the future

01:27:22.020 so that they can continue to reproduce, our theory.

01:27:25.740 And then there's K-theory, that is having very few children and investing a lot in their manifestations so that they are, so that you have a, you know, so that you have a very few offspring, but you have embodied strong survival stuff in them so that they can live, you know.

01:27:53.740 And, you know, like the shorthand that one of the guys said is, you know, it's run versus kill.

01:28:01.560 You know, like you think about mice, right? 0.96

01:28:05.440 Mice mothers don't teach their kids anything. 0.99

01:28:08.080 They just, they nurse them until they can kick them out of the nest, and then they go and spread out.

01:28:12.840 Whereas wolves, only the alphas reproduce or maybe the betas, and then like a whole pack raises the kids,

01:28:21.080 and they have few wolves, but they invest a lot in their training and their upbringing.

01:28:28.780 And that's the way our civilization, that's the way Western civilization is manifested

01:28:33.520 into the world.

01:28:35.160 We are K-theory.

01:28:36.740 We have fewer children and try to teach them stuff and, you know, try to help them manifest

01:28:46.100 their highest selves.

01:28:47.280 and that's been the way

01:28:50.420 like I was reading like even in medieval

01:28:52.840 Germany you know

01:28:54.520 in the medieval period

01:28:56.180 throughout Western Europe men didn't have kids

01:28:58.980 until later in life

01:29:00.160 as opposed to other types of

01:29:02.580 civilizations

01:29:04.180 that have

01:29:06.040 lots and lots and lots

01:29:08.900 of kids and don't teach them anything

01:29:10.400 and they just turn loose on the world

01:29:12.160 for us to have to deal with 0.64

01:29:14.020 And those fundamental distinctions in the way that we approach the way we promulgate descendancy into the world, those sorts of innate characteristics are the fundamental distinctions between folk and non-folk.

01:29:38.980 And those sorts of folkways are inherent in our being, and so we have to hew closely to that folkish tradition in order to continue to have and manifest our descendants so that we can live into the future as the gods want us to do.

01:30:02.580 And yeah, as far as other species, we should be concerned about that, but only to the extent that, you know, I mean, there's a thing of reasonableness, right?

01:30:13.700 You don't, you know, I am, I actually have a history in deep ecology.

01:30:27.480 I think nature has the right to exist for its own, in its own sake.

01:30:31.480 But if a small species goes extinct, I don't think the gods are as concerned about that as they are if, you know, if one of our bloodlines dies out.

01:30:43.700 alan have you checked have any of you well okay presupposes hey alan have you checked out

01:30:54.260 conrad rosenberg's translation of the poetic edit it is a diglottic critical edition with

01:31:02.640 very good commentary and a translation with focus on meaning it's a working progress but he's gotten

01:31:09.720 a lot of work done on it i really appreciate that it's translate translated into anglish

01:31:15.640 with the proper noun or even the proper nouns it's open source too are you familiar with this

01:31:22.280 do you have thoughts i am not um but spell that name for me and i will go scout it out

01:31:28.120 conrad with k rosenberg common spelling okay i will check that out um i am always open for

01:31:38.120 for a new translation. My particular one that I like to go to is the Chisholm Poetic Etta,

01:31:48.960 which I keep here on the desk, because Dave Chisholm was a practitioner and not just a translator.

01:31:58.180 But I will definitely check out Rosenberg's Etta, and hopefully I will be versed on that.

01:32:07.240 see what i did there hopefully i'll be better versed on that next time i'm along here

01:32:14.280 yeah i haven't um heard of it myself it is always a

01:32:21.960 tricky balance on whether you're going for word accuracy whether you're going on conveying the

01:32:28.760 same message or whether you're going on fitting the right poetic meter all of those things were

01:32:34.920 important to the original authors but you can't do all of those things equally good simultaneously

01:32:43.800 so that's always a that's always a challenge i like that it's the dual facing text i always

01:32:49.880 appreciate that because that lets you go back and check and examine your work one of my favorite

01:32:55.960 translations is bellows but going through that was fun we catch things every now and again that

01:33:01.880 that are just obviously mistakes now that we have you know an additional hundred years of

01:33:07.480 understanding um full north and the grammar and stuff there's just obvious root words that aren't

01:33:13.160 what he chose to translate here and here so it's really beneficial to have that dual facing text

01:33:19.480 or a diglotic which is the first time i've ever encountered that word thank you for

01:33:23.800 bringing it up in the chat i'll learn something today uh how many members are we at now 730 as

01:33:31.800 of a few minutes ago what other literature is also good alan what literature is good

01:33:42.280 what other literature is also good um first of all so a couple things right

01:33:49.640 i think anything in the western canon

01:33:54.360 exclude the last 50 years anything in the traditional western canon

01:33:58.440 of literature is beneficial reading for the auditor. And I mean Shakespeare, the lofty

01:34:13.160 flights of his language are inspirational to the reader. And again, to follow along

01:34:24.700 soliloquy that any of his characters give, I think that, you know, that's an important

01:34:29.580 exercise in shaping your mind-body

01:34:33.500 complex. So, you know,

01:34:37.780 as far as literature, fiction, there's some good science fiction

01:34:41.600 that I could recommend, you know.

01:34:48.980 Then, like, if you want to get into the

01:34:51.540 area of politics and um like the manifestation of history and historiography and those sorts of

01:35:00.300 things i've got a lot of books i would be glad to recommend to you um you know there's a i think

01:35:08.460 and honestly one of my very favorite books that i've listened to recently is called the prophets

01:35:14.740 of doom where that writer he seems relatively friendly to the traditionalist viewpoint but he

01:35:23.780 reviews several authors um like uh de govino and toinby and evola and um spencer uh who are

01:35:36.180 who see the cyclical view of history and understand that civilization that does not protect itself

01:35:46.660 is doomed to fail and that has and that that has always been the course of history if you look back

01:35:52.820 through you know roman civilization um the the you know the russian civilization to a lesser extent

01:36:02.100 persia you know if you if you look at these civilizations and in a you know from the

01:36:08.740 thousand year viewpoint um you can see why those sorts of things run in the cycles that they do

01:36:21.300 there's also another great book that i've listened to a couple times

01:36:27.140 called a world after liberalism which

01:36:32.100 uh reviews again several um traditionalist authors although this particular writer

01:36:41.940 is not our friend you just have to invert the adjectives in other words when when this guy says

01:36:47.380 this horrible idea came this great idea tried to manifest and then it didn't uh you know and

01:36:55.620 it didn't work right for whatever reason the um you know those those uh

01:37:06.180 hopefully i'm answering the question the uh you know and again you know i i also like to read

01:37:12.900 science fiction like as dessert if you will i uh there's a i read a really good book recently

01:37:21.860 called solaris which had just a really interesting take on how life manifests itself from non-life

01:37:33.460 i think philip k dick is a magnificent author with a wide range of interesting ideas

01:37:42.900 if you've seen the blade runner movie the book is a quadrillion times better

01:37:51.140 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

01:37:57.220 Super, super good book.

01:38:01.620 I've read, you know, fictionalized accounts of the life of yogis.

01:38:06.400 Siddhartha is another really good book.

01:38:08.720 Hermann Hesse, his fictionalized account of the life of the Buddha.

01:38:16.440 Again, excellent, excellent stuff.

01:38:21.140 How much time do we have? I've got, I have 600 books still on the shelf. Oh, you know, and another thing, sorry, because since we are ostensibly on a religious program, what are the other authors that I can't not mention?

01:38:35.280 find two authors. One is Alain de Benoit. His book on being pagan was very influential in my

01:38:48.520 understanding of, in the early years of my paganism, and actually it's interesting that you

01:38:53.920 sort of mentioned it, you know, one of his overarching ideas in that book is that pagans

01:39:00.080 have tried to find themselves as everything Christians are not, which is why a lot, so many

01:39:04.780 pagan ideas manifest as anti-christianity and as anti-family and as anti-traditionalist

01:39:12.060 you know that's just a wrong-headed view of what paganism what traditionalism

01:39:17.580 which we're trying to do you know or approach this from a traditional viewpoint

01:39:24.460 that that is you know that that's wrong-headed to do it any other way Colin Cleary again

01:39:33.500 um we could quibble about some of the some of the stuff that that he likes um but i

01:39:40.060 got a lot of understanding from his essays and i know you don't but we you know i think so and fine

01:39:47.660 and and i'm cycling back around to say marcia eliotta because he's one of the founders of the

01:39:53.420 idea of comparative religiosity um i may not be saying his name right but i have like i've read

01:40:01.900 at least 10 of his books including the three-volume history and it's literally this one

01:40:08.220 and why this is that's you know his three-volume history of religious ideas

01:40:13.100 you know he goes back to the paleolithic age and thinks you know what and he's and he talks about

01:40:20.940 what were what were they trying to do when religion when when man was first becoming

01:40:26.300 what were they doing and you know how has that uh shaped and ebbed and flowed over the

01:40:34.620 millennia that have followed that um in his book the sacred and the profane i have bought and given

01:40:41.500 away many times i think that defines a lot of the it helped it helped me define a lot of the ideas

01:40:48.540 in the way that I approach practice, you know, and that's why we can, like, that's why, like,

01:40:56.220 when you put on church clothes, you're entering the sacred, and there isn't, and although

01:41:01.180 much is holy, few things are sacred, and that, and his writing helped me understand that.

01:41:08.860 okay so that was a selection um again i don't know that the initial thing was intended to be

01:41:21.000 that wide open but that's where we're going with it because it entertains us to do so

01:41:24.620 first up mr t an autobiography by mr t from 1984

01:41:32.040 so my friend got that for me in high school as a joke but i got bored and i forget like

01:41:41.920 what the circumstance was but i was really impressed it was a very good well-written

01:41:49.100 thoughtful book and it was not about our folk but it was folkish i would encourage you if you have

01:41:57.660 any ebon-hued friends to encourage them to read Mr. T, an autobiography by Mr. T.

01:42:08.280 Also, other thing, not really related to the topic, but a book I thought was really cool

01:42:14.380 when I read it, The Perfect King, The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation.

01:42:20.860 That was by Ian Mortimer, and he did a series on a sequence of English kings, I think, from Edward I through Henry V.

01:42:35.740 But it was really good, and I learned a lot reading that, and I found that fascinating.

01:42:40.940 Goering, a biography by David Irving was a really good book

01:42:47.840 that's my favorite of Irving's books that I've read

01:42:49.980 but I like a lot of the stuff that he's written

01:42:51.760 very well researched, well presented

01:42:53.820 by Evola, I like a lot of the things Evola writes

01:43:00.360 or wrote rather

01:43:01.340 but The Mystery of the Grail, Initiation of Magic

01:43:07.100 and the Quest for the Spirit

01:43:08.680 I thought that was really unique and presented material I hadn't encountered before that I

01:43:16.020 thought was fascinating. It kind of sent me on an interesting intellectual quest on a number

01:43:22.320 of things. I think that's really cool. I also like Evola's much maligned Yoga of Power.

01:43:29.640 The Yoga of Power, I'm trying to read that. Okay, Tantra, Shakti, and the Secret Way.

01:43:38.680 I thought that was really good

01:43:41.480 I thought it was a really good book

01:43:42.500 I think it has nothing to do with yoga

01:43:44.000 and it's woefully mistitled

01:43:46.380 but I thought the information

01:43:48.640 was really good

01:43:49.360 I thought it was a very interesting book

01:43:50.700 and I know that other people

01:43:51.580 are not great fans of it

01:43:53.640 there's a bunch of little

01:44:01.860 interesting things

01:44:03.520 it's hard but you know

01:44:04.420 we could list off cool books all night

01:44:06.880 I think a lot of us like reading, but those are some choices that I think are good and useful in our wide variety of subjects.

01:44:20.680 We have one of our members recently put out a book called Secret Hitler.

01:44:26.500 I have seen that getting advertised around.

01:44:30.480 It is a work of fiction that is some kind of a thriller work of fiction.

01:44:36.880 I have some folks that have started reading it that say it is fascinating so

01:44:41.740 there is that really no idea what it's about but it's an interesting cover and

01:44:47.020 interesting title yeah those are the just off top my head some other good

01:44:53.400 literature so the next question also intriguing Matt as also here you go to 0.77

01:44:59.800 Do you get any special attire that other Goethys don't have?

01:45:07.200 Hopefully, eventually, I get all kind of cool special attire. 0.98

01:45:10.840 As it is right now, my stole is bigger, and it's gold.

01:45:18.200 The Speckengar, their stoles are white, and the Goethar stoles are blue, the AFA colors.

01:45:27.960 But that's the only different thing that I get to wear at this point.

01:45:35.140 Next.

01:45:35.880 Oh, okay, follow-up.

01:45:38.260 If the Gothar were going to wear a hat as part of their uniform, what should it be?

01:45:42.220 And what would your gothic version look like? 0.70

01:45:45.640 10-gallon?

01:45:46.740 Nick, you got that picture.

01:45:49.800 It would be like that.

01:45:50.980 There are these funny gold conical prehistoric German hats that nobody really knows all the reasons for.

01:45:58.380 And I don't think they would fit on a head very well and not far a fall off.

01:46:02.180 But they're kind of fascinating to look at.

01:46:04.180 I have no idea if we had a cool Goethe hat, what it would look like.

01:46:10.340 Probably not be a 10-gallon hat.

01:46:15.580 I suppose.

01:46:16.380 I vote for the bowler.

01:46:17.480 I vote for the bowler.

01:46:18.460 that's the that's the hat that i that i think um is really the i think that's the happen thing

01:46:26.620 the happening thing would we put a feather in the side or no yes and you could put different

01:46:35.100 like you could have a gold feather and we could have white feathers and gothar could have blue

01:46:40.460 feathers so let's put that on the list that is a possibility in the future um it would not be a boat

01:46:46.460 hat i'll tell you that like boat hats look ridiculous um so this one's interesting um

01:47:00.300 there's a quote unquote heathen truism that thor likes dark beer are there any other divinely

01:47:07.980 preferred beverages i have heard i have heard and practiced that truism um there was a book

01:47:19.100 and i can't remember the title and maybe i'll look it up when alan's talking i think it was by diana

01:47:25.980 paxton which even she gets some stuff that's kind of cool every now and again i suppose this book

01:47:33.740 at some interesting things like that some interesting kind of upg this god likes this

01:47:41.100 this other god likes this kind of stuff um i don't know that any of that needs to be taken

01:47:46.860 overly seriously but it is i think that it is fun and engaging for you to consider

01:47:57.740 beverage choice you know if you have a particular beverage that you think is special to one of our

01:48:03.580 gods i think that's you know a cool thing to do i think that many of us may make similar

01:48:11.100 assumptions on similar deities i think even beyond that it's definitely something cool to

01:48:17.340 do to your ancestors and as i've said on this a number of times i think when you're making

01:48:24.940 personal offerings like that you can go one of two ways well i mean you probably go a lot of

01:48:31.260 but to my mind there's there's two good ideas on that um what you think they would like so

01:48:40.220 something that you have some reason to believe they have a preference for or maybe harkens to

01:48:45.180 a piece of their lore or something that you really like that you would like to share with

01:48:51.420 them because it's special you i think either of those is a good way to go as far as the

01:48:56.380 drinks that other gods might like i think from that same book was like rich red wine was a um

01:49:07.260 preferred drink of tear you know know that that's historically attested but i do think

01:49:12.540 it's attested in that same book that i read about the dark beer for thor um

01:49:16.940 Um, I think in the same book, it may have said champagne for Ny'Orther.

01:49:27.260 I tend to like the idea of rum for Ny'Orther.

01:49:34.540 I, one of the first offerings I ever made to the gods was Goldschlager for Freya.

01:49:43.060 and i think it's a solid choice because goldschlager's delicious um but yeah that was

01:49:50.740 so that's something i did that's what i know offhand other than the lore you know talks about

01:49:58.060 odin specifically drinking mead um but i know there's people that you know have wine as specific

01:50:06.620 offerings to odin and i know there's people that have like whiskey as a preferred odin offering

01:50:11.880 But, Alan, in your time, have you come across any traditions about which gods like which beverages?

01:50:20.760 As I recall, Odin, sorry, Thor, has a particular affinity for hazelnuts.

01:50:29.680 And so there was a friend of mine, a former friend of mine, was a brewer for one of the local commercial breweries here, brew pubs.

01:50:40.320 and he asked me and so he he brewed a big thick um actually that was a porter more than an imperial

01:50:48.800 stout but you know with hazelnut um in the brew so uh you know that would be you know entirely

01:50:57.820 appropriate to me it is made both as you say because Odin is specifically you

01:51:10.240 know the winner of the mead I have read that even the word ale when used in the

01:51:23.860 context of the lore of the folk during our formative and tribal and migration

01:51:31.140 period and all that. Ale was not beer but a watered-down mead. So mead's the thing,

01:51:43.340 wine was banishingly rare until late in the period. I mean grapes don't grow in

01:51:53.620 the northern climes that you know that was imported from italy so you know to the extent

01:52:00.800 that here's the god of import export you know and he's making some trades with the guys in

01:52:06.880 genoa to get wine i guess that could be a thing but again i you know i i like your idea

01:52:13.340 of the way that you, our gods are multifaceted, right?

01:52:20.880 And so I don't think Odin is going to turn down a glass of whiskey or schnapps or mead

01:52:31.840 or, now he might turn down a Coors Light because that's offensive,

01:52:36.760 but um anything else in that realm is going to be um in good keeping anybody who has serious

01:52:48.000 thought in that regard i urge you to brew your own mead it's not that hard

01:52:53.100 if i can do it you can do it and uh and you know i will help anybody who wants to get started

01:53:00.360 brewing mead and um you know in fact i owe an email to one of the guys i gave a lot of advice

01:53:05.560 to about brewing mead and he said it was actually improved his mead brewing so

01:53:10.440 johnny if you're out there man shoot us an email

01:53:18.840 so that book is called essential aussitrew by diana paxton spoiler alert it is not essential um

01:53:27.400 and i don't know i am loath to recommend any of her stuff but it did have interesting like

01:53:33.880 a list of god than what a upg of their preferred beverage was that's the first place i encountered

01:53:40.680 like in a written format that's more like the dark beer but it does is something a lot of people have

01:53:45.320 kind of internalized um if you read all other 800 books about also true you could read diane paxton

01:53:53.640 yeah look don't get confused i would put mr t a biography by mr an autobiography by mr t

01:54:00.840 well above that um i would not i would much more encourage you to read mr t's literature than hers

01:54:08.280 but that is where that is where i think that it came from so i wanted to keep it a buck as the

01:54:15.560 kids say um question we have a duty to reproduce oh no you already answered that another question

01:54:24.680 also entitled question everyone likes to talk about what they think is the best translation

01:54:33.400 what do you think is the worst translation law speaker what would you say is the worst

01:54:39.320 translation of one of the eight the worst translation of the eddas

01:54:46.440 see you're asking the wrong guy because like i'm doing good to make it all the way through chisholm

01:54:52.440 right i haven't i have read um what's the other one that's real popular you mentioned it

01:54:59.640 um crossley holland hollander bellows bray um see i've i've read hollander i've read chisholm

01:55:12.040 that's enough for me right like and i'll and i'll go into my thing about the cannings if you want

01:55:17.880 but um the you know i i don't know the worst one i've heard that the cowboy is pretty dismal

01:55:25.800 um but i do i like jackson crawford otherwise for most of his work so

01:55:30.600 i'm not gonna i'm not gonna deny him there really

01:55:38.520 yeah i

01:55:42.120 i don't have a war

01:55:48.840 i wish i was more of a snob on that where i had a really evolved opinion on like a ranking of all

01:55:54.680 of them off the top of my head hollander

01:56:03.960 flows the best but it's the least spot-on accurate to the original text um

01:56:11.000 um also i think cowboy have them all by protecting property facility but again that's the intent of

01:56:20.120 it it's not that can't really i don't like it but i can't really you know that is what it's trying

01:56:29.080 to be um linguistic question why do you all say i seer like i seer isn't that as symbol typically

01:56:41.880 pronounced with the same vowel as in grass american english shouldn't it be uh like assier

01:56:52.760 so no if you were going phonetically in american english it should be acer but in um

01:57:02.200 old norse pronunciations all speculative but i think that the best we have to go on

01:57:06.600 is icelandic pronunciation and the a e is pronounced like a i it's pronounced i

01:57:13.960 but yeah i think if you are anglicizing it it's not wrong because especially you're you're spelling

01:57:23.900 it ae so sure a seer the letter that we would use is and again i forget whatever the name

01:57:31.620 letter is but it's like the combination ae where it's one letter and that makes an i sound in

01:57:37.540 modern Icelandic. The name of that letter is ash. There you go. Ash is an eye noise.

01:57:48.640 Just like EI makes an A sound in modern Icelandic. And in Latin, the I is a long E. So it's

01:57:58.420 you know beanie beddy beaky yeah so i mean it's not it's not a crisis but no it wouldn't be i

01:58:07.320 don't think it would ever be a soft a like ah um because it's got that next to it yeah i always

01:58:14.160 think of the e is making the a long so it's acer they know who you're talking about yeah and again

01:58:21.240 it to anglicize it with everything else i think acr is acceptable but icier is

01:58:29.000 certainly the icelandic pronunciation in the old norse

01:58:35.320 not because it's a name it's a proper name so i you know i get that um another question

01:58:42.680 are the brothers grim a good source i know it's a huge catalog alan do you have thoughts about

01:58:49.640 Wilhelm and Jacob?

01:58:55.820 I think the Brothers Grimm are a good source. 0.79

01:59:01.840 In fact, I keep meaning to make my way back through the, this is the complete Brothers

01:59:09.260 Grimm, which lives here untouched for quite a while.

01:59:12.860 But I think that the Grimm's, first of all, they, I mean, a big part of their work was comparative mythology.

01:59:22.860 They were collecting these folktales as an understanding of the folk soul.

01:59:31.800 Now, that's not the word that they used, but that's the way that I understand it,

01:59:36.120 like the way that our folk have manifested into the world are through their stories.

01:59:41.860 So, you know, these legends and tales taken in context are definitely a way of helping us fill out our understanding of the way that our people have understood the world and have operated within the world.

02:00:09.960 Absolutely.

02:00:11.860 I would take that over Diana Paxson's and made up and bolted crap, except for the Thor-lighting dark beer, which actually sounds pretty right. 0.61

02:00:28.100 Woe to you if you're trying to set a table for the gods and you don't know the proper setting and proper preferences.

02:00:34.220 um as far as Grimm's so no I don't think the Grimm's are good source and I say that you know 0.97

02:00:45.280 please hear the rest of it I have never gotten a lot out of it I think that their intentions

02:00:55.320 were awesome I appreciate the work that they put in

02:00:59.580 i don't think they're horrible i would not like discourage anyone from reading them absolutely

02:01:07.320 i think that there is a um reverence people have because it was such a pioneering work

02:01:18.380 and it was such a unique thing and again i i don't i don't hate that at all i just

02:01:23.980 don't think it was all that accurate and i think they were working you know blindfolded with one

02:01:33.920 hand tied behind their back just because of the scarcity of material um but i think what they did

02:01:39.160 was really um pioneering and a noble endeavor of theirs and i don't want to say i don't want to be

02:01:48.420 negative i'm just answering the question honestly i don't think that's a particularly fruitful use

02:01:53.800 of your time digging into a lot but again i certainly wouldn't discourage it i think it is

02:01:59.000 all very well intentioned um alan what is your favorite level of stone age material culture

02:02:07.720 paleolithic the neolithic the mesolithic what say you i'm really a mesolithic kind of guy because i

02:02:17.160 think that's the right level of technology you know by the time we were uh by the time we moved past

02:02:23.800 sharpened flint and got into metallurgy.

02:02:29.600 I think we were getting, you know, then we were past the point.

02:02:32.800 We should have tapped the brakes right about then and, you know,

02:02:38.080 and held on at that point.

02:02:39.580 I don't know why I'm fuzzy.

02:02:42.240 Maybe I should have not meditated so hard this morning.

02:02:51.080 I'm not manifesting properly.

02:02:53.800 you're you're vibrating on a different frequency yeah camera you know it is not my my pineapple

02:03:00.260 mimosa um i i have no i have no great affinity for any particular level of stone ageery um

02:03:12.180 i like i am familiar with more things from the neolithic period so i'm gonna i'm gonna claim

02:03:19.900 the neolithic period because there are stone monuments in europe i have visited that are

02:03:26.620 neolithic in origin and they were cool and i appreciate that um hey matt just got done watching

02:03:34.860 the old interview you did with justin garcia at the pressure project and it got me thinking

02:03:40.140 what would you say to people who are half white half non-white but feel closer to their european

02:03:44.780 side and want to practice house and truth they couldn't be in the afa but would it be blasphemous

02:03:50.140 for them to practice so this is a really interesting and nuanced question um

02:04:07.660 i know that there are hardliners that want me to just say yes that's disgusting how dare you

02:04:12.540 i genuinely am very sympathetic for people who find themselves in that spot where through

02:04:20.620 no fault of their own they don't fit anywhere i wish that i had really good answers for those

02:04:30.560 people and i don't um again i feel like it seems incumbent upon us to have those answers and people

02:04:44.900 expect us to but it's also i think a bit unfair for us to have to you know unravel a knot that

02:04:56.820 we told everyone not to tie. I think the best people can do in that spot is give it a shot

02:05:04.280 and do their best. I think you find certain people. And again, I think that different

02:05:14.880 communities and different ethnicities have different what that means. If you are half 1.00

02:05:23.120 black and half white you are not white no one thinks you are white you just aren't you are black 0.98

02:05:34.000 and again i didn't make those rules they just are but we also know that they are true

02:05:40.380 i think that it's very easy to get very lost in nuanced tedium and endlessly argue about

02:05:49.540 what counts as what, but one of the things that's always been informative as the AFA standard

02:05:55.420 is, you know, do you look white? Are you white? Do you identify as white? Would we identify you

02:06:02.820 as white? Do you check the box that says white on your census stuff, on your medical forms,

02:06:10.080 on your applications for things? Everyone who's half black checks African-American or black. 0.62

02:06:18.420 that's the box you check because we all just know what that means if you're half you don't 0.99

02:06:24.060 check the white box and we all know that so is it blasphemous like the other thing is 0.80

02:06:32.680 does it like damage the gods i don't think so is it effective or approved of by the gods

02:06:41.100 I don't think it's optimal.

02:06:43.280 I also am not going to, you know, presume to overstep.

02:06:50.100 It's not what they want of us as a community of people who follow them.

02:06:54.880 And I think some of those people would be accepted by whatever else they are in that community.

02:07:06.060 I don't know if maybe they form their own community of, you know, folks that don't fit in other spaces.

02:07:16.460 And I truly don't know. And I think that it's very selfish of us and not us probably on this broadcast, but on people who are the parents of these folks to put them in that kind of spot.

02:07:37.760 i think an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure on that and it's unfortunate that their

02:07:44.960 parents didn't follow the teachings that we would all advise on that and it really i wish that i

02:07:51.760 had a really eloquent answer on that and i don't and i genuinely feel bad for those people that

02:07:58.680 they truly don't fit in in the scheme of things alan that's another that's another one of those

02:08:05.460 things where i think that the the practice of we can look at the

02:08:13.780 um the the practice civilizational practice of the tribes um during the time that the romans

02:08:21.700 were interacting with them like they wouldn't even marry between tribes so like an alamani

02:08:28.340 wouldn't marry an Ostrogoth you know much less someone who looked as far different you know 0.92

02:08:36.260 as far different as one of the other 0.51

02:08:43.620 any term that you want to use you know any other race like the

02:08:47.620 you know so like the tribes wouldn't even intermarry so you know that they would 0.97

02:08:51.060 they would not approve of inter, I had it, interracial marriage, and, you know, but neither

02:09:08.460 does any other, you know, until like the extremely recent past, that was not a thing.

02:09:16.060 Yeah.

02:09:21.060 so another question are our gods and our folk at spiritual warfare with other religions

02:09:32.800 alan what say you

02:09:36.000 depending on how you want to define those terms yes um you know there's only so much niche

02:09:48.540 available for religious manifestation in Western European folk.

02:09:57.060 And so, yes, that's one of the reasons why other non-Native religions have been so active 0.88

02:10:07.660 in proselytizing and converting our folk. 1.00

02:10:12.740 You know, certainly a thousand years ago, a hundred years ago, a hundred hours ago, 0.81

02:10:16.860 So, you know, they are, they have the zealotry to change all of our people so that we will have the mindset of the foreign deities that permeate modern culture. 0.82

02:10:38.200 And yes, we are at war with them in the sense that, you know, you can only be one or the other. 0.96

02:10:48.500 And so we are trying to bring as many of our people home by any means necessary so that we can supplant the parasitic faith that has been seeded into our garden. 0.92

02:11:12.300 And, you know, this is, I mean, speaking of books, I mean, if you want to read a book that is, that says that in a, that explains all of that in a much more eloquent way than I can off the cuff tonight, the Dharma Manifesto talks about the idea that we are at war, but we didn't start it.

02:11:42.300 yeah i would say that we are depending on what that means but it's

02:11:55.100 funny because i don't necessarily think that

02:12:01.900 that means that we individually are at war with the practitioners of other faiths

02:12:08.620 and it sounds like those two are incongruent and and i don't mean that they are but i think that 0.97

02:12:21.020 there are other folk religions that don't seek to convert our people to their

02:12:31.100 faith and that don't seek to stomp out our faith they're about their people and their advancement

02:12:37.660 and about you know dealing with others on a you know certain letting circumstance determine that

02:12:45.820 as opposed to having some inherent aversion and i think that's our position too in general there

02:12:51.180 are certain faiths that their fundamental tenet is that our faith is bad and must be wiped out 0.74

02:12:58.660 That is an avowed truth in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. 0.99

02:13:05.840 Therefore, those faiths are absolutely in spiritual warfare with Alcetree. 0.90

02:13:12.580 But I think a lot of the people that claim to practice those faiths kind of have a live and let live attitude about it or don't really care that much or, you know, whatever else the case might be.

02:13:22.400 So I don't think that implies a certain level of behavior towards other practitioners of other faiths, but it certainly does on a spiritual level between our gods and their god, and between our religion as a big-picture concept and theirs, absolutely.

02:13:41.820 and again we didn't start it i don't think that's inherent to our faith but it is inherent to our

02:13:49.800 faith that we stand against people that would wipe out our faith or take our people and rip

02:13:57.680 them from trough to our gods um another question if appropriate does the afa have an official

02:14:08.260 mead producer do you guys have an official producer of ceremonial grade mead um no we don't

02:14:16.900 people use a lot of different kind of needs we have a number of people that make their own needs

02:14:20.900 but alan you might want to say more on this because of our people um within the afa that

02:14:26.820 produce their own mead i think our law speaker here is probably the most prolific in doing so

02:14:31.940 Yeah, and I, you know, whatever, at St. John, whatever is to hand is the best mead.

02:14:41.740 And I do like, first of all, like the small meaderies that have started to manifest in, you know, now that I know Gilbert has brought some bottles from like one of the local Georgia meaderies.

02:15:11.740 it's always very good um the i can't remember what it's called but like there's the the beatery

02:15:18.060 that makes odin's skull and some other um you know viking themed beets which they're all pretty good

02:15:25.260 they're a little um heavy really for my taste um chaucer's is actually not bad i mean it you know

02:15:35.180 chaucer's perfectly fine um uh you know that's the most commercial everywhere mead but ratty

02:15:41.740 is not mead don't i mean if that's all you got that's fine but bun ratty is not mead

02:15:50.460 great grill mead side note it's completely appropriate to do ritual with different kind

02:15:59.020 of alcohol and you can but know what you're doing and be intentional about what you're doing

02:16:05.020 it kind of goes back to our previous conversation if you want to blow it with wine or with uh

02:16:11.500 ale or with whatever just make sure that you know what you're doing there's reasoning and

02:16:15.900 it's tricky when some products say they're one thing and they're really something else

02:16:21.740 like bun ratty's good but it's like white wine with honey added i think

02:16:28.060 i mean that's that is what it is right that that is what it is i was i started to disagree that it

02:16:41.760 is but fun ready's not good i mean it's tolerable you know it's like mc ultra right if you if that's

02:16:50.360 the only beer in the cooler i'll drink one but so i like a lot of quarters like so don't bring

02:16:57.820 that i went to bunratty castle and i have been there and walked the halls and seen the thing

02:17:05.020 and smelled the peak and it just brings me back i don't know if it's it's like i really like um

02:17:15.820 why is it uh uh the the uh the champagne of beers miller miller highlife

02:17:24.060 high life there you go i don't even think it's that great but it's what i drank when i first

02:17:29.980 started drinking with my friends and it takes me back to a time and a place so i'm not saying it's

02:17:35.180 good i'm just saying i have a special connection to it and you know know what you're getting if you

02:17:39.500 want to bloat with white wine with honey in it then bun ratty is get you there and i've even had

02:17:46.940 some heathens that i used to practice with you know they did what they called quick mead which

02:17:54.540 was they would just take some vodka and stir some honey in it and maybe dilute it with either juice

02:18:02.700 or water and they called it quick mead which it's you know it's not quite profane but it's the right

02:18:11.340 it's right next to it and i'm you know and somebody made a quick mead with um

02:18:20.380 pink lemonade powder at a winter nights i was at

02:18:26.620 it was intriguing it was very very alcoholic it would get you there quick

02:18:33.100 i would not prefer to do bloat with it

02:18:41.340 Quickmead is not the friend of man.

02:18:45.780 All right, next up.

02:18:49.420 New to Oustertrude, but I have a heavy question.

02:18:51.680 I broke an oath to quit an addiction.

02:18:54.520 I don't want to use again, and I want to become loyal to Othyn again.

02:18:59.720 Do you have any thoughts on our repentance in Oustertrude?

02:19:02.940 I want to give Alan the last word on this, but I want to say a couple of things.

02:19:07.300 um we don't have blanket obligatory forgiveness like you don't like hey odin i'm sorry okay it's

02:19:18.400 all good that doesn't work as a concept in house of truth but that doesn't mean that there's not

02:19:26.060 ways to repent or to to reset the scales but it is about resetting scales and i don't know

02:19:32.800 the verbiage of your oath but a couple of things about repentance first step stop like if you're

02:19:41.280 currently doing something that is causing a problem stop moving in a negative direction

02:19:48.480 secondly can you repair what you broke is there a way to repay a thing that's been taken or

02:19:59.920 or some kind of in-kind compensation

02:20:04.920 to square with whatever you agreed to do and didn't do.

02:20:12.040 But fixing what you broke

02:20:13.960 is a really important concept in House of Truth.

02:20:18.820 And we still pretend that that's a concept

02:20:22.200 in our criminal justice system, but not really.

02:20:24.520 We talk about a debt to society.

02:20:27.160 If society is the person that you broke trough with, the idea of repaying what you broke is a fundamental to our system of justice and fixing things.

02:20:41.780 It's kind of a first step towards repentance. If you're able to fix the things that you damaged, that's a big step.

02:20:49.440 now there's more to it a lot of stuff becomes kind of nuanced depending on the situation but

02:20:56.120 i think that as a concept needs to be kind of internalized by everybody it's not just like

02:21:00.920 hey i'm sorry i messed up it was thought you know every infraction like that is you're taking

02:21:09.900 something from something and it's interpersonal even in an interpersonal thing if i got on here

02:21:17.520 and I cursed out Alan about something.

02:21:20.100 It's not just, hey, Alan, I was having a bad night, 0.99

02:21:22.500 had too much of my mimosa, I'm sorry, I'm a jerk. 0.94

02:21:26.640 It would also be, hey, everyone on the show 0.97

02:21:30.020 that listened to me do that, I was really wrong.

02:21:33.460 I'm dumb and I'm sorry and I was incorrect.

02:21:35.880 And doing something to restore the reputation

02:21:38.340 that you damaged on top of anything

02:21:42.120 that you're trying to do to make amends

02:21:44.140 with the person that you defended.

02:21:46.460 but there's an idea of restoring the thing that you've broken or the thing that you've taken

02:21:50.940 and that can take a lot of different forms but i think alan may have some more specifics

02:21:54.860 on your question so i want to go ahead and throw it no what everything you said is uh completely

02:22:01.100 accurate of course the um and one issue that we see a lot in oaths is that they are taken

02:22:11.500 with no, and this is one of the things we've tried to do, especially

02:22:16.000 oaths that are taken in ceremony, to

02:22:19.900 take things in with a specific

02:22:23.940 penance

02:22:28.100 if the oath is not fulfilled.

02:22:32.820 Now, but at St. God, if you took

02:22:35.840 something that was less definite, you know,

02:22:39.740 by this oath, I swear I will stop whatever X behavior.

02:22:48.280 It seems to me that to get right with Odin,

02:22:57.620 to whom that oath was taken,

02:23:00.540 like now you owe him something because, as Matt said,

02:23:05.080 you know, you have damaged the relationship.

02:23:09.740 between you and the gods.

02:23:11.780 You've damaged the relationship inside yourself.

02:23:16.680 So you need to make a sacrifice,

02:23:23.620 whether it is money,

02:23:26.460 which is all too easy to try to set up.

02:23:32.640 Typically, I, you know, like,

02:23:36.400 and because I make mead,

02:23:37.940 Like when I, either out of gratitude or in recompense, you know, for me, it's pouring out a bottle of mead.

02:23:48.180 That certainly would be entirely appropriate, you know, to go down and buy some non-fun-ratty mead

02:24:01.180 and go to your altar, your horde, not down in the kitchen sink,

02:24:06.940 but in the yard if that's what you have, at a tree.

02:24:12.640 You know, restore and restore that relationship with the gods.

02:24:19.840 And in return, ask for strength.

02:24:23.180 You know, I make this offering to restore my growth with the gods and ask for your help in fulfilling the oath that I took and to keep my feet on the path.

02:24:43.720 The other thing is be more careful about the oaths that you take.

02:24:46.620 if it helps you

02:24:51.860 whatever your addiction is

02:24:53.500 my dad struggled with alcoholism

02:24:57.580 my kids have struggled with stuff

02:25:02.540 but whatever your addiction is

02:25:05.520 if you need help

02:25:11.360 get help

02:25:12.520 it's a tough road

02:25:16.580 to take by yourself 1.00

02:25:18.680 your go-thar will help you

02:25:23.200 I will help you

02:25:24.540 get through that

02:25:27.620 honestly

02:25:29.220 that sort of

02:25:32.280 thing is the kind of

02:25:35.000 issue that I try to take to my

02:25:38.200 grandmother

02:25:39.840 right

02:25:41.700 your

02:25:43.360 desir

02:25:44.480 will help you

02:25:46.980 so restore your faith

02:25:49.680 with Odin

02:25:50.380 leave some cream out for the

02:25:53.340 house elves

02:25:55.160 ask your grandmother

02:25:57.620 to keep the bad stuff away

02:25:59.720 and

02:26:00.480 hold fast brother we're here for you

02:26:03.440 yeah and good on you

02:26:07.580 for wanting to fix it

02:26:08.560 a lot of people

02:26:09.940 with a lot of people when they fall on their face with anything they try to do be it an addiction

02:26:17.100 or whatever else they try to run from it or if they break an oath they you know like try to

02:26:24.640 outrun it somehow wanting to acknowledge it and fix it you know i think is admirable in and of

02:26:31.340 itself um who is the best god or goddess to make offerings to for healing of a friend or family

02:26:38.100 member um that would be air one of the handmaidens of frigg she is known as the greatest of healers

02:26:46.500 and the lore specifically talks about she is one that those that would be healers call upon for

02:26:52.100 help in healing that's literally the the extent that we know of her is that she is the the right

02:27:00.100 deity to call on for healing stuff and somebody who the afa is really worked with a lot in trying

02:27:07.700 to build a relationship and beseech for healing to good effect for folks so that's absolutely who

02:27:14.340 i would encourage for that but i think that alan's point previous also i would encourage reaching out

02:27:21.220 to the dc or to that person's female ancestors to that person's ancestors generally

02:27:28.260 i don't think it always is just reaching out to the gods on it i do think that reaching out

02:27:33.300 the ancestors of that idea too do you have anything to add on that album nope

02:27:40.260 cool um speaking of which does the afa have a substance abuse program yes we do um

02:27:49.380 i would invite you to reach out to ashley erlinson and nick can put the address up she is one of our

02:27:58.660 folk builders and she heads up our substance abuse program that we do have and i hope that's helpful

02:28:05.780 if you have any other you know oh like a substance abuse counseling program i thought you meant like

02:28:11.380 how to get access to oh no no no not to facilitate substance abuse mining um though there are plenty

02:28:20.580 of options outside the afa to facilitate some of those things within the afa though ashley helps

02:28:25.780 with that um so i would have you reach out to her or to any of our gothar to help you

02:28:31.060 guys get in touch and help you in the struggles that you're working with

02:28:39.060 so in the harbarth slew odin tells thor he needed his help to restrain a woman so he could have his

02:28:47.460 way with her uh is is this meant to be symbolic if so what is the meaning here alan do you have

02:28:54.660 thoughts on that particular poem i am unfamiliar with that so i expect so sorry well okay so

02:29:04.980 uh the poetry that we have in our lore is written for different reasons and there are

02:29:12.740 poems that are obviously reverential there are poems that are meant to convey divine truth

02:29:22.180 there are poems in there that are meant to be humorous or meant to be like poetic battles

02:29:29.140 with like how much art of poetry you have this and the locusena are poems that are what are called

02:29:39.140 flightings and i find them to be the least valuable of the poems in our corpus of lore

02:29:49.620 because i don't think they're intended to be deep collections of lore i think they're intended to be

02:29:59.860 closer to what the philosophes and the later stage greeks would do using their

02:30:05.940 gods in the form of comedy i think it's useful because they drop hints at pieces of lore

02:30:11.700 but i think that they are set up as like insult battles between um between the gods and i don't

02:30:21.420 think those poems are done particularly reverently but i do think that there's little nuggets in them

02:30:26.680 useful but yeah i think those are done as body comedic things that happen to be written down

02:30:38.640 that include our gods as characters but i don't think there's a lot of like

02:30:44.480 my truth in those two poems in specific because again i think they're looking for any big purposes

02:30:50.960 it's one of the things to watch the poems that get referenced and used in other poems to see kind of

02:30:59.060 how widespread or how important they were and it's one of the things we're going through right

02:31:05.540 now there's some of the poems of lore that are reiterated in um in the prosa in the gilfaginning

02:31:14.340 because they're needed to be included in there because they're super important and then there's

02:31:18.260 some of these other ones that i think are less so and i think the tone of them is much more of the

02:31:24.420 harbors and lokasena that are fairly irreverent in how they're presented

02:31:30.100 um alan who is the god you feel closest to currently who is the goddess that you

02:31:38.500 currently feel closest to and why

02:31:40.120 so you know it's it's you know matt you and i have talked about that here recently

02:31:53.620 and it's an interesting paradox

02:32:02.640 or irony.

02:32:05.000 I get those two mixed up.

02:32:07.160 You know, but as an attorney,

02:32:10.260 you know, I certainly feel

02:32:12.360 a close affinity with Tyr,

02:32:14.800 the god of sacrifice and right order.

02:32:19.820 And there's a lot, you know,

02:32:21.260 I certainly think of that a lot.

02:32:26.560 But at the same time, like a lot of my spiritual practice is organic.

02:32:37.760 You know, I meditate every day.

02:32:40.720 I do Tai Chi, Kundalini, Rune Mantra work.

02:32:48.840 all of which is the kind of deep work that I think Odin was referencing

02:33:14.260 when he was talking about hanging on the tree.

02:33:20.340 Nine days of long meditation.

02:33:23.660 Not there yet.

02:33:24.700 I've done two and a half hours.

02:33:28.860 With you, that seemed like a long sit.

02:33:30.720 But, so, like, my life is Tyric or Tyrian,

02:33:41.600 if that's the whatever the

02:33:43.440 competatory form that would be but my

02:33:45.640 spiritual practice is odenic

02:33:47.500 as far as the

02:33:49.700 goddesses go

02:33:50.660 you know I really

02:33:53.500 would feel a close affinity

02:33:55.760 to Frigg

02:33:56.400 you know

02:33:57.480 the

02:33:58.200 constancy the motherhood

02:34:03.940 the

02:34:04.480 shepherding instinct

02:34:07.560 of

02:34:08.900 the maiden

02:34:10.980 of the mother, sorry, the mother figure, I think is the right manifestation for, I think it's the

02:34:18.740 right remedy for what we've seen of, you know, too much maiden and not enough mother here lately,

02:34:27.560 but, you know, she would certainly be the, at this age, you know, I mean, you know, nearly 40,

02:34:35.440 So, you know, it's time to start acting a little mature and, you know, less Freya and more Frigg.

02:34:51.220 So I don't like to, I like to give people good answers on here.

02:34:56.760 And these are the questions that are hard.

02:35:00.000 And I think some of this comes into play.

02:35:08.500 We've had a lot of questions lately about full truies or people who have like a, they're specifically devoted to one of the gods over the others.

02:35:20.320 and I genuinely have

02:35:24.080 I have been engaged in this

02:35:32.020 in the way that I have for the time that I have to where I don't feel

02:35:36.060 like I can say that. I feel like there are gods that I

02:35:40.160 am more distant from or don't

02:35:43.980 or have not developed a strong relationship with

02:35:48.140 yet but i don't know that there's one that i feel closer to than others because i think that i

02:36:00.780 call upon them or offer to them or relate to them on different circumstances or different

02:36:09.500 ebbs and flows of my life differently i mean i think that odin is a very easy answer

02:36:19.580 but i have very consciously been trying to spend a lot of time in making offerings and reaching out

02:36:27.340 to lord tier especially because i've moved out here and i'm trying to in the planning stages

02:36:33.980 for his hof that i'm going to be a part of erecting out here so that has drawn me close

02:36:40.540 when we're in the lead up to getting a hof for any of our gods i spend a lot of time

02:36:48.060 trying to build that closeness and interact with them more during that period because that's

02:36:55.340 something i'm really focused on i mean i think early on i think thor was the god that you know

02:37:02.700 most i guess most brought me here or most um i had the most initial i guess

02:37:16.060 draw towards um

02:37:20.380 i would say either odin thor or tear between the three of them i don't know that i could specify

02:37:27.980 further than that right now and then the goddesses i mean certainly it would be frig or freya more

02:37:36.860 than it would be um some of the smaller goddesses that that are part of a phrase staff or afraid

02:37:44.300 staff rather but i again it really depends on what the what the circumstance is so i can't give a

02:37:56.860 good answer on this and i'm trying to be introspective

02:38:02.620 it all really really depends if i had to gun to my head at this exact moment i'd say odin and freya

02:38:11.260 just to give you a real answer but i think that you know on the hour that might change because

02:38:17.820 i really do feel like i've tried to develop a good relationship and a good connection with

02:38:23.180 a great many of them and i continue to try to do that

02:38:28.860 ah okay so this one there's some there's a conversation kind of going on in the chat room

02:38:34.220 about oaths so a little piece of it why even take oaths why not honor the gods with your actions

02:38:41.660 and then some back and forth about you know pondering whether you got to care about us why

02:38:46.380 not just you know fix your stuff yourself and in various back and forths on that um

02:38:55.820 alan what's your initial take on why is it important to take oaths

02:39:01.100 and you know why not just do the right stuff without taking those

02:39:06.540 Well, I think under the right circumstances, oaths can manifest you into doing the right thing.

02:39:19.620 It is a means of, I mean, certainly it's, first of all, I mean, in the plainest sense

02:39:29.080 of what you're doing, you're strengthening the relationship

02:39:32.960 with the gods by interacting

02:39:37.200 with them in that way, as long as you fulfill

02:39:40.960 your oath. I mean, that is a way of

02:39:44.860 strengthening not only your

02:39:47.060 whatever it is that you're doing, but it's also

02:39:53.060 a way of strengthening your relationship with the gods.

02:39:59.080 And, you know, absolutely, you should, you know, it is perfectly legitimate to do whatever it is, fix yourself without calling on the help of the gods.

02:40:13.380 But there's nothing inappropriate about, you know, if you feel like you need help.

02:40:19.080 I mean, it's, I think it's pat and simple and lacks understanding to say, why don't you just do whatever, okay?

02:40:38.880 If you need external help, if you need help from the gods, if you need help from a counselor, if you need help from the go-thar, if you need help from a nine-step group or whatever, use those tools.

02:40:54.220 I mean, there's nothing inappropriate about using a cable to winch yourself out of the canyon, right?

02:41:09.800 If you're struggling and need help, use whatever tool is out there, and an oath is an absolutely legitimate way of doing that.

02:41:19.220 so there's two kind of oaths like oaths between people formalize an agreement in a specific way

02:41:32.580 they build trust and they build consequence if trust isn't maintained and they solidify loyalty

02:41:41.700 in the face of hardship like you wouldn't need an oath between people if it was guaranteed to have

02:41:48.980 you know happy good times all the time the oath is there for those difficult circumstances so

02:41:56.260 there is a formalized way in a particular ritualized and in some cases enforceable

02:42:03.780 commitment to stick through things even when it's difficult but oaths to the gods about certain

02:42:11.300 things there is a ritual aspect about an oath that makes it worth more than the sum of its parts

02:42:18.980 doing difficult things and doing the right thing is good like nobody's going to argue that like

02:42:27.860 yeah it's awesome if you can just beat your addiction by yourself that's great but there's

02:42:32.160 something special about coming before the gods and formalizing a commitment to do a thing

02:42:37.980 and then accomplishing that that you've oathed to do that ability to make that commitment in a

02:42:47.520 formal and ritualized way and then complete it builds reputation and builds spiritual might

02:42:57.000 in a greater way than doing it without doing that. It builds your reputation, builds your

02:43:04.160 reputation on this side of the veil and beyond. And I think that's very important. There is a

02:43:10.820 pride in your ability to accomplish and your ability to follow through goes a little bit to

02:43:19.100 some of the previous conversation we had tonight about goal setting you know why set goals why

02:43:24.380 don't you just do the right stuff anyway and don't set a goal you just get there because you're doing

02:43:28.640 the right stuff well you can but there's an enhanced value about setting a goal on a timetable

02:43:35.500 and accomplishing that goal.

02:43:37.020 You build upon the accomplishment that you've made.

02:43:40.080 When you make a promise to the gods

02:43:42.660 and then you fulfill it,

02:43:44.160 you have built a level of trust that,

02:43:46.700 okay, so-and-so made this commitment

02:43:49.480 and they followed through.

02:43:51.660 I trust that next time they'll follow through.

02:43:54.220 Doing that consistently builds your reputation

02:43:59.940 in a special way.

02:44:02.460 and doing certain things

02:44:04.920 ritually enhances

02:44:06.620 that potency and that value.

02:44:10.080 Another thing like, well, I don't

02:44:11.060 think the gods care about

02:44:12.280 the oaths that people make.

02:44:15.260 Well, I do think they care.

02:44:16.620 How much they care, again,

02:44:18.600 they lose a lot of sleep over it, maybe not,

02:44:20.840 but our gods judge us. They judge us all the time.

02:44:24.100 I think they do

02:44:24.920 think less of you if you make oaths

02:44:26.680 that you don't follow through on. I think our Lord

02:44:28.740 is clear on that.

02:44:29.660 And I do think they think more of you if you're somebody who follows through on your oath.

02:44:36.420 You want your actions, but our people have always been verbal.

02:44:41.840 Verbal is one of the keys to magic for our folk and always has been.

02:44:47.060 You have an idea or a commitment or something you want to do and you utter that out.

02:44:53.140 You're removing it from the world of imagination and you're manifesting it into the world of reality.

02:44:58.320 We have always been ones to make boasts or to make proclamations or to make poetry, to make these statements.

02:45:08.680 That use of making verbal commitment to call your shot and do a thing is fundamental to our folk and to our culture, and it always has been.

02:45:19.100 And doing that draws the eye of judgment to you, and you're enhanced if under that scrutiny you accomplish great things.

02:45:30.520 And that's really what we want. We want our gods to be proud of us.

02:45:34.240 One thing that I often do when I'm inviting the gods, the ancestors, and the land spirits to be with us during blow is I invite them to hear our words and to see our deeds.

02:45:50.820 Because ideally you want those things, you want both of those things so that they match up.

02:45:55.160 So your deeds aren't by happenstance.

02:45:58.060 You've spoken a thing into existence and you've made good on the commitment that you've made.

02:46:03.120 And there's an enhanced value to that.

02:46:08.680 Something else has a particular value.

02:46:12.340 Shannon in Georgia donated $18 towards our pavilion, and we appreciate that, Shannon.

02:46:17.000 Thank you very much.

02:46:20.500 So, Alan, anonymous question.

02:46:23.400 Obviously, community is important for our folk, but what does that mean?

02:46:27.580 Does it involve getting involved in each other's lives?

02:46:33.120 for the good of the greater community and for the future.

02:46:40.900 Yes, absolutely.

02:46:45.220 And I mean that in almost every sense of the word.

02:46:51.460 I mean, part of the way that we build community is by judging each other.

02:47:00.220 That's the I mean, that's the harshest way to say that. But, you know, that's, you know, by treating each other with fairness and tenderness and love and maturity.

02:47:12.640 You know, that is absolutely a way of building the community.

02:47:19.620 That's both the duty and the benefit of being in the community.

02:47:25.300 You have an obligation to your folk to treat everyone with fairness and love, but also dignity and all those sorts of things.

02:47:41.080 them with honesty, you know, that way people will be able to correct themselves if that's

02:47:51.260 the right idea to try to express in this context, you know, because, you know, that this relationship

02:47:58.340 that we have with each other, this horizontal relationship is the right manifestation of

02:48:09.060 the folk soul. We see each other in each other, and by being able to hold each other to a decent

02:48:19.920 standard of behavior, a decent standard of action, then we all understand that we are

02:48:31.300 accountable to each other, we're accountable to our ancestors, and ultimately accountable to the

02:48:37.200 odds, and by judging each other, and there's no, I can't think of a different word, but, you know,

02:48:48.520 by holding each other to accountability, then that does help build community, because,

02:48:57.440 you know, if your close friend, if your brother, if your spiritual companion won't tell you the

02:49:06.460 truth, won't correct you when you're starting to veer off the path, then who's going to do that?

02:49:13.560 You know, and that's been, that I think is a big problem in current society and why we're so far 0.84

02:49:21.660 off the rails in so many ways is, first of all, we have manifested a Christian ideology that no one

02:49:31.940 can judge me but God

02:49:33.160 and of course they mean

02:49:37.200 Adonai

02:49:39.260 the

02:49:40.360 are

02:49:42.180 y'all dabble with but that's a different

02:49:46.000 discussion

02:49:46.840 so the

02:49:48.560 idea that you're

02:49:51.940 only accountable to God 0.56

02:49:53.860 and the rest of us don't matter

02:49:55.200 that is false

02:49:56.580 we are accountable

02:49:59.800 to each other

02:50:00.520 And so to hold each other accountable is a way of, you know, turning, keeping someone's drinking problem from becoming alcoholism, keeping someone's spending problem from turning into bankruptcy, keeping someone's abuse of their mate from turning into, you know, from turning from bad to worse.

02:50:24.960 and understanding that we are that we all owe each other this duty of care that that that's

02:50:33.080 what community is and if you know actually one of the things that i

02:50:37.560 on my youtube subscriptions is to the medieval mindset and he talks about the idea that like

02:50:46.040 you know we think about that those guys were miserable you know just you know stuck in the

02:50:52.020 same place all the time, but just, you know, like you were around the 200 people that you knew the

02:50:56.780 best and the 200 people who knew you the best. And so you were in constant companionship. You

02:51:02.560 were in constant growth with the people who would help you when you needed help and you would help

02:51:09.860 when they needed help. So that sort of accountability is what, you know, in a lot of

02:51:17.480 ways is what we're trying to build in the AFA by having COFs, for the most part, online

02:51:25.680 communities, but also kindreds and local groups that can do this with and for each other,

02:51:34.920 encourage each other when we're down, build each other up, hold each other accountable.

02:51:40.820 yes that is the purpose of community and that's the that's a lot of the good part of being part

02:51:47.720 of the full is being part of that community and that's why i always tell people like you know

02:51:52.400 being online is fine and interacting online with other afa members is great

02:51:57.640 but go to the hof i mean yeah it's you know and you think about you know that it's some giant

02:52:07.300 burden to go two three hours to drive two three hours but you know like in the not that long ago

02:52:14.740 it would have taken you two hours to get the team hooked up to buggy so you could

02:52:21.140 clock another hour to you know go just over the order to be able to um to to go to to go to church

02:52:30.260 so we're just spoiled but we shouldn't but it's worth it to come in and manifest yourself as part

02:52:38.980 of the whole all right so um the stuff alan said also it community provides context that we live

02:52:50.980 out all of our values that you know one of the biggest problems we have in modern societies

02:52:57.620 or in our modern existence i mean i think modern society might even be a myth we don't have

02:53:05.420 connectivity connectivity you don't know your neighbors you don't know the people in your town

02:53:10.520 for the most of us and we're all atomized having people that you know that know you some of it's

02:53:19.680 reflected in um our ancestors use of patronymics oh matt matt who matt geraldson oh i know gerald

02:53:30.680 he's awesome cool you're his kid we'll take care of you or hey who's that screwing up oh all right

02:53:37.680 cool i know your dad come with me we're gonna you know get this handled you have a set of eyes

02:53:42.400 looking out for your people and you have a reputation that you build in your community

02:53:50.380 you're somebody you have a value people know you you know people and that's how we're meant to be

02:53:57.260 and it's how all the other values of ours are played out they're not internal values they're

02:54:02.000 external values they're things that your community recognizes that you are part of something and

02:54:09.600 we're certainly all meant for that and uh nick can you read for me the last question because

02:54:16.800 my private chat um reset when i got booted are you referring to alan austin's yes good evening

02:54:30.400 i'll see you go through matt law speaker alan and folk builder nick what is to be done with

02:54:34.640 all the whites out there who don't seem to have a problem with other races asserting themselves

02:54:39.600 but get icky feelings inside 0.98

02:54:41.700 when whites are pro-white. 0.74

02:54:43.740 Is it possible the conditioning is

02:54:45.640 not so deep that they become

02:54:47.580 reasonable only when something traumatic

02:54:49.860 happens, either to them or to

02:54:51.660 society, at least for most

02:54:53.720 of them? Thanks for all you do.

02:54:58.500 Alan, what are your

02:54:59.440 thoughts on that?

02:55:09.600 Here's the thought that comes immediately to my mind in the framework of this question.

02:55:25.640 And it relates to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

02:55:31.480 And here's what I mean.

02:55:32.760 But when East Berlin was communist, there was a cadre of professors and political operatives who were the most adamant communists.

02:55:51.380 like they were the most ardent the most zealous and like communism's the thing and we're all

02:55:56.580 going to be communists and we're all going to manifest the great revolution and blah blah blah

02:56:05.940 but immediately after the berlin wall fell

02:56:10.660 those same people who are the most ardent communists became the most ardent capitalists

02:56:17.460 in the moments that I feel hope

02:56:22.460 that's one of the

02:56:23.760 nodes of hope

02:56:26.180 that I cling to is like

02:56:28.140 all this 0.99

02:56:29.420 anti-white 1.00

02:56:31.240 garbage 1.00

02:56:35.780 that permeates 1.00

02:56:37.720 the media sphere

02:56:40.220 but nowhere else

02:56:44.440 I think as soon as we break the wall, like as soon as it becomes clear, we'll hit that tipping point where, oh, yeah, you know what?

02:57:02.200 Grandpa was right.

02:57:04.360 You know, this is what my grandfather thought.

02:57:06.360 This is what his grandfather thought.

02:57:08.080 They were right.

02:57:08.740 Like all these people for thousands of generations had the right idea about the right approach to what we call folkishness.

02:57:24.820 I think it's a delicate negotiation to get there.

02:57:30.440 And if I may, you know, I'll give you, like, one of the things we talked about last month was the elevator speech.

02:57:36.900 And one of the things that I sometimes think about is trying to convince an audience of people that we are the ones who hold the correct way of thinking, right?

02:57:57.140 And so the way that the anti-white rhetoric has gone goes sort of like this.

02:58:06.900 Right. I would ask you, like, Matt, do you love your mother?

02:58:14.640 And you said, yes.

02:58:16.400 Okay. And you said, why do you hate my mother? Why do you hate my mother, Matt?

02:58:22.220 You know, you just, you hate, if you love your mother, you must hate my mother, right?

02:58:27.520 I mean, and that's the false dichotomy, that these anti-racists have shoved down our throat, and it's the blood libel, which is also built on a stack of lies and mendacity, but we can love each other.

02:58:53.680 We can love our race. We can love our people and be completely neutral toward everything else, right?

02:59:05.340 I don't hate anybody. I wish they'd stop hating us.

02:59:10.220 But to think that we can't love ourselves and love our people without hating other people is just wrong. 1.00

02:59:25.780 It's stupid. It's not, you know, it's illogical. 0.99

02:59:30.220 And we're finally starting to break through that barrier where people are beginning to see the fallacy of that straw man argument.

02:59:40.220 High school males are trending conservative, you know, and I think it's going to, I think we're just going to hit that pivot point in the great cycle where it's just going to, you know, it's going to tip back in our direction and we're going to be back okay.

03:00:06.660 That's my optimistic viewpoint.

03:00:10.220 So, yeah, the question's kind of a strange one. Like, yes, it does. Yes, there are a bunch of

03:00:26.880 people out there that are so badly abused by very intentional social conditioning that they

03:00:35.360 recognize other races of people and celebrate those people asserting their will to power in

03:00:43.680 the world yet they are taught to be self-loathing and to feel guilt and feel bad or ask the questioner

03:00:53.040 feel icky about white people doing that those people are wrong and ultimately unfortunately

03:00:59.680 those people are weak but those people many of those people are starting to wake up and that's

03:01:05.520 really positive i think alan is right that the masses wait for certain cues and then they tip

03:01:13.760 into an avalanche towards whatever way certain social pressures go at certain times

03:01:21.840 and that's really interesting we've seen small ripples of that in different ways in our time

03:01:26.160 with other issues you know when it was super cool to do all the gay stuff in every single company

03:01:32.400 everything was gay all the time gay rainbows everywhere and then as soon as the mood shifted 0.56

03:01:37.680 and people were getting tired of that all of a sudden silence from the same people that were

03:01:42.880 huge champions of that where's all your rainbow stuff where oh that stuff just disappears a lot

03:01:48.880 of places people are very valuable that way and i don't think that's good but it is

03:01:53.840 it is something to think about when we are in a position where a critical mass of people

03:02:03.920 wake up and get it then those other people who follow trends are likely to wake up as well and

03:02:12.060 you know our job is to

03:02:15.420 live right and where we can spread the word and do what we can with the resources in front of us

03:02:25.220 to affect the things that we can change we can make better and hopefully our folk will come

03:02:33.200 around either you know in our lifetime or after but we have no option not to do that the rest is

03:02:42.020 nihilism and is below

03:02:44.180 the heroic standards that our gods

03:02:46.040 and our ancestors have for us.

03:02:49.340 Take the 0.86

03:02:50.060 white pill. Take the white pill.

03:02:52.620 Do the thing, and 0.63

03:02:54.100 in doing so, you associate

03:02:56.160 with some of the best

03:02:57.920 people who are out there being heroic like

03:02:59.920 yourself. You

03:03:01.820 are able to make your life, your

03:03:03.860 family's life, and our

03:03:05.860 community's life that much better.

03:03:08.680 We're all better for it.

03:03:09.720 don't let perfect be the enemy of good

03:03:14.280 because there's tremendous opportunity in front of us

03:03:17.200 and we're really fortunate that we have a microcosm out here

03:03:21.380 in the Astro Folk Assembly

03:03:22.480 you have hundreds of people who your actions directly

03:03:27.240 you can make their lives better

03:03:29.100 you can do good things for your community

03:03:31.720 and we're building amazing things

03:03:34.320 we're building families

03:03:35.520 we're building Hoffs for the worship of our gods

03:03:38.620 we're building community and we are building and developing a faith to be

03:03:43.180 here for generations upon generations into the future and you're part of that

03:03:48.220 so do what we can to be the example for these other folks and as they wake up we

03:03:54.760 give them a place to come home to and we're doing that and I'm really proud

03:03:58.900 to be part of that with all of you guys join the team and come in for the big

03:04:03.580 win there you go and you can join at one zone.org on the join link and we look forward to all of

03:04:11.660 you joining um that is our last question for this evening alan thank you so much for joining us

03:04:16.940 tonight and imparting your adulting wisdom for us um nick thank you as always for producing

03:04:26.460 and all the things that you do i look forward to talking to you all next week and until then

03:04:33.580 Hail the Aesir, hail the folk, hail the AFA, and remember, victory never sleeps.

03:05:03.580 Transcription by CastingWords

03:05:33.580 Transcription by CastingWords

03:06:03.580 Thank you.

03:06:33.580 Thank you.

03:07:03.580 Thank you.

03:07:33.580 Thank you.

03:08:03.580 We'll be right back.

Asatru Folk Assembly - June 25, 2026

6⧸24⧸26 Victory Never Sleeps, Ep 207 - Bits and Pieces

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript