Ryan Onymous

I'm from here, one of the two best cities I know of. The other being the one I live in currently.
Thank you to FRED PETERS, for this rad portrait of my hometown and for all his other awesome art. Please check him out:
Fred Peters Fine Art
I have no beliefs.
A belief is something one is willing to accept without direct verification of experience, or without the support of evidence, resulting in assumption that is taken as a basis for action or non-action. Experiential knowledge ALWAYS trumps a belief having no basis in actual experience.
“Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.” Robert Anton Wilson
I'm also a paranoid:
"Paranoid awareness is the means to disengaging from Consensus. Paranoid awareness is a leap of the imagination, a leap that we are all preparing (or not, as the case may be) to take. The key to paranoid awareness on the edge of the eschaton is that beliefs must be dabbled in without ever really being believed. To first understand the conspiracy of nature, the "matrix" that constitutes the foundation of paranoid awareness and is forerunner to the lucid view, it is necessary to see that nothing is as it seems. This is the key. Paranoid awareness insists that we exist peripherally, superficially, "skating over thin existence"(Charles Fort), with neither scope to our vision nor depth to our understanding. Let's imagine there exists a design-a pattern, map, grid or web- into which all things invariably fit. This idea is not new. It is established by science (chaos physics and fractals), and more or less in accord with most people's idea- however dimly conceived-of religion. There is an underlying order, a superstructure that exists to the world, called Nature by the realists, God by the romantics. The ramifications of this idea are somewhat more challenging. They suggest that every single phenomenon-every name, word, number, occurence, colour, sight , sound, smell and every individual being- is a part of this order and has precise meaning or significance-and by extension, function-within it. In other words, absolutely nothing that happens in this life is random or accidental or irrelevant to the paranoid. Every piece plays it's part in the puzzle, and contains some secret or clue to the great Mystery. We are referred by paranoid awareness not to this and that, mind, but to everything. By such an understanding, ordinary paranoia is not only justified- it is incomplete. Paranoid awareness is an intermediary but necessary stage on the path to lucidity. Paranoia is the beginning of wisdom."- Aeolus Kephas, The Lucid View
I present here some words of wisdom passed down through time immemorial (according to Castaneda et al.) through the Toltec Indian lineages of Ancient Mexico, and elsewhere. Fascinating stuff. :
From The Teachings of don Juan : A Yaqui Way of Knowledge:
- A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war, wide awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it will live to regret his steps.
-Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.
From A Separate Reality; Further Conversations with don Juan
-A light and amenable disposition is needed in order to withstand the impact and the strangeness of the knowledge I am teaching. Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy, and vain. To be a man of knowledge one needs to be light and fluid.
-One has to reduce to a minimum all that is unnecessary in one's life.
-We learn to think about everything, and then we train our eyes to look as we think about the things we look at. We look at ourselves already thinking that we are important. And therefore we've got to feel important! But then when a man learns to see , he realizes that he can no longer think about the things he looks at, and if he cannot think about what he looks at everything becomes unimportant. Everything is equal and therefore unimportant.
-What makes us unhappy is to want. Yet if we would learn to cut our wants to nothing, the smallest thing we'd get would be a true gift. To be poor or wanting is only a thought; and so is to hate, or to be hungry, or to be in pain. The power to do that is all we have, mind you, to oppose the forces of our lives; without that power we are dregs, dust in the wind.
-It is up to us as single individuals to oppose the forces of our lives. Only a warrior can survive. A warrior knows that he is waiting and what he is waiting for; and while he waits he wants nothing and thus whatever little thing he gets is more than he can take. If he needs to eat he finds a way, because he is not hungry; if something hurts his body he finds a way to stop it, because he is not in pain. To be hungry or to be in pain means that the man has abandoned himself and is no longer a warrior; and the forces of his hunger and pain will destroy him.
-You must stop talking to yourself. Every one of us does that. We carry on an internal talk. We talk about our world. In fact we maintain our world with our internal talk. Whenever we finish talking to ourselves the world is always as it should be. We renew it, we kindle it with life, we uphold it with our internal talk. Not only that, but we also choose our paths as we talk to ourselves. Thus we repeat the same choices over and over until the day we die, because we keep on repeating the same internal talk over and over until the day we die.
-The world is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is. If we stop telling ourselves that the world is so-and-so, the world will stop being so-and-so. You must start slowly to undo the world.
-The things people do are the shields against the forces that surround us; what we do as people gives us comfort and makes us feel safe; what people do is rightfully very important, but only as a shield. We never learn that the things we do as people are only shields and we let them dominate and topple our lives. In fact I could say that for mankind, what people do is greater and more important than the world itself!
-The world is all that is encased here; life, death, people, the allies, and everything else that surrounds us. The world is incomprehensible. We won't ever understand it; we won't ever unravel its secrets. Thus we must treat it as it is, a sheer mystery!
From Journey to Ixtlan; the Lessons of don Juan
-There is no need for us to say anything about others. There is no need for you or for me to regard other's actions in our thoughts one way or another. The worst thing we can do is to force people to agree with us. I mean that we shouldn't try to impose our will when people don't behave the way we want them to.
-It doesn't matter how one was brought up, what determines the way one does anything is personal power. A man is only the sum of his personal power, and that sum determines how he lives and how he dies. Personal power is a feeling, something like being lucky. Or one may call it a mood. Personal power is something that one acquires regardless of one's origin. The difficulty with you, which is the difficulty with all of us, is to be convinced. You need to believe that personal power can be used and that it is possible to store it. To be convinced means that you can act by yourself.
- To not-do what you know how to do is the key to power. In the case of looking at a tree or bush, what you know how to do is to focus immediately on the foliage. The shadows of the leaves or the spaces in between the leaves are never your concern. Start focusing on the shadows of the leaves on one single branch and then eventually work your way to the whole tree, and don't let your eyes go back to the leaves, because the first deliberate step to storing personal power is to allow the body to not-do. The body likes things like this. You can stop the world using this technique.
-You should not have remorse for anything you have done, because to isolate one's acts as being mean, or ugly, or evil is to place an unwarranted importance on the self. Well-being is a condition one has to groom, a condition one has to become acquainted with in order to seek it. Well-being is an achievement one has to deliberately seek.
-In order to accomplish the feat of making yourself miserable you have to work in a most intense fashion. It is absurd you have never realized you could work just the same in making yourself complete and strong. The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves strong. The amount of work is the same.
-The world is the world because you know the doing involved in making it so. If you didn't know its doing , the world would be different. Without that certain doing there would be nothing familiar in the surroundings.
-There are infinite numbers of lines that join us to things. They are real lines. You can feel them. The most difficult part about the warrior's way is to realize that the world is a feeling. When one is not-doing , one is feeling the world, and one feels the world through its lines.
-Not-doing is very simple but very difficult. It is not a matter of understanding but of mastering it. Seeing , of course, is the final accomplishment of a man of knowledge, and seeing is attained only when one has stopped the world through the technique of not-doing.
-Shadows are like doors, the doors of not-doing. A man of knowledge, for example, can tell the innermost feelings of men by watching their shadows. You may say that there is movement in them, or you may say that the lines of the world are shown in them, or you may say that feelings come from them. To believe that shadows are just shadows is doing. That belief is somehow stupid. Think about it this way: there is so much more to everything in the world that obviously there must be more to shadows too. After all, what makes them shadows is merely our doing.
-The only thing that is real is the being in you that is going to die. To arrive at that being is the not-doing of the self.
From Tales Of Power
- We are a feeling, an awareness encased here. We are luminous beings and for a luminous being only personal power matters.
- Everything we do, everything we are, rests on our personal power.
- One must push themselves beyond their limits, all the time. The only possible course that a warrior has is to act consistently and without reservations. Some may know enough of the warrior's way to act accordingly, but old habits and routines stand in the way.
- Dreaming entails cultivating a peculiar control over one's dreams to the extent that the experiences undergone in them and those lived in one's waking hours acquire the same pragmatic valence. The sorcerers' allegation is that under the impact of dreaming the ordinary criteria to differentiate a dream from reality becomes inoperative.
- Things are real only after one has learned to agree on their realness.
- Seeing is a special capacity that one can develop which allows one to apprehend the ultimate nature of things.
- Seeing happens only when the warrior is capable of stopping the internal dialogue.
- The world had to conform to its description; that is, the description reflects itself. We have learned to relate ourselves to our description of the world in terms of what sorcerers call habits or intentionality, that is, the property of human consciousness whereby an object is referred to, or is intended.
- The world doesn't yield to us directly, the description of the world stands in between. So, properly speaking, we are always one step removed and our experience of the world is always a recollection of the experience. We are perennially recollecting the instant that has just happened, just passed. We recollect, recollect, recollect.
- We are luminous beings. We are perceivers. We are an awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason , forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime.
- There are three kinds of bad habits which we use over and over when confronted with unusual life situations. First, we may disregard what's happening or has happened and feel as if it had never occurred. That one is the bigot's way. Second, we may accept everything at its face value and feel as if we know what's going on. That's the pious man's way. Third, we may become obsessed with an event because either we cannot disregard it or we cannot accept it wholeheartedly. That's the fool's way. There is a fourth, the correct one, the warrior's way. A warrior acts as if nothing had ever happened, because he doesn't believe in anything, yet he accepts everything at its face value. He accepts without accepting and disregards without disregarding. He never feels as if he knows, neither does he feel as if nothing had ever happened. He acts as if he is in control, even though he might be shaking in his boots. To act in such a manner dissipates obsession.
- A warrior cannot complain about, or regret, anything. His life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. Challenges are simply challenges. As is always the case in the doings and not-doings of warriors, personal power is the only thing that matters. The basic difference between an ordinary man and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary man takes everything either as a blessing or as a curse.
-We confuse ourselves deliberately. All of us are aware of our doings. Our puny reason deliberately makes itself into the monster it fancies itself to be. It's too little for such a big mold, though.
- The self dreams the double. Once it has learned to dream the double, the self arrives at this weird crossroad and a moment comes when one realizes that it is the double who dreams the self. Your double is dreaming you. No one knows how it happens. We only know that it does happen. That's the mystery of us as luminous beings. You can awaken in either one.