My Path of Development

A Journey Through the Horizontal Wilderness

My path has never been a straight ascent. It has been a long traversal across what I have come to call the Horizontal Wilderness—a terrain of learning, unlearning, testing, collapse, recalibration, and slow interior alignment.

What follows is not theory, nor testimony for effect. It is the account of a life carried, instructed, corrected, and steadily reorganized by the same Voice that first intervened to save it.

The Crushing and the Voice

My Spiritual journey began more than forty years ago with a profound crushing.

After more than twenty years of severe alcoholism—entering the latter stages of alcohol poisoning, my skin turning purple, my liver so damaged it would require nine+ years to regenerate—I reached a definitive end. At the close of a nine‑day binge, facing my third DUI, I heard words that did not arise from fear, resolve, or imagination:

“You will never drink again as long as you live.”

In that moment, my appetites were altered. The compulsion ended. And it has never returned.

That intervention was not the beginning of discipline or recovery programs; it was deliverance. And it was issued by the same Holy Spirit who would continue to guide me forward—quietly, insistently—through every phase that followed.

Survival Without Substitution

Searching and attending church denominations became part of my external environment, but they were never the source of my preservation. The same Voice that delivered me remained my Guide—using structures when necessary, moving me on when they began to substitute for growth.

These environments functioned as Jacob’s Well: places of temporary encounter, but not final supply. They served a season, but they could not satisfy the deeper thirst that had been awakened. Staying there would have meant survival without transformation.

At some point, the Spirit requires a change of spigots.

The Horizontal Wilderness

For decades after deliverance, I wandered—intentionally and earnestly—through nearly every denomination and spiritual movement available to me: New Thought and Unity, faith‑prosperity streams, Pentecostalism, Sonship Movement, revival cultures, and countless sub‑schools in between. I bought their books and tapes and listened intently taking notes, highlighting and underlining everything that resonated with me.

I bought and read relentlessly, wearing out Amazon and local bookstores. Especially Haslam's billed as the largest bookstore in the South.  Many of those books eventually went back—sold for pennies on the dollar—not because they were useless, but because certain Higher truths initially drew me and then 'frightened' me. 

I had tasted just enough to know that something deeper existed, but was still worried that somehow the devil was behind it.  Most of the Pentecostal and especially the non-denominations had as much devil teaching as Jesus teaching. They often referred to "doctrines of devils" but that was exactly what they were sharing, And, how did they get what they were teaching, it is not in the New Testament. 

In those years, I learned firsthand the dangers of:

• “no‑cross” Christianity, meaning promises, no requirments

• spiritual sensationalism

• tradition so insulated it could no longer conduct life, the Voltage in the Wire.

• victory language completely divorced from inner crucifixion

The Horizontal Wilderness is not a place of rebellion. It is where sincere people search broadly because they intuit that the inheritance is larger than what they were given.

Learning That "Learning Is Mostly Unlearning"

Eventually, clarity emerged: learning is at least two‑thirds unlearning.

I heard that exact phrase come out of my mouth one evening at an in-home bible study.
By this time I was actually teaching a Discipleship Class at Cross City Correctional Institute in Cross City Florida. Of course there were other folk coming in there and many had been sharing with the inmates for many years before I started. 

One the inmates that was in my class had attended the bible study class that this gentleman taught and invited me to go to his home one evening for a bible study.  I went mostly to support my former studen who was now out on parole. But, also, I was always hungry for Truth anywhere I could find it. About ten minutes or so into the his teaching I realized that much of what he was saying was "aimed" at straigtening me and what I had been sharing in my class out!  

I had discovered that Jesus mainly taught the Kingdom of God as a Mystery.  Also that unless one is born from above, they cannot SEE the kingdom of God, John 3:3. 

So, after the teaching part of the meeting was over we were gathered in his kitchen for snacks and the host approached me and said "I don't know about you brother but I've always", and that is when we all heard me say "I don't know about you, but I've discovered that learning is about two thirds un-learing, how about you?" 

That completely changed the atmosphere, removed any spirit of pride or competiton and as we were leaving the host followed me to my car and I gave him a book by Watchman Nee and one by Andrew Murray titled Humility, He seemed to appreciatively accept them and thanked me for coming. 

I had accumulated layers of ethnic, cultural, theological, and experiential insulation—much of it sincere, some of it harmful. The task was to strip that insulation away without damaging the pure wire of the Spirit beneath.

Certain books acted as instruments rather than answers. After years of the Faith Prosperity Movment, Kenneth Hagin, Kennth Copeland, Jerry Saville, Charles Capps, etc, etc. etc.Then I traveled thru the New Thought Movement, Unity, Religious Science, Divine Science, New Age.

That's when I found a book by L. E. Maxwell’s titled Born Crucified, among others, helped break the mirages of prosperity religion and the static of excessive spiritual warfare, anchoring me again to the true Foundation: Jesus Christ formed within. I realized that the Faith Prosperity Movement and the New Thought labeled churches have no working, dynamic Cross, no Holiness doctrine.  You can leapfrog all that and climb on up some other way, SEE John 10:1.

What survived the stripping was not doctrine, but Life.

The Seeker and the Lamp (Luchnos)

This marked my emergence as a Seeker in the true sense.

I turned to Scripture not as a flat text for exhortation, but as a developmental map—especially the Gospels, the Psalms, and the Pauline letters. I focused on what I came to call the Jesus Pattern Son: Christ not only as Redeemer, but as the formed Human revealing the path from nepios (immature) to huios (mature sonship).

During this season, I worked by the light of the luchnos—the lamp. I was looking at truth, studying its mechanics, its order, its interior architecture. I explored the “House,” discernment between things that differ, and provisional models for understanding spiritual maturation.

The lamp is necessary. But Scripture itself insists that the lamp is not the destination.

The Finder and the Morning Star (Phosphoros)

Second Peter speaks of a transition—from the lamp shining in a dark place to the Morning Star arising within.

This is the shift from looking at truth to living from it.

In other traditions, this distinction is well known. The Sufis speak of ḥāl and maqām. My deliverance was a ḥāl: a sovereign, temporary state of grace. But the aim of development is maqām—a permanent station stabilized through obedience, alignment, and interior work.

This is the transpersonal threshold: “joining the wires” so the inner Lighthouse is lit from within, capable of carrying higher voltage without burning out the human system. Illumination without formation fractures people. Formation exists to prevent that.

Ankle‑Deep Again

One of the great paradoxes of development is that every ascent eventually feels like beginning again.

Ezekiel’s river speaks of waters to swim in—but at the next level, one may once more find oneself ankle‑deep, slowed, forced back into clearing channels and removing sediment.

That is my present season.

Having tasted the Daystar, the work now is alignment: clearing remaining blockages, releasing obsolete frameworks, and ensuring that the House is fully wired for what it is meant to carry. You cannot safely live in the transpersonal if the personal has not been thoroughly ordered.

Why Innerstream Exists

At seventy‑nine years old—having survived open‑heart surgery, bilateral leg surgeries, and numerous physical trials—I can say this with clarity: the light I once walked in would feel like darkness compared to present truth, were it not honored as a necessary stage, a lamp for my feet.

Innerstream exists to share the unvarnished blueprints of this journey—not to impress, recruit, or persuade, but to orient those who find themselves walking the same Horizontal Wilderness.

This work is my mark (Matthew 5:48): not a static state of flawlessness, but the dynamic perfection of maturity.

The path continues. I remain a student of the Way even as I give names to its contours. If anything here resonates, let it serve not as instruction, but as confirmation—that the wilderness is navigable, the Guide is faithful, and the stream does, in fact, go somewhere.