THE STORY

I didn’t set out to become a teacher of this work.

I set out to understand something I could feel but couldn’t quite name.

I was born in Michigan, raised between two strong and very different forces: structure and creativity. My father was a military man and CEO, precise and demanding. My mother was an artist and country singer—expressive, intuitive, and emotionally fluent. From an early age, I learned how to move between worlds that often don’t speak the same language.

That pattern followed me into adulthood.

After college, I moved to Los Angeles and entered the entertainment industry from the ground up. I worked my way from Production Assistant to Producer, Writer, and Director, collaborating across major studios and productions. Storytelling became my craft. Not just as entertainment, but as a way of understanding people, motivation, conflict, and transformation.

But beneath the outward motion of career and creativity, a quieter question persisted.

What actually changes people?

Not temporarily. Not theatrically. But in ways that last.

The Search

I was raised with respect for religion and tradition, yet I felt drawn beyond doctrine toward lived experience. Like many people with logical minds, I approached spirituality with curiosity and skepticism in equal measure.

I explored meditation centers, spiritual communities, alternative healing spaces, and countless gatherings built around ritual and atmosphere. Some were beautiful. Some were sincere. Many were meaningful in the moment.

And yet, again and again, I noticed the same thing.

By morning, the effect was gone.

The experience faded. The patterns returned. The same inner disorganization remained.

So I kept searching because I knew something deeper existed. I could feel it, even if I couldn’t yet articulate it.

The Apprenticeship

In 1990, during my first visit to Hawai‘i, there was a massive shift. Not as a revelation, but as recognition. What I encountered there was not spectacle or belief, but coherence. A way of understanding human experience that emphasized relationship, responsibility, and direct perception.

Over the following decades, my life became an apprenticeship. Not in adopting an identity, but in learning how perception itself functions.

I studied extensively. I returned repeatedly. I listened more than I spoke. I learned from elders, teachers, mystics, and practitioners across multiple traditions, including indigenous knowledge holders who shared what they could with care and discernment.

I do not claim lineage authority.
I do not claim cultural ownership.

What I carry forward is experience that I earned slowly, tested repeatedly, and integrated into real life.

There were losses along the way. My father’s passing. The loss of teachers. The death of my mother. These moments stripped away abstraction and demanded something honest and usable.

Understanding became less about knowledge and more about orientation.

The Turning Point

What I eventually realized after years of searching was this:

We are not going inside ourselves when this work happens.

We are not escaping reality.
We are not imagining worlds.

We are reorienting consciousness.

Awareness is not contained within the body. The body is a physical interface, a point of reference for the spiritual. When perception disengages from exclusive identification with physical location, awareness doesn’t collapse inward, it opens outward into other perceptual environments that are already present.

This realization changed everything.

It explained why surface-level spiritual experiences faded.
It explained why certain ancient practices endured.
It explained why some forms of work integrated while others evaporated.

And it became the foundation of what I now call Perceptual Navigation.

Story as Instruction

I am a storyteller by nature and by trade. Over time, I came to understand that story is not decoration. It’s orientation.

Through narrative, metaphor, and symbol, human beings learn how to navigate complexity, meaning, and transformation without being overwhelmed by abstraction. This is why I eventually wrote Ocean Spaces, Island Worlds.

That book is not separate from this work.

It is an instruction manual disguised as a story that compiled all I had learned from many great minds.

Through the character of Matani, I explored the same perceptual principles I had spent decades living and studying—how people lose orientation, how they recover it, and why free will and responsibility matter more than belief.

Only after publishing the book did I fully understand what those years had been preparing me for. I hadn’t just been researching or writing.

I had been apprenticing.

Where I Stand Now

I live a modern life. I raise children. I work, commute, create, and carry responsibility. I do not live outside the world—I work inside it.

The work I offer now exists because it functions here.

I don’t claim special authority.

What I offer is guidance in perceptual orientation—teaching people how to consciously enter, navigate, and return from non-ordinary awareness with clarity, grounding, and agency.

This work lasts because it restores access to something that was never gone—only misoriented.

Why I Share This

I share this story not to impress, but to be transparent.

If something here makes sense, it may not be because you believe it…but because you recognize it.

And if you don’t, that’s okay too.

This work has a way of finding the people it’s meant for, quietly and without force.

Just like it found me.