John, You are very welcome here. There are many Open Forum registered visitors who choose just to read, not to post, and that’s fine. On the other hand, if you should be moved to post, that’s great, too.
You wrote “There are obviously folks here who have advanced further along their chosen paths than I”. That may or may not be so. That is, appearances, even experiences, can be deceiving, and you yourself may not know precisely where you are in your own unfolding. Whatever the case, it is almost certainly true that, in the words of Benjamin Spock, I think it was,
you know more than you think you do. Thus, what seems to release the inherent (or, to borrow from your username, the innate) knowledge that is already within every
seeker is not how long we have walked our path, but with what humility, commitment, and enthusiasm we walk it. In my experiece, an abundance of each of those is what the process demands of us; no more than that, but no less, either.