Spiritual journey

OK. I'm going to change gears here after a long hiatus. I'm now going to chronicle my spiritual odyssey. How I got to where I am now spiritually. Actually, I can pick this up exactly where I left off in my last post but take it in a different direction... with Maynard G. Krebs and the Dobie Gillis show. When I was 10 yrs old (fifth grade), I became enamoured of "hip" talk like beatnik Maynard and "Kookie" the constantly hair combing parking lot attendant on the cop show, 77 Sunset Strip.
This inspired me to pick up a book entitled "The Beats" at the Trailways bus station in Fitchburg, Mass where I used to wait for my father to pick me up after my guitar lesson. This was an anthology of writings by people like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Leroi Jones (now Imamu Imiri Baraka) and Gregory Corso. Often, these writers referred to Zen Buddhism and terms like satori, koans, bodhisattva, dharma and the like. Again, I initially saw these terms as part of the "beat" lexicon. They sounded cool and I liked to use them but I didn't want to use them ignorantly. I wanted to use them with understanding. And so it began.