Her house looked like something out of Neil Gaimon’s imagination.

Angie Rapalyea (Rap-al-yeah-a) lived in Philadelphia, my home city for many years. In 1998, I’d met her by responding to an online posting to learn about energy work and had found myself standing outside the gate of her home in Germantown. She was on a corner lot, in a darkly shuttered house with pointing spires and floor-to-ceiling windows of another era. Age and a gentle neglect permeated everything.

The inside of her house revealed animal pelts shewn across chairs and banisters, bones scattered across alters, and Native American drums and artifacts in odd corners. The worn wooden floor creaked (of course) as you moved. I remember a huge Grandfather clock ticking ominously by the stairs that climbed steeply up and into the shadows of the second floor.

The comedian Bill Maher once quipped, “I have nothing against the Catholic religion except my entire childhood.” I tend to agree. Rules and conformity just weren’t, and aren’t, my thing.

The Buddhist path I took in my 20’s was Vajrayana, which was a lot more relaxed than Zen. Retreats started at 8:30 or 9 in the morning, offered generous breaks, and allowed you to adjust on your meditation cushion, to chat on breaks, to take care of your own needs as you saw fit.

A spiritual identity and a spiritual experience seem like great things. After all, who doesn’t want to have spiritual experiences — like feeling the divine all around you? And who doesn’t want to be more identified with what we might call “spiritual” personality traits, like kindness, openness, love, and acceptance?

The vast majority of contemplative and meditative practices encourage both of these things — powerful spiritual experiences, and a powerful spiritual identity.

Not so much in Zen, though.

It’s not because Zen is a killjoy in principle, even if it can be a buzzkill from time to time. Yet Zen’s sober view of spirituality is one of the main reasons I wrote “When the Buddha Needs Therapy.”

Let me explain.

Projection is a very human thing to do.

Projection, for a refresher, is the process of displacing one’s feelings onto something else, be it a spouse, the idea of a god, or a spiritual teacher. It is most commonly used to describe “shadow” projection — hating in others what we actually have within ourselves. For example, if someone bullies a peer about his insecurities, the bully might be projecting his own struggle with self-esteem onto the other person, hating it, and making fun of it.

I wanted to share a final story about Junpo and me. This one involved Ken Wilber and Junpo, two grizzled spiritual warriors who I had the honor of sitting with (with Doshin Nelson Roshi) for 3 hours, back around 2011.