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forourselves and then elevate it—temporarily, at least—to the status of genuine identity.
    Like boardwalk tourists poking our faces in the two-dimensional carnival cutouts depicting the muscle man and bathing beauty, we are forever trying to find some authentic self in the multitudinous, temporary, and ever-changing roles we assume in life. We clutch at straws, claiming to actually be somebody to avoid the free fall that we fear is entailed in being nobody.
    We find ourselves in relationships with others and then glom on to such guises as our true identity (“ I am a father/mother/son/daughter/friend/lover/husband/wife,” and so on). Or we identify with our jobs and professions (“ I am a carpenter/lawyer/doctor/teacher,” and so on). Or we earn degrees, certificates, and titles, and present them as our true identity (“ I am a licensed mechanic/certified yoga instructor/PhD”).
    We have our hobbies and leisure pursuits (“ I am a surfer/camper/blogger/roller blader/stamp collector”) and our racial, religious, economic, and national personae (“ I am white/middle class/Christian/American”). We create online avatars or Facebook identities in the hope that a virtual persona will suffice for our self-image. We even, in a true act of desperation, identify ourselves with our past traumas ( “I am a recovering survivor of alcoholism/drug addiction/childhood abuse/divorce”) or current feelings (“ I am angry/happy/jealous/depressed”).
    We try to find ourselves through these identifications , a word that derives from the Latin term “to make the same.” We make a role “the same” as the player of the role, or constitute the experiencer as “the same” as the experience the experiencer experiences. I
    But who is the “I” that we at different times assert is one or another (or the sum total of all) of these guises? Who’s the personthat takes on all these personae? Who is it that’s sticking his or her head into each of these two-dimensional cutouts?
    â€œAll the world’s a stage,” Shakespeare said, “and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts.” 3 These various roles are sometimes chosen and sometimes given to us to enact, but when we wholly identify with one player or another in this revolving cast of characters—doing our best to keep up with the necessarily frequent costume changes—we set ourselves up for confusion, dissatisfaction, and frustration. We are confused about which one of the multiple roles truly identifies us; we are dissatisfied by the attempt to make any one of these parts truly fulfill us; and we are frustrated by the limitations inherent in each and every one of these personae.
    Bewildering when you actually think about it, right? All these different versions of “me”!
    A character played by Lily Tomlin in her one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe , voices what may be a common sentiment: “All my life, I’ve always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific.” 4
    Mistaking the authentic self for what are just multiple, transient, and conditional guises—creating at best a fractured and confused sense of identity—we are diverted from the quest to uncover our deeper, changeless nature. We identify with what has been called the “lower self”—the ego, persona, personality, or “self-image”—instead of communing with the real McCoy, what has been variously termed the higher or authentic self, the soul, the spirit, our true nature or being. “We have a hunger for something like authenticity, but are easily satisfied by an ersatz facsimile,” as Miles Orvell puts it. 5
    The self, it seems, is in an ongoing identity crisis. We’re spending our lives in a series of caricatures,