I’m Not Sure Who You Think I Am and I’m Not Sure Who I Think I Am Either
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts~ Shakespeare, “As You Like It”
In the grand theater of life, we often find ourselves playing roles for which we didn’t audition, wearing costumes and even personas that we didn’t choose, and reciting lines that we didn’t write. This particular drama of personal identity and self, as well as recognition and misrecognition, culminated for me while teaching at Esalen, when I spied the great philosopher Sam Keen.
“Are you Sam Keen?” I asked with a voice tinged with the excitement of a fan meeting a hero.
“Not Yet!” he replied — a response so profound in its simplicity that it could be a koan.
As someone who has spent decades teaching Buddhist psychology, I immediately understood what Sam meant. The self, that stubborn illusion we cling to so desperately, is nothing more than a series of ephemeral data points compiled by our minds. We are all just actors in a play, convinced of the permanences of our characters and roles, occasionally blessed to realize that the curtain falls and rises again with each passing moment. And then we die and that self is reified, realized. So Sam didn’t want to be defined by a reification or realization of the name “Sam Keen.” Not yet, at least.
This notion of the self as fictional is encapsulated in the Buddhist concept of Anattā or “no-self.” It’s a challenging idea to most Westerners, as counterintuitive as suggesting that the chair you are sitting on doesn’t exist. Yet just as the chair I am sitting on now is merely a convenient label for a collection of legs and seat that used to be a tree and will eventually be dust, our sense of self is but a name we give to an ever-changing assemblage of thoughts, feelings, perceptions as well as flesh, bones, blood, and cells.
But if our sense of self is dynamic, why does it often feel static, and why are we so certain of who we are? Maybe it is because we also outsource the task of self-definition to others… We become who others think we are, other people’s projections, like actors taking cues from an unseen audience — say followers on social media.
I have experienced this phenomenon firsthand as I am frequently misrecognized. When I unintentionally stroll past a red rope or am ushered to the finest table in a restaurant, I assume that I have been misrecognized for some ubiquitous washed-up 80s musician — perhaps Eddie Money’s keyboard player, Billy Squier’s bass player, Rick Springfield’s saxophonist, J Geils’ drummer… an apparently harmless optical illusion, a momentary escape into an even more fictional parallel universe.
And then I saw this photo and suddenly it all made sense:
I guess that people misrecognize me for the missing Robinson brother from The Black Crowes. Nevermind that I can only name one of their songs… a cover of an Otis Redding ditty.
But in that moment of joyously enjoying my complementary libation, I am fully aware that I have been given a new role to play, one I never auditioned for but was (mistakenly) projected upon me by others.
An ethical quandary: how should I feel about benefiting from being misrecognized? Is it a form of deception or a simple quirk of fate that I should embrace? After some reflection I have come to view it as part of my karma, a cosmic joke that adds levity to an otherwise grim reality.
And as Miles Davis so eloquently enunciated, “It is what it is.”
In my work as a spiritually oriented psychotherapist, I have come to believe not in enlightenment, but in awakening. It is a subtle distinction but an important one. Enlightenment suggests a final state, a permanent arrival. Awakening, on the other hand, as I wrote in “How To Survive Your Childhood Now That You’re An Adult: A Path to Authenticity and Awakening” is a process, being able to continually surf life’s inherent paradoxes.
In my extremely limited understanding of the human brain (neuroscience being littered with charlatans), I believe — most likely, mistakenly — that the pre-frontal cortex is primarily a binary either/or machine. The problem is that reality is “both” or “all of the above,” not either/or. It is both meaningless and meaningful, positive and negative, good and bad, good and evil, day and night, sun and moon, Brahman and maya, loving and hating, black and white and gray, etc.
This is why conceiving of awakening as surfing paradoxes is “useful” and even propitious. It also aligns with Lacan’s concept of “subjective destitution” because the Buddhist idea of “no-self” involves a radical questioning of our fixed notions of identity. Both “no-self” and subjective destitution invite us to see our-selves not as solid, unchanging cores, but as fluid, evolving processes.
Subjective destitution, as articulated by Lacan, challenges traditional notions of identity by undermining — nay, deconstructing — the idea of a stable, coherent self. It involves the surrender of our fundamental fantasy of the possibility of “wholeness” and leads to a questioning of our sense of self. This process disrupts the symbolic and imaginary formations that constitute identity revealing the self as a construct mediated by the external forces of the Big Other. By accepting the void at the core of identity, subjective destitution opens up possibilities for new forms of subjectivity that are not bound by traditional Western notions of self.
From that point we can “vivre la pulsion” or “live the drive.” An example of living the drive would involve an analysand who no longer seeks validation from others for their desires. Instead we find satisfaction in pursuing our drives without the need for external approval. For instance, an artist might create not for recognition but because the act of creation itself provides a form of jouissance, a satisfaction derived from the process rather than external validation.
“What other people think of me is none of my business.”
Living the drive, as conceptualized by Lacan, can be seen as analogous to Nietzsche’s metaphor of the camel, lion, and child in terms of personal transformation and liberation. Here is how they line up:
The Camel: Initially we are burdened by societal norms and expectations, similar to how the drive is initially constrained by the symbolic order. The camel represents a stage of obedience and duty.
The Lion: As we reject these norms and asserts self-determination, we become like the lion, symbolizing courage and the will to create our own values. This parallels the drive becoming more autonomous as it breaks free from constraints.
The Child: Finally the child represents innocence and a new beginning that involves embracing our desires without the need for external validation, finding satisfaction in the process itself, akin to a child’s affirmative and joyous approach to playing. In this play there is liberation and acceptance of our authentic natures.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.” ~ Eliot
Am I Eddie Money’s keyboardist or the missing member of the Black Crowes?
Definitely not.
Am I the Kim Kardashian of academia?
Quite possibly.
Could my greatest talent lie in seeing through the veil of illusion and believing that every speech act is really a request for love?
Yes.
But am I “Ira Israel”?
Not yet.
Yeats famously wrote that “the best lack all conviction, the worst are full of passionate intensity.” How do we walk that razor’s edge of being fully engaged in a life that we know is absurd? Especially when there are dogmatic fundamentalists who wouldn’t piss on us if we were on fire… or would maybe even set us on fire because we don’t share their beliefs in gods, or their ideas about sex, love, marriage, etc.?
In the end, perhaps the wisest approach is to willingly and deliberately choose our illusions.
In juxtaposition to Yeats, I espouse the genius of the poet laureate Robbie Williams who so eloquently phrased it at the end of the film “Better Man”:
“It might be cabaret, but it’s world class cabaret…
And I’m the fucking best at it!”
On this grand stage we call life, we might not always know who we are or who others think we are, but we can certainly play the game at full throttle… and with a wink and a nod to the absurdity of it all.
