The question of personal “identity”—who or what I really am—is unanswerable apart from a personal God whose creative word decides the issue. That is why Eastern religions that lack such a God have no use for such questions and consider them illusions to be dissolved. The same applies to notions like a “true friend,” “true poet” or true anything. The reason is that identity and truth in the sense needed require there to be meanings we discover and do not create, and thus a world that is meaningful before we begin to act in it. But such a world can’t exist apart from a personal creator-God.