I believe those of us who participate in online communities should find a new term to describe the name(s) by which we are known offline.

There has been a sad proliferation of terms that use "real" to describe offline names, lives and identities, and I would suggest it is a false application and a harmful one.

In what way are our online handles not real? They are, in fact, reified with every word we type using them. The fact that there may be many such identities does not make any one of them less real. Only the sincerity or lack thereof with which we speak in them can do that.

One name may be the one we use in monetary communities such as banks, when signing for a loan. Another may be the one we use in creative communities to sign the works of our imaginations. The structural functionality of both names is the same.

Under certain circumstances, "official" and "unofficial" could suit the need to distinguish between what is acceptable to, say, employers and what is not. But even that casts a shadow over the legitimacy we generate on our own account, in our own spaces, to our own rules.

Myself, I lean toward "offline" and "online" which are less value-laden and more simply descriptive. And, for those who are in the privileged and fearless position of using one name for everything, the statement that "this is my 3D name, too" has a certain panache.

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Sometimes, in I Ching, hexagrams go in pairs. Heaven over Earth and Earth over Heaven is one of those pairs.

One of the most common readings of this pair rests on the point that the movement of Heaven is upward while the movement of Earth is downward.

So Heaven over Earth, rather than being the happy, natural way of things, is a recipe for instability. Each of them flies off in its own direction, without any countervailing influences at all. It's a model of solipsistic extremism.

Earth over Heaven, on the other hand, is the concept of balance. The movement of each presses against the other and is held stable. Earth over Heaven can move in any direction at all, as long as both choose and move together. It's freedom, but also constraint, because, without that partner to balance against, it all unravels again.

Another interesting thing about I Ching is that each of the six lines in a hexagram can be stable or moving. A moving line will change into its opposite, solid to broken and broken to solid. So, for example, Heaven (three solid lines) with all three lines moving will be on its way to becoming Earth (three broken lines).

And now we come to the point of this. Our online text interactions with each other can be either Heaven over Earth or Earth over Heaven.

In either case, though, the lines are invariably all moving.

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