Get a 50 year lease on your i-name for only US$25, and impress your friends and family in five years time by already having one when everyone else finally finds out what they are…
An i-name is a new standards-based persistent identity that can be used to receive email, telephone, fax and other forms of communication. It is portable and easily remembered. For example, my i-name could be =sitapati. An i-broker protects your privacy by brokering requests to communicate with you. Only persons to whom you explicitly give permission can actually use it to contact you, and they make a request through your i-broker who relays it to you. Can anybody say: “Just say No to spam”?
The advantage of an i-name, aside from the spam reduction feature, is that even if you change jobs, Internet Service Providers, phone providers, countries, even sexes, people can still get in touch with you through your easily remembered i-name.
Online identity doesn’t map well to “real world” identity yet, and efforts are underway to bring the two inline. Although you may change many aspects of your life which affect your online identity, such as phone numbers or email addresses, you remain the same identity. So now efforts are underway to make your online identity persistent and transcendental to circumstantial changes, just as your real world identity is.
Your real world identity is persistent not only through circumstantial and external changes such as moving house or changing jobs, but also through more fundamental changes. Think back (if you can remember) to being a child. Your body then was completely different. It was a different size, had different hormonal characteristics, and was even composed of completely different cells (scientists tell us they renovate completely every seven years). Somehow, across the changes that brought you to the present conglomeration of cells that make up your physical body, your identity has persisted.
Of course many things about you have changed - your tastes, your opinions, your desires - but the fact is that those are things that have changed about you, not about anyone else. There is no continuity of identity between you and I - we are different people. On the other hand, there is continuity of identity between you now and your childhood self. That’s why we can say “I am a different person than I was ten years ago”. The “different” spoken of here is not the same as the “different” in: “You and I are different people”. What’s the difference between “I” and “I”? Details. The core identity is continuous.
What is it that gives rise to persistent identity across complete changes in the cellular structure? According to Vedic understanding, that is our transcendental identity, what we really are. It’s not the body, which is an ever changing set of circumstantial details, from childhood to youth to adulthood and on to old age. Modern science has a dearth of understanding of this identity. What is the difference between a living body and a dead one? They body is there: but where is the person that we all knew?
Have a look at this take from the Bhagavad-gita to see the wisdom of another culture on this blindspot in modern Western understanding.
