I said, “Hey, you know, breakdowns come
And breakdowns go
So what are you going to do about it?
That’s what I’d like to know” – Paul Simon, “Gumboots”

If you’ve been reading the last few posts, you’ve been reading my critique of my relationship with Twitter.  If our positions were reversed, I’d be thinking what Paul Simon was saying to his friend in a taxi headed downtown.  I’d be thinking, “What are you going to change about the way you use Twitter?”

I’m going to tweet a little less.  I’ve tweeted 37,608 tweets in roughly 5 years and 7 months, which averages to 18 tweets a day.  How much less?  I’m going to limit myself to an average of 9 tweets a day, so that my current use and cold turkey meet each other half way.

I have vastly reduced the number of people I follow.  Before this assessment started, I was following about 10,500 different accounts.  Yes, it did make it hard to get to know anybody all that well.  How many people am I following now?  28.  How many of the 10,472 unfollowed accounts noticed being unfollowed?  Six.  Those six are part of the 28 I’m following.  I’m also following some close friends and some news sources I regularly read.

I’m going to limit the number of people I follow in a given time period.  What’s the number and time period?  One new follow per day.  You might say “But there are so many splendid people to follow on Twitter.”  There are indeed, but my plan is to let the pressure to follow someone build, let them become more luminous in my inner sight, until it is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that I should follow them.

I’m going to construe Twitter follows as an invitation for conversation.  For example, I was recently followed by Dr. Dwight Webb, Professor Emeritus in the Counselor Education program at the University of New Hampshire.  With a few moments of Googling, I discovered that he is the author of a book titled “50 Ways To Love Your Leaver.”  I never would have discovered this if I had been obsessing on having more followers.  I sent him an email saying a little bit more about myself than what he would find in my Twitter flow.

Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.

I confess that over the course of my life, I have experienced great ambivalence, swirls of mixed thoughts and emotions regarding the subject of being influential to others.

I recall attending Promise Keepers conferences in the 1990’s and 2000’s.  One of the things they pointed out was the great power of relationships.  For example, in the New Testament, the young man Timothy (who went on to become Bishop Timothy and St. Timothy) had the apostle Paul as a mentor.  Paul and Barnabas could be said to be colleagues, allies, partners.  And Paul had Timothy as a protege.  The Promise Keepers taught that, other things being equal, it was a good thing for a Christian man to have a mentor, an ally, and a protege.  I had no snappy comeback for this on scriptural grounds.  But when I looked at my life, and the difficulties I had experienced, I had a hard time believing that anyone would want to be like me, or follow in my footsteps.

I started blogging in 2003, in the hopes of sharing some of the things I learned from reading the Bible, and some of the things I was learning from my experience as a college professor.  I confess that I was a sucker for measures of influence in the blogosphere, visits, comments, links, trackbacks, permalinks, being included in people’s blogrolls.

Twitter not only has its own metrics for influence (retweets, favorites, follows, etc.), but it allows third parties to slice and dice the data generated by Twitter interactions to create their own metrics for influence (like Tweet Grader and Klout).  I’m not quite as much a sucker for Twitter influence metrics as I was for blogosphere influence metrics, but I wonder if I’m being helpful.

On some days, I consider my desire for influence as an itch, something of which I have yet to be cleansed of by my practice of Steps to Knowledge.  On the other hand, maybe it’s a good thing to aspire to be a good influence, maybe it’s a godly thing to aspire to be a godly influence.  There are any number of portions of Steps to Knowledge which talk about undergoing preparation to be of service, a contributor, in the future.  This seems to be part of mine.

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Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.

You don’t have to be a great scholar of human nature to notice that a person’s choice of companions has a profound impact on their destiny.  Wise King Solomon wrote “Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers harm.” (Proverbs 13:20, New International Version).  The apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthian church, “Do not be misled: ‘Bad company corrupts good character.'” (I Corinthian 15:33, New International Version)

When Twitter was launched, it had a relatively humble vision, at least in public.  One idea of Twitter was that it might be nice to know little things (and by “little things,” I mean “things that can be expressed in 140 characters or less”) about people you liked, and to share little things about yourself to people who liked you.  It would be like having your friends with you even they weren’t in the same room with you.  Leisa Reichelt coined the phrase “ambient intimacy” to describe this phenomenon.  The mockers said “Nobody cares what you had for breakfast, dude!” But if I like you, I might be willing, even happy, to invest three seconds in what you had for breakfast.

“Whatever is real cannot be threatened.
Whatever is not both mobile and social does not exist.” – Me, in 2010

As Twitter became the Next Big Thing, it became a marketplace of influence.  If you aren’t actively making the case at Twitter for your business or your religion or your political ideology, you’re leaving influence on the table.  So having more followers became more important, and being followed by the people one considered influential became more important.

I mention this to mention that I have had a number of different strategies for choosing who to follow on Twitter.  Sometimes I followed people for no other reason than that they followed me, or retweeted me.  Sometimes I used a random-walk strategy, seeing who else the people who followed me were following.  Sometimes I followed the cool kids, the people with the most followers, related to a given topic.  The most recent strategy I’ve used is to follow people who a) follow me, and b) have something in common with the me I advertise in my Twitter bio; Christians, political conservatives, people in the autism community.

I assess my Twitter follow strategy as something that reinforces the definition of myself in my Twitter bio.  If someone wants to do that, I’ve just shown them a successful strategy to adopt.  On the other hand, if you are questing for the mystery of your life (like I am), you may wish to consider being a little more flexible.

I assess my Twitter follow strategy as relatively uncritical, because I’m using someone’s Twitter bio as an overly important piece of information.  It should be noted that when someone follows you on Twitter, what you see is their Twitter bio.  Therefore, a person’s Twitter bio is their best hope to get someone they follow, to follow them.  It doesn’t say anything regarding the consistency of the person’s actual Twitter flow with their Twitter bio.  I believe it would be better if I looked at the last few tweets of someone to see if their tweets match their bio, if their tweets represent a flow I would like to influence me. I therefore assess myself as inadequately thoughtful as to who I want to influence me.

I am currently pondering what my new follow strategy will be, and how rigorously I will follow it.  I might just take my own suggestions.  Wouldn’t that be something?

Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.

In the previous post, I introduced that New Message from God practice/attitude of the Deep Evaluation.  I promised to share my evaluation of an involvement that has been going on for the past 5 years.  The involvement is…Twitter.

Let the record show that this is not an evaluation of Twitter, but only of my interaction with it.  I readily accept the possibility that some people’s involvement with Twitter has led to quite different results than mine.

I am pleased to have had the opportunity to hear Evan Williams, one of the founders of Twitter, speak at the 2007 International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Twitter was exactly one month old at the time, but was already generating significant enthusiasm from the 2007 South by Southwest conference.  I not only joined enthusiastically, but I returned from the conference and told whoever would listen that Twitter was going to be the Next Big Thing.

“Well, a redneck nerd in a bowling shirt was a-guzzlin’ Lone Star beer,
Talking religion and-a politics for all the world to hear.” – Kinky Friedman – They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Anymore

As of today, November 13, 2012, Twitter reports I have a total of 37,564 tweets.  Some of these are retweets of other people’s tweets, but I don’t know how many.  I believe it is a relatively small percentage.  What was the content and vibration of my Twitter flow? Flailing in helpless rage, especially from 2008 to 2010.  Pointing out persecution of Christians around the world, mostly, but not completely, from Muslims.  I want to believe that the flow got a little kinder and gentler in 2011 and 2012, because of my study of Steps to Knowledge, but I can’t really say for sure.

At this point, I’m recalling the dream of Horatius Bonar (1808-1889), Scottish churchman and poet.

Bonar dreamed that the angels took his zeal and weighed it, and told him that it was an excellent zeal, that it weighed out at 100% – all which could be asked.  He was greatly gratified by the result.  Next they wished to analyze that zeal.  They placed it in a crucible and tested it in various ways with this result: 14 parts were selfishness, 15 parts sectarianism, 22 parts ambition, 23 parts love to man, and 26 parts love to God.  He awoke humbled, and determined on a new consecration of his life to God.

I’m not exactly sure what the results would be if the angels were to conduct a vibrational assay of my Twitter flow from March of 2007 to the present.  All I know is that it’s something of which I’m not particularly proud.  All I know is that if there were any people who changed their minds about any political issue because of something I tweeted, I don’t know about it.  All I know is that if there were any people who attracted to Christianity by something I tweeted, I don’t know about it.

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Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.

When the apostle Paul wrote these words to the church at Corinth (I Corinthians 6:12, New American Standard Bible), I believe he was bringing perspective.  The Corinthian Christians were rejoicing in their freedom, rejoicing that their relationship with God was not based on following certain rules, but rather on the indestructible life of Christ.  All well and good, but there is some important fine print in verses 12 through 17.  A person may be permitted to eat what they want, but if they become a glutton of excess or delicacy, then what?  If one’s exercise of freedom leads to the loss of freedom through addiction, then what?  A Christian may rejoice that his body is a member of Christ himself, but if he takes the members of Christ and unites them with a prostitute, then what?
I mention this to introduce a practice of the New Message from God.  It could be considered a practice, it could be considered a customary attitude we try to develop. The idea is that every activity, every investment of time, talent and treasure, every possession can be construed as a relationship.  Furthermore, every relationship either furthers one’s purpose for being in the world, or hinders it.  Therefore, every relationship, activity, investment and possession is a subject for evaluation in the light of one’s deeper nature.  This practice/attitude is called the Deep Evaluation.

It’s not like I woke up one morning after I got back from Encampment and said “Whoa! I need to do some Deep Evaluation!”  On the other hand, I observed myself feeling and acting as if I had said that very thing.  I decided to just go with it.  I haven’t evaluated many different involvements yet, but there’s one involvement I have been observing from a number of different angles.  It’s rather significant for me, as it’s something in which I’ve invested quite a bit of time over the past 5 years.  It’s significant enough that I’m not going to launch into it until the next post.

Welcome to Mystery of Ascension! We are students and advocates of the the New Message from God. We are members of a worldwide community. We seek to assist the world in successfully navigating difficult times ahead. We seek to assist the world in successfully emerging into a greater community of intelligent life. You will also find some poetry. Find out more about us here. Contact us here.