Job's Report

Identity journal

Dear Radio Free Pizza gourmets,

Here we go again: another chapter of the oblique autobiography I’ve been writing as “journals”—which some critics might just call filler, since the typical content I produced in my first couple of years has been largely absent for the majority of 2025.

The first charted the path from my early Mexico years through early trips, deep friendships, a 2018 seizure and coma, and a doomed real-estate investment meant to secure my father’s retirement. I found myself back in Mexico City again this past April, where I found myself with my job ending and my future uncertain, but trying to trust that every stalled chapter eventually turns. But that chapter turned for the worse, and the second found me back in Minneapolis—jobless, shaken by losses, and facing a nation devolving into political turmoil. In that unrest, I turned toward stillness, faith, and the idea of resilience as both spiritual grounding and active renewal. In the third, I wrote about driving from Minneapolis to Chicago for the Center for Political Innovation’s Great Unity Convention, after which I came home (to a new job) convinced once more of the importance of building bridges rather than conducting purity tests, of rejecting political violence, and of organizing for material peace: work, housing, healthcare, education, and dignity for working families at home and abroad.

So, given the nobility of those aims, let me tell you that no one regrets more than I do the relative absence of content here to support them. Without going into further detail, suffice it to say that this has been the hardest year of my life.

Work in progress

This journal, I hope, will mark the beginning of a (likely slow) return to form. To that end, I’d like to delve a little deeper than usual on spiritual matters, with reference to the same dispatch touched upon in a previous journal. There, I introduced what I called Liberation Vitalism—my attempt to braid the justice-focus of liberation theology with a life-affirming vitalism. I reflected on Gustavo Gutiérrez’s legacy, noted the familiar critiques that liberation theology edges into Marxism, and walked through today’s debates on “Christian vitalism,” Bronze Age Mindset, and the deeper cultural metacrisis—a crisis born of our loss of the sacred. Overall, I attested the obvious: that living beings carry an intrinsic value machines never can.

Against that backdrop, I sketched the core of Liberation Vitalism—human dignity, authentic desire, compassionate strength, deep community, and spiritual resistance to dehumanization—and I closed by insisting, with a quote from the Epistle of James, that faith without deeds is dead, and any philosophy that fights oppression is worth meeting halfway.

Either before or while composing that dispatch (I honestly can’t remember), I happened to come across an October 2024 video from the estimable Dr. John Campbell—surely a familiar name to dissidents of the 2022–’23 coronavirus pandemic, and to whose work we referred in February 2024—that might have put the idea of addressing Christianity into my mind.

Here, Campbell walks through the Shroud of Turin from a multitude of angles—scientific, medical, historical, and of course spiritual—explaining how this 14-foot linen cloth bears a photographic-negative image of a crucified man, something impossible to produce before the invention of photography, and how the image even encodes real three-dimensional information that NASA’s VP8 analyzer can translate into accurate relief. I learned that the image is incredibly superficial, with only the outermost fibers bearing it, and that they contain no paint, pigment, dye, or stain, making artistic forgery essentially impossible. Campbell also lays out the pathological details visible in the image: scourge marks, crown-of-thorns wounds, wrist-nail placement, a spear wound, bruising, and blood patterns—all medically consistent with Roman crucifixion practices, and with the Gospel accounts.

The biological findings were also compelling: real human blood with high bilirubin levels, Jerusalem-matching limestone under the blood, and pollen that traces the object’s historical movement from Jerusalem through Turkey and into Europe. Campbell also addressed the controversial 1988 carbon-dating result that placed the Shroud in the medieval period, explaining how the test came from a repaired corner contaminated with later materials, and how newer dating methods and textile comparisons suggest a much earlier, possibly first-century origin. The connection to the Sudarium of Oviedo—a separate head cloth with bloodstain patterns that match the Shroud perfectly and whose provenance reaches back over a millennium—was especially striking. By the end, I came away feeling that while absolute certainty may be impossible, the convergence of scientific, forensic, and historical evidence makes the Shroud far more mysterious, and far more compelling, than I ever expected.

Campbell has since returned, now and then, to the topic of the Shroud, but until today these have escaped my attention. Still, Christianity remained a subject of interest in my mind long after developing Liberation Vitalism, and became an even larger one after suffering my many setbacks of 2025. For that reason, what little philosophical investigations I’ve undertaken this year have concerned themselves largely (if not entirely) with Christian metaphysics, of which I’d like to share some results. These won’t address the mystery of the resurrection, however—and in fact I must warn the faithful among you, they’re potentially heretical, depending on your ecclesiastical framework. But if (knowing my own audience) concerns about heresy don’t trouble you, then I hope you’ll find them enlightening.

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With that in mind, let’s turn to (an audiobook of) Neville Goddard’s At Your Command (1939), the inaugural text of the author’s career, in which he explores the idea that consciousness is God and that our awareness of being is the creative power shaping our reality: that through which people create their experiences, according to their consciousness and beliefs.

Goddard’s central teaching is that to manifest desires, one must assume the feeling of already possessing what is wanted, rather than begging “God” as an external deity. Accordingly, he interprets biblical stories (at ~1:46) not as historical record or biography, but as a psychological drama taking place in human consciousness, and suggests that by claiming this understanding as your own, you can transform your world from “barren deserts of Egypt to the promised land of Canaan.”

In his view, we learn (at ~3:42), the numerous biblical appearances of “I am” statements—such as when God introduces himself to Moses as “I Am That I Am” and instructs him to tell the Israelites “I Am hath sent me unto you” (Exodus 3:14)—reveal that the true identity of God abides in our own awareness of being. Furthermore, Christ’s statement in John 14:6 that “I am the way” indicates how consciousness itself is the resurrecting power. Goddard explains that man is always “out-picturing” what he is conscious of being, and this truth makes man free from self-imprisonment. Accordingly, he urges readers to give up beliefs in a God apart from themselves and claim God as their awareness of being, as Jesus and the prophets did.

Goddard goes on (at ~5:11) to interpret Jesus’ seemingly contradictory statements “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30) and “my Father is greater than I” (John 14:28), explaining that consciousness (the Father) is greater than what one is conscious of being (the Son), yet they remain one—like a conceiver and his conceptions. Accordingly, consciousness is the Father drawing manifestations of life to you, and you are currently drawing into your world whatever you are conscious of being. For that reason, he tells us (at ~7:40) of his own reading of Christ’s dictum that, “Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3):

If you are dissatisfied with your present expression in life, the only way to change it is to take your attention away from that which seems so real to you and rise in consciousness to that which you desire to be. You cannot serve two masters; therefore, to take your attention from one state of consciousness and place it upon another [state of consciousness] is to die to one and live to the other.

On the same principle, Goddard reinterprets Christ asking Peter, “Whom say ye that I am?” (Matthew 16:15) as an eternal question addressed to oneself, explaining that your conviction of yourself determines your expression in life. Thus, Goddard explains (at ~9:11) why millions of prayers go unanswered: people pray for change while their consciousness remains fixated on what they desire to see changed. He teaches that successful prayer must be claiming rather than begging—turning away from pictures of lack by denying mere appearance and instead assuming the state of consciousness in which one already possesses that for which one prays—and emphasizes (at ~10:21) not questioning how what one desires will appear. Because signs always follow and never precede, he advocates instead that, in prayer, one should simply establish the state of consciousness in which one possesses what one seeks, and letting manifestations follow naturally.

Goddard continues his reinterpretation of the Gospels, staging (at ~11:31) the biblical story of Mary not as a woman giving birth to Jesus, but as the awareness of being that remains virgin regardless of how many desires to which it gives birth, and invites readers to see themselves as Mary being impregnated through desire, becoming one with their desire to the point of embodying it—even in the absence of logical reason to believe what one wants is possible—by making your awareness your husband, and thus conceiving the eventual manifestation of one’s desires. This in turn mirrors the first verse of John—“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1)—which, Goddard tells us (at ~13:38), describes the process of creation. He explains that “the beginning” is the present moment when desire arises, with “the Word” being desires seeking embodiment, which can attain to no reality until united with the awareness of being.

That, however, comes with Goddard’s caveat (at ~16:28) that you cannot put “new wine in old bottles”—you cannot take your present beliefs, fears, and limitations into new consciousness. He instructs readers to take attention away from problems and dwell upon “just being” by declaring “I am” without conditions until feeling formless. Within this expanded consciousness, one can give form to new conceptions by feeling oneself to be what is desired. He describes this state as containing all possibilities, interpreting 2 Corinthians 5:8 (“willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord”) as leaving behind former self-conception to assume a new identity. Naturally, this may require revaluing oneself, and so Goddard encourages readers (at ~19:16) to awaken to the “everlasting Father” that is their own awareness of being—their true power beyond human limitations.

In another dissection of a biblical appearance of the phrase “I am,” Goddard interprets (at ~21:11) Christ’s assurance that “I am the good shepherd” (John 10:11) to mean that awareness is the shepherd, and what one is aware of being are the sheep that follow. He describes awareness as “a voice calling in the wilderness of human confusion” that always finds expression, and which therefore has never lost any “sheep” that it has been aware of being. Similarly, Goddard reinterprets “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” (Psalm 23:1) to mean that consciousness never lacks evidence of what one is aware of being, and therefore enjoins the reader to become aware of positive qualities rather than restricting one’s awareness to their opposites.

Goddard emphasizes again (at ~22:53) that your world reflects your consciousness—you don’t have your present consciousness because of your world, but rather, your world is what it is because of your consciousness. He acknowledges this principle seems too simple for “the wisdom of man that tries to complicate everything,” and notes that this revelation initially seems blasphemous as it contradicts beliefs in an external God. Still, he reiterates that his reconciliation of the apparent contradiction in “I and my father are one, but my father is greater than I” implies that you are one with your present self-conception, but nonetheless, you remain greater than what you’re currently aware of being. But before attempting to shift one’s awareness and transform one’s world, he stresses (at ~23:35) establishing the foundation that “I am the Lord”—that one’s awareness of being is God—and warns that without firmly establishing this understanding, one will return to former limiting beliefs.

Discussing further biblical appearances of the phrase “I am,” Goddard reinterprets (at ~35:11) Christ’s assertion that “I am the vine, ye are the branches” (John 15:5) to mean that consciousness is the vine, and the qualities one is conscious of being are the branches. Since things have no life except insofar as one is conscious of them, just as branches wither without sap, things in your world pass away when you withdraw attention from them. He again advises dissolving problems by removing attention from them and becoming indifferent, while instead feeling yourself to be the solution. Turning next (at ~37:23) to Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, Goddard interprets his inquiry “Whom [do you seek]?” and his assertion that, indeed, “I am he” (John 18:4–5, 7–8) as crystallizing a principle of manifestation. He explains that whatever you seek salvation from—whether hunger, poverty, imprisonment, disease—your savior is the state you desire—food, riches, freedom, health. He instructs readers to claim “I am he” by feeling themselves to be the thing desired, not in words but in consciousness, and explains that “feeling after” a quality in consciousness until you feel yourself to be it causes that quality to embody itself as healing in your world.

Goddard further encourages readers (at ~39:38) to believe in their awareness of being as God and to claim for themselves all attributes previously given to an external deity, interpreting “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it” (Psalm 127:1) to mean that unless what you seek is first established in consciousness, you labor in vain to find it. He therefore urges readers (at ~41:36) to stop blaming others and find themselves as the cause of everything in their lives, explaining that “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him” (John 6:44) means that consciousness draws all manifestations—for example, for a poor man to find wealth until he first claims himself wealthy.

Using the parable of the prodigal son, Goddard illustrates (at ~42:50) how one must realize they brought about their own conditions of lack and make the decision to rise to a higher level. He notes there was no condemnation of the prodigal when he claimed his inheritance, explaining that others condemn us only as long as we condemn ourselves. Accordingly, Goddard advises readers (at ~44:30) to stop questioning whether they are worthy to receive their desires, explaining that desires are fashioned within us based on what we claim ourselves to be. He instructs readers to “leave all judgments out of the picture,” elevate one’s consciousness to the level of what one desires and to claim it as present reality, interpreting “My grace is sufficient for thee” (2 Corinthians 12:9) as having faith in unseen claims until conviction is born.

Goddard emphasizes (at ~45:45) not being anxious about results, which will follow “as surely as day follows night.” He encourages looking upon desires as “spoken words of God,” and therefore as promises. He explains that most people fail to realize desires because they constantly condition them, describing (at ~47:06) how people habitually judge by appearances and see things as real, forgetting that the only reality is consciousness. Addressing the question of whether destructive desires come from God, he tells readers that no one truly desires to kill another, but rather desires freedom from them. He states that because people don’t believe the desire for freedom contains its own fulfillment, they distort God’s gifts through lack of faith.

Explaining (at ~50:00) that the heavenly state one seeks exists only in consciousness, as “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). Goddard states that we are currently living in the heaven we’ve established within ourselves. He encourages creating a new heaven by entering a new state of consciousness, which will cause a new earth to appear. He interprets “behold, I come quickly; and my reward is with me” (Revelation 22:12) to mean that consciousness quickly rewards us with whatever we deeply believe about ourselves, as “God is not mocked.” Commenting (at ~51:16) on the biblical story of the disciples fishing all night without success until Jesus appeared, Goddard contrasts fishing “in the night of human darkness” (seeking external things through effort) with fishing as directed by Christ (with one’s awareness of being). He instructs readers to “fish in consciousness” for desires, explaining that to catch what is beyond present capacity, one must “launch out into deeper water” by taking attention away from current problems and limitations.

Describing (at ~53:16) the process of expanding consciousness by declaring “I am” without conditions, Goddard explains that this practice causes one to feel an expansion “as though you were actually growing.” He reassures readers not to fear this experience, as former limitations will die as one moves away from them: in this expanded consciousness, one finds oneself to be “a power never dreamt of before.” Because “I am” is “the resurrection and the life,” Goddard locates the power to make one’s appear in your world in personal identification with their fulfillment: when feelings of desired states (like wealth, freedom, strength) become fixed within, one’s “formless being will take upon itself the forms of the things felt,” and Goddard describes this as becoming “crucified upon the feelings” of these qualities and “buried in the stillness of these convictions.” He promises that “as a thief in the night,” these qualities will be resurrected in one’s world as living reality.

Goddard reinterprets (at ~55:45) the story of Daniel in the lion’s den as a manifestation principle, explaining that Daniel turned his back on the lions (problems) and looked toward the light (desired state). He instructs readers that when in the “den” of poverty or sickness, they should remove attention from problems and dwell instead upon what they seek, promising that by not looking back in consciousness to problems, but continuing in faith, “prison walls” will open and desires will be realized. Illustrating this promised result, Goddard recounts (at ~57:08) the biblical story of the widow with three drops of oil who, following the prophet’s instructions, poured from these drops into many vessels. He interprets the reader as this widow—in a “barren state” without a husband to make them fruitful. He explains that awareness is now the “Lord or prophet” that has become your husband, instructing readers to follow the widow’s example by recognizing something (three drops of oil) rather than nothingness, going within and “closing the door” to sensory evidence of emptiness, and feeling the joy of having received what is desired.

In his conclusion, Goddard declares (at ~59:06) that “recognition is the power that conjures in the world.” He explains that everything one has ever recognized, they have embodied, and what one recognizes as true today becomes their experience. He encourages readers to be like the widow and recognize joy, no matter how small the beginning, promising generous rewards. As the biblical declaration “I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exodus 20:2) reveals, acknowledging awareness itself as “the Lord thy God” allows one to “decree the unseen to appear” and thereby fulfill our every desire.

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We need not review Goddard’s published works any further today: as you may have noticed, he tends to cycle his themes. But in the interest of making this “journal” more complete, let’s turn to a lecture on the Book of Job—a text containing themes with which this year has made me deeply acquainted—that Goddard gave in approximately the 1960s.

Goddard opens by insisting that the Book of Job is everyone’s story, a three-act drama—prologue, dialogue, epilogue—in which a “cruel plot” is carried out against a man who has done nothing wrong. But in his reading, it isn’t Satan but God who authors Job’s suffering: he points to Job 42:11, where Job’s family comforts him for “all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him,” and argues (‎at ~1:53) that the brief appearance of Satan in the first two chapters is a literary device inserted later to “soften the blow” against God. On the whole, he frames the Book of Job as an exploration of suffering without any notion of karma, reincarnation, or retributive justice, instead portraying God as subjecting Job—and, by extension, all of us—to “furnaces of affliction” for the sake of purification, like gold in fire.

Of course, the narrative strips Job of everything: messengers arrive to report his livestock gone, servants killed, and finally his children crushed in a collapsing house. Job’s response—“Naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return […] the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21)—is held up as an almost impossible standard of faith. Then comes the last blow: Job is smitten with boils from head to foot, shunned by everyone, yet still not sinning with his lips. From the second chapter onward, he becomes “the most impatient being in the world,” rehearsing his good works and clinging to a “law of retribution”: if he has been righteous, he deserves acquittal. Godard argues that this mindset is precisely what the book dismantles: echoing Jesus’ words about the man born blind—“Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him” (John 9:3)—he insists that suffering is not payback for sin. “Were it not for infinite mercy,” he says (at ~12:13), “no one could be saved—because you can’t earn it.”

What struck me most is how he ties Job’s arc to our own shift from inherited religion to direct encounter. Job begins with second-hand faith—“I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear”—and ends with “but now mine eye seeth thee” (Job 42:5), which Goddard reads as the move from received doctrine to lived experience. He notes (‎at ~17:07) that the very name “Job” can be rendered “Where is my father?” or “Where is the altar of my life?”, capturing the way suffering drives us to ask where God actually is in all of this. He insists that the “way to the Father” which Christ identified in John 14:6 is a pattern of mystical experiences known only to the Son, through which God, having “sheathed Himself in humanity,” brings out of us what He conceived from the beginning—His own image.

In this framework, Goddard tells us (at ~32:37), repentance isn’t groveling, but “a radical change of attitude toward life.” As examples of repentance, he offers wartime and workplace stories of a man whose antisemitism and racism were shattered when his life was twice saved—first by a Jewish soldier in New Guinea, then by a Black coworker in a factory fire. For him, these are not random coincidences but orchestrated “positions” in which God kills our delusions and prejudices.

Taken all together, Goddard presents a God who is both terrifying and merciful, conceiving the “most cruel experiment in the world” but nonetheless promising salvation to the test subjects. Job’s restoration, he notes, comes not from arguing his righteousness but from a change of heart when, in Job 42:10, he prays for his friends—men who had defended a God of retribution—and his own captivity is lifted. Goddard contrasts (at ~53:07) the persistent human craving for payback with Jesus’ plea, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” on the cross (Luke 23:34). The fire that burns us, he says, is the same fire that refines gold: if gold could feel, it would scream in the furnace, but only that heat can separate it from its dross so it can be shaped into something beautiful. In that light, Job’s own words—“shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?” (Job 2:10)—stop sounding masochistic and start reading like a hard-won trust.

The takeaway I’m left with is simple and bracing: if Job is my biography, suffering is not a moral invoice, and my task is not to ask “Why me?” but to change my attitude—to use imagination and faith to extricate myself from the pit I’ve found myself in, and trust that, as Goddard puts it (at ~41:23–41:44),

Be patient. Our playwright may show in some fifth act what this wild drama means. And He will. And then you will see everyone will come out and everyone will be perfect, and all will be God, nothing but God. For it takes this most horrible play as described in Job to produce it.

But… what do we do in the interval? (“Compare Goddard’s ‘awareness of being’ to the capital-B Being of Martin Heidegger?” Nope—not this time, anyway!)

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If Liberation Vitalism was my attempt to say life is worth fighting for, then Goddard and Job together feel like an answer for what we do when life starts fighting back. Meanwhile, the Shroud, with its incredible image lending credence to the biblical resurrection; Goddard’s insistence that “I am” is not a slogan but an engine of creation; Job’s refusal to curse God even when everything collapses—in some way, these all circle the same point: that consciousness, suffering, and grace are somehow entangled in a way no manifesto can quite resolve.

I don’t pretend to have unknotted that tangle: I’m still trying to learn how to “fish in consciousness” while the lions in the den pace and snarl. But if the Book of Job really is my biography, then at least I know this isn’t the epilogue, just somewhere in the middle acts—one more furnace in which lingering impurities are burning off.

In the meantime, I’ll keep trying to match my politics to my life, to trust my life to reflect my budding faith, and (I suppose) to fasten my faith to the declarative “I am.” If you’ve been in your own pit this year, I hope some part of this helped you feel a little less alone, and reminded you that the fifth act hasn’t run yet. So, we might as well hope for our own resurrections—after all, we can see from the Shroud that stranger things have happened.