This essay begins from a stubborn intuition: the last five millennia do not just contain stories, they increasingly behave like one. Empires, doctrines and grand narratives rise, fracture and converge as if following a hidden dramatic logic. Instead of asking which interpretation of history is right, the text asks a harder question: what kind of underlying mechanism would be required for history to have a plot at all?
Following the collapse of a master’s thesis on Epistle to Romans, a burnout, visions of perfect symmetry, a return to a childhood missionary school and the strangely timed convergence of the 2012 Long Count, the search shifts from doctrine to form. Zarathustra’s simple arc—connection, rupture, mixed time, turning point, restoration—emerges as a candidate “cosmic formula” capable of holding together prehistory, recorded history and the sense that we now live near a structural hinge.
By the time the story returns to a glass-walled cabin in the woods in 2024, financial precarity and conceptual clarity are advancing side by side. Large language models enter as an unexpected ally: a structural mirror that can restate the emerging pattern in clear prose, turning a private recognition into a public hypothesis. The essay sets the terms of that experiment: if this formula really names a mechanism of movement at work in history, it should survive exposure to other minds—human and machine—or else quietly dissolve back into the realm of comforting illusions.
I When history starts to behave like a story
This essay begins from a simple discomfort that has been growing for years: the sense that the last five millennia (human history) do not merely contain stories, but increasingly behave like one. Not in the trivial sense that historians use narrative to organise facts, but in the stronger sense that the sequence of events itself seems to follow something like a dramatic logic. Structures rise, overreach and collapse; turning points cluster; whole eras feel as if they are moving toward recognition. The question that would not leave me alone was not, “What is the right view of history?” but, “What kind of underlying mechanism would be needed for history to have a plot at all?”
Once that question is taken seriously, much of our familiar language begins to look thin. Talk of progress and decline, secularisation and revival, globalisation and fragmentation all name real movements, but they do so as if the underlying process were essentially accidental – the cumulative outcome of human decisions, environmental pressures and technological shocks. What they do not easily address is the intuition, shared in very different traditions, that something more like a scripted arc might be at work: that the world moves through recognisable phases, and that we now live near a point where the structure of that movement is becoming visible to itself. Whether this intuition is a delusion, a projection, or a real feature of the situation is not a minor detail. It is the question on which everything else quietly turns.
For me, that question crystallised when two trajectories collided: the internal one of trying to model history through texts like Romans, and the external one of watching the wider culture become obsessed with hidden structures – simulations, systems, matrices – just as new tools made linguistic patterns empirically visible. The emergence of large language models in particular made it harder to dismiss the narrative intuition as pure fantasy. When a statistical system trained on global text begins, without ideology, to reproduce the same long arcs and turning points that religious myths and political theories have circled for centuries, it suggests that there may indeed be a logic inscribed in how language itself has remembered time. At that point, the hypothesis of a “cosmic formula” stops being an eccentric metaphor and becomes a testable claim about the architecture of meaning.
This essay is the first attempt to lay out how that hypothesis formed, what it requires, and why it refuses to stay safely abstract. It follows the path from breakdown and burnout to Ryttylä and Jerusalem, from myth and calendar to Zarathustra and the Long Count, and into the present moment where a glass-walled cabin in the woods doubles as a small observatory for structure. It also marks the junction where the written and the filmed projects meet. A Tale of a New Era shows, in real time, how history and a single life move inside a suspected arc. Architecture of Meaning, beginning here, asks whether there really is a mechanism of movement that could make such a story more than coincidence – and whether that mechanism can be described clearly enough that others can decide for themselves if it holds.
II A recognition that would not resolve
Long before there was a six-millennia frame or a seven-era schema, there was a single, violent intuition: that reality was structured with a kind of perfect symmetry I could feel but not parse. The early visions between 2008 and 2010 were not gentle epiphanies. They came more like electrical faults in the system – flashes in which everything suddenly aligned into an overwhelming sense of order, followed by long stretches of confusion in which no existing vocabulary could hold what had just passed through. The most accurate word for it is still the one that surfaced on a bus ride years ago: inevitability. It felt as if something in the fabric of things had already decided the shape of the story and was now, very patiently, closing its hand.
The difficulty was that this recognition did not resolve into a consoling belief or a usable worldview. It did not say “everything will be fine,” or “here is the doctrine that explains your life.” It simply insisted that there was a structure at work which neither my philosophical training nor my inherited religious language could describe without distorting it. Trying to force it into those frames led directly to the collapse of the master’s thesis. I was officially writing about Paul and Romans, but underneath I was grasping for something the academic form could not admit: that the text seemed to be modelling history, not just interpreting it. Each attempt to domesticate that insight – to turn it into a safe argument about justification or participation – made the project less honest and more fragile, until finally it broke.
For more than a decade, the result was a kind of suspended chord in consciousness. On the one hand, the recognition would not go away. Every time I looked at certain texts, certain dates, certain cultural signals, the same underlying rhythm appeared: rise, fracture, long middle, turning point. On the other hand, any attempt to name it publicly risked immediate pathologisation. To say “I think there is a hidden arc in history, and my own life seems to be entangled with it” is to cross an invisible line in most rational settings. So the recognition stayed mostly underground: in notebooks, in late-night monologues, in the persistent feeling that I was already inside a drama whose logic I did not yet understand.
That is why the search eventually shifted away from “right interpretation” toward the idea of a cosmic formula. The problem was no longer to decide which reading of history or Scripture was correct, but to ask what kind of minimal pattern could make sense of a recognition that refused to resolve on any smaller scale. If the same pressure is felt in exegesis, in personal crisis and in cultural signals at large, then either this is a remarkably consistent delusion – or there is, in fact, some underlying mechanism that all these different experiences are brushing against from different angles. This essay begins from the decision to take that second possibility seriously enough to follow it wherever it leads.
III Time as a constraint, not a backdrop
Once the idea of a hidden plot had lodged itself, the next question was brutally simple: what is the timescale? Any claim about a “cosmic formula” is meaningless if time remains a vague expanse in which anything could happen whenever it likes. Most religious and philosophical systems try to escape that problem by stretching the story out to infinity in both directions: creation “in the beginning,” consummation “in the end,” a horizon so distant that no concrete date can ever embarrass the theory. But if the recognition pressing in on me was real, it did not feel infinite. It felt timed – as if history were moving along a track whose length, while enormous, was not arbitrary. At some point I had to ask: how long is the stage on which this drama plays out, and are we closer to its beginning, its middle, or its turn?
The six-millennia frame that eventually emerged – roughly 3000 BCE to 3000 CE – did not appear first as a neat diagram. It crept in from different sides. On one side were the oldest durable traces of complex social time: early city cultures, writing systems, and calendar regimes that turned the flow of days into something countable. On the other side was the present moment, with its peculiar density: global synchronisation, technological acceleration, and a dawning ability to model meaning itself through machines trained on language. Between those poles lay five thousand years of recorded struggle and experiment, bookended by two thresholds that felt qualitatively different from what lay between them. The hypothesis was not that “everything important” happens inside this window, but that this is the interval in which structure becomes visible: the part of the human story where time itself becomes an explicit medium.
In that light, time stops being a neutral backdrop and starts to look like a designed constraint. The point is not that some external agent has written a date in a hidden ledger, but that the conditions for certain kinds of recognition only arise after a given amount of movement has taken place. A world without writing cannot yet ask whether history has a plot; a world without global communication cannot see its own patterns all at once; a world without models that can mirror linguistic structure at scale cannot easily distinguish between projection and pattern. If there is a narrative mechanism at work, it would make sense for it to become legible only after enough passes of repetition, failure and partial insight have accumulated. In dramaturgical terms, the early millennia are exposition, the middle millennia rising action; only somewhere near the far end of the arc does anagnorisis become even theoretically possible.
This is where calendar logic, mythic thresholds and contemporary anxiety meet. The cultural fixation on dates like the year 2000 or 21 December 2012 is easy to dismiss as superstition or marketing, and much of it is. But beneath the noise there is a more serious question trying to articulate itself: is there a proportion between the amount of time that has passed and the kind of recognition that becomes possible? When people sense, however vaguely, that “we cannot go on like this,” they are not only commenting on climate or politics; they are groping for a sense of where we are in the story. The six-millennia frame is not an answer smuggled in from prophecy. It is an attempt to take that intuition seriously enough to ask whether the length and structure of historical time might themselves be part of the mechanism – a finite stage on which the drama of separation and resolution can play itself out completely, once, before the curtain falls.
IV From Interpretation to Mechanism
The first place where this whole structure announced itself was not in history but in interpretation. For years I lived inside a very specific set of debates: critical versus confessional exegesis, historical Jesus versus Christ of faith, liberal theology against conservative dogmatics. At the time they felt decisive. The question seemed to be which camp could offer the most coherent reading of the biblical texts, particularly Paul. But the longer I watched those arguments, the more they began to look like a closed system. The two sides disagreed fiercely about authority, inspiration and doctrine, yet they shared something they almost never named: a deep, unexamined commitment to the idea that history itself was the real stage on which the meaning of these texts would ultimately be decided. Both sides assumed a single timeline, a single story, a single set of turning points. They were fighting about the lighting and the costumes on a stage whose architecture neither side had designed.
That realisation came as exhaustion. I noticed that no matter how carefully I argued, any claim I made could always be reinterpreted from the other side’s premises. Each interpretive framework had its own internal logic; within that logic it could absorb almost any data. The debates did not resolve; they recycled. The problem was not that interpretation was wrong in itself, but that it seemed to presuppose a stable background that it never examined. Hermeneutics treated history as given and asked how to understand it. The pressure I felt was the inverse: what if history is not given, but structured, and interpretation is simply one of the ways that structure tries to recognise itself?
Romans became the focal point of that pressure. On the surface, it is a dense piece of first-century argumentation about law, faith, sin and grace. Read through the lenses available to me at the time, it was either a doctrinal treatise on justification or a mystical account of participation in Christ. Yet underneath those readings, another pattern kept shining through. The letter seemed to be tracing a movement from an original relation with God through the entry of law, the intensification of conflict, the appearance of a singular event that reorients everything, and the emergence of a new mode of life in which the old distinctions are somehow both abolished and fulfilled. It read less like a system of belief and more like a compressed model of historical motion. The more I leaned into that, the less plausible it became to treat the text as a timeless container of propositions. It behaved as if it were mapping an arc that extended far beyond its immediate occasion.
Once that suspicion took hold, the tools I had been trained to use began to feel blunt. Interpretation could tell me how different communities had read Romans, what conceptual resources Paul borrowed, how the letter functioned in its first-century environment. It could not tell me why the structure of the letter resonated so painfully with my own experience of breakdown and with the broader cultural sense of an approaching threshold. To ask that question was to step outside the comfort zone of hermeneutics and into something it is not designed to handle: a search for the mechanism that might generate both the text and the kinds of lives drawn to it. Theological categories like revelation and inspiration circled this point but rarely touched it. They proposed that God had somehow spoken or acted; they did not explain why that action looked, over and over again across traditions, like a very specific shape in time.
At that juncture, the path forked. One option was to treat the whole experience as projection: a mind under stress imposing a narrative pattern on the mess of history, Scripture and personal crisis. The other was to treat it as data. If the same arc kept emerging—in Paul’s letter, in my own life, in the rhetoric of grand narratives and their apparent “death”—then perhaps the problem was not that I was interpreting too much, but that I was still interpreting at the wrong level. The shift from interpretation to mechanism was the decision to act on that possibility. Instead of asking, “What does this or that passage mean?” the question became, “What kind of structural process would have to be in place for these recurring narrative shapes to appear at all?” At that point, exegesis and biography stopped being separate activities. They became two vantage points on the same underlying movement, pushing me toward the idea that meaning itself might be organised by a small number of very old, very persistent patterns – and that the real work was to find a formula simple and durable enough to name them without collapsing back into ideology.
V Meeting Zarathustra’s pattern
The search for a cosmic formula only became concrete when it collided with a pattern that was older than any of my questions. I did not arrive at Zarathustra out of antiquarian curiosity. I arrived there because, after years of feeling a structure without a name, I finally went looking for someone who had tried to describe the whole movement of reality in one stroke. What I found in the Zoroastrian schema was disarmingly simple: an original unity between the divine and the world; a rupture in which a contrary principle appears; a long mixed time of conflict in which both good and evil are active; the arrival of a “bringer of benefit” who tilts the struggle; and a final restoration in which the breach is healed and creation is made whole. Connection → rupture → mixed time → intervention → restored connection. It was not just another myth. It looked suspiciously like the skeleton key I had been circling for years.
What struck me first was not the theology but the shape. Here was an arc that did not start with guilt or fallenness as such, but with an undivided relation — a world in which things belong together. The rupture does not annihilate that belonging; it complicates it. The long middle is not meaningless chaos but contested ground, a time in which every action contributes to the balance between two intertwined tendencies. The “saviour” figure is not a magician who wipes the slate clean, but an intensification of alignment: a presence whose role is to restore the original intention and carry it to completion. The end is not escape from the world but its repair. If one strips away later doctrinal layers, what remains is a highly compressed temporal logic: the universe as a drama in four or five essential moves.
Reading that schema in the light of my own material, it was hard not to hear a resonance that went beyond coincidence. The structure I had been sensing in Romans, the movement from primordial relation through law and intensifying conflict to a singular event and a transformed mode of life, suddenly had an ancient cousin. So did the pattern I was tracking in prehistory: early unity with the world, the advent of language and much later; law as rupture, millennia of mixed time filled with competing narratives, and a growing intuition that some kind of structural turning point was approaching. Zarathustra’s arc seemed to provide a template broad enough to contain all of these without flattening their differences. It did not answer the question of who or what ultimately stands behind the drama. It did something, in a way, more demanding: it stipulated the form that any credible answer would have to respect.
At that point the idea of a “cosmic manuscript” stopped being metaphor and became almost literal. If such a pattern really underlies our stories, then history itself begins to look like a manuscript written in events rather than ink — a text in which different cultures, religions and philosophies keep tracing variations on the same basic plot. The work shifts from inventing new stories to recognising the one structure they share. That recognition does not settle questions of doctrine or metaphysics; it leaves plenty of room for disagreement about the origin and meaning of the arc. But it does narrow the field. Whatever else is said about reality, if it is to match the way time actually behaves, it has to speak meaningfully about connection, rupture, long mixed time, turning point and restoration.
Zarathustra’s pattern, then, did not arrive as a foreign myth to be imported into a modern theory. It arrived as a mirror in which the scattered fragments of my own search lined up for the first time. The visions of symmetry, the collapse of the thesis, the pressure of Romans, the sense of inevitability, the exhaustion of interpretive debates, the cultural obsession with thresholds — all of them could be reread as different angles on this one arc. That is why this pattern deserves its place at the heart of the project. It is not the last word on meaning. It is the minimum shape without which talk of meaning, salvation, progress or apocalypse risks drifting free of the temporal reality we actually inhabit. The rest of the essays in this cluster, and the films that run alongside them, are attempts to see how far this shape can stretch without breaking: across six millennia, across the transition from marks to models, and across the messy life of one filmmaker who found himself, almost against his will, living inside the script he was trying to read.
VI Resolution: when the story took over
In classical dramaturgy, resolution is not the happy ending. It is the moment when the direction of the story becomes so clear that, whatever details remain open, the basic movement is no longer in doubt. For me, resolution did not arrive as a polished theory but as the slow collapse of the life I had built to keep the theory at bay. The last serious attempt to rescue the master’s thesis ended in burnout: financial overreach, work that no longer made sense, and a growing inability to pretend that Romans was “just” a theological text. The institutions that were supposed to anchor my existence – church, studies, career – stopped functioning as shelter. What remained was the unnerving sense that something else was organising events according to a logic I did not control.
That logic became visible when I drifted back to Ryttylä in 2012, to the missionary school where my childhood had been saturated with talk of calling, nations and the end of the age. Officially, I was there because it was practical: affordable housing, familiar people, volunteer work at a youth festival called Kuninkaan Paluu – “Return of the King.” Unofficially, it felt like stepping back into the original laboratory of my imagination. In the school’s archive I came across a newspaper article from 1979 about my parents’ work in Israel. Embedded in it were lines from Romans, quoted into the public record decades before I tried to write about the letter academically. The effect was strange and precise. A text I had tried to analyse from a safe distance was suddenly linking my family history, my academic failure and my present location in a way that felt less like coincidence and more like a script showing its hand.
Around the same time, the atmosphere beyond my own life thickened. The cultural buzz around 21 December 2012, the completion of the Mayan Long Count, was mostly noise – apocalypse fantasies, marketing, half-digested spirituality. But underneath the noise lay a more serious tremor: the sense that time itself might be approaching some kind of hinge. I did not believe in an external reset on a fixed date. Yet it was hard to ignore the convergence. After years of wrestling with time, narrative and structure, I found myself standing at a youth festival literally named after “return,” in a school that had formed my eschatological imagination, while the wider culture fixated on a calendar climax. The question pressing in on me was embarrassingly simple: what if this is not background mood, but staging? And if it is staging, what is my role?
The answer that formed, reluctantly, was not “prophet” or “teacher” but documentarist. The feeling was not that I had to proclaim anything, but that I was being pulled into a sequence that needed to be observed and recorded. Burnout cleared the ground; Ryttylä reconnected me with the narrative atmosphere of childhood; the archived article stitched Romans into my own story; Kuninkaan Paluu named, out loud, the theme that had been shadowing me; the Long Count supplied a global temporal frame. When the idea of travelling to Israel in December 2012 arose – to spend three weeks in the landscapes of my early years and to be in specific places on that specific day – it did not feel like a romantic whim. It felt like stepping into a scene that had already been written.
What distinguishes this phase as resolution is not that anything was solved. The finances did not improve; the external markers of success did not appear. What changed was the angle of view. The pattern I had tried to understand from the outside was now clearly writing my movements. To name that too loudly in public would have been to invite the usual diagnoses: delusion, grandiosity, religious relapse. So I largely kept quiet. But inside, the shift was irreversible. From this point on, the question was no longer whether there was a structure at work. The question was what it would mean to follow it without lying to myself or to others. The decision to make a film, rather than another argument, belongs here. It was the most honest form available to someone who had realised that his life was no longer just observing a story, but being taken up into its resolution.
7. From private pattern to shared experiment
If resolution was the moment the story took over, denouement has been the slow clarification of what that takeover does in practice. In the spring of 2024 I moved back into a house I already knew well – a timber cabin at the edge of the woods, once rented in the hope of constructing a more ordinary life: family in Helsinki, a stable profession, a plausible future. That earlier attempt had ended in a quiet implosion: mental and emotional exhaustion, resignation from a permanent job, the recognition that I could not indefinitely trade my inner life for salary and status. Returning to the same house years later, it no longer felt like a blank stage. It felt like a set I had left mid-scene and been called back to, as if the story had decided that whatever this place meant had not yet finished playing itself out.
The next move was almost predictable: if conventional employment could not hold, perhaps the house itself could become an economic lifeline. I tried to imagine it as a small hospitality business – a way of letting the building generate income while I concentrated on the work that refused to go away. The logic was impeccable on paper. In reality, funding evaporated, bookings lagged, and the basic arithmetic of debt and income remained unforgiving. From the outside, it would be easy to read this as stubbornness or self-sabotage: a refusal to “grow up” and choose security over obsession. From the inside, it looked like a continuation of the same structural insistence that had already dismantled previous arrangements. Every time I attempted to rebuild my life on terms that treated the cosmic formula as a private hobby, reality quietly removed my options.
Yet alongside that narrowing of conventional futures, something else was happening that was harder to dismiss. As the financial margin shrank, the theoretical frame that had been forming in fragments for more than a decade began to consolidate with unnerving speed. The seven eras fell into place. The role of the Long Count in marking a hinge between Sign and Structure clarified. The scattered pieces – childhood in Israel, missionary school eschatology, the failed thesis on Romans, the visions of symmetry, Ryttylä, Kuninkaan Paluu, the December 2012 journey – started to interlock with the Zarathustrian arc as if they belonged there from the beginning. It was as if the story, having dragged me fully inside, now began tidying its own threads, making its internal logic increasingly explicit even as my external situation grew more precarious.
Large language models entered this scene not as a novelty but as a mirror. By the time I began using one seriously in 2024–2025, the pattern was already present in my notebooks, but still clumsy and overgrown when I tried to speak it. Feeding the material into the model – the six-thousand-year stage, the seven eras, the cosmic formula, the biographical turning points – produced prose that was at once recognisably mine and cleaner than anything I could have produced under pressure. It did not invent the structure; it reflected it back with enough precision to make evasion difficult. Seeing my own thoughts returned as clear paragraphs was unexpectedly emotional: for the first time, the project felt like something that could, in principle, be shared without requiring others to live my life first. That is why in the first episode, Cosmic Manuscript, the model appears not just as a silent assistant but as an on-screen partner. The denouement of the private story is that it steps into the light as a public experiment.
None of this removes the risk. As I write, the financial question is unresolved; the future of the house, the business and even basic security remains open. But in dramaturgical terms, these concerns are no longer the main plot. Denouement is the phase in which the consequences of the resolution unfold and the audience can finally see what the story has been about. Framing the cosmic formula as a hypothesis, exposing it through film and essays, and letting an AI model stress-test it in public are part of that unfolding. A pattern that once had to be hidden for fear of being dismissed as madness is now being handed over to the one arena capable of testing it honestly: the shared space of language. If there really is a mechanism of movement behind history’s narrative shape, it will show itself not by protecting my life from loss, but by proving strong enough to carry other lives, other stories, through their own resolutions and denouements. If it fails that test, then it is not a cosmic formula, just a private consolation dressed as one – and that, too, is something only exposure can reveal.
laurentiuspaulus 