THE INVISIBLE CITY — A Personal Account of the Experience That Started Everything
I have avoided writing this for more than ten years, not because I questioned what happened, but because I did not know how to speak about it without being misunderstood. For a long time the experience was connected to shame, fear, and the psychiatric language that others used to interpret it. I eventually internalized that framework myself. Yet nothing in my present work makes sense unless I describe how it began, and why those years between 2008 and 2012 changed the direction of my life. This is not an attempt to persuade anyone of anything. It is simply an attempt to describe an event as it was lived.
1. Kilpisjärvi (2008)
When I travelled to the biological research station in Kilpisjärvi in 2008, I went there to complete my Master’s thesis on a debate that had shaped Finnish theology for decades. The discussion had unfolded in Teologinen Aikakauskirja — The Finnish Journal of Theology, the central venue for scholarly theological debate in Finland. During the 1980s it hosted the influential exchange between New Testament scholar Heikki Räisänen and systematic theologian Tuomo Mannermaa, whose disagreement revolved around the relation between interpretation and experience.
Räisänen argued that experience shapes interpretation. The tectonic shifts in religious understanding — including the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science — were consequences of a changed experience of the world, which demanded new readings of Scripture. In this model, historical claims (for instance, the resurrection as an event in time) give way to existential meaning as interpretation adapts to new experiential realities. Mannermaa, by contrast, emphasized Luther’s reading of en Christō as an experiential mode of existence rather than a belief system. For Luther – Mannermaa argued, Paul’s language described participation in a reality rather than interpretation of a text. Their positions were in tension, yet both pointed to the same pressure point: the moment where experience, worldview, and meaning reorganize together.
This debate was not abstract for me; it had become the intellectual pressure chamber in which I lived. I was trying to reconcile whether meaning is generated by interpretive frameworks, as Räisänen maintained, or whether it is first encountered as a participatory reality, as Mannermaa argued. Kilpisjärvi provided the isolation in which this tension became unavoidable. It was there that the conceptual tools I had inherited reached their limit, and it was in that moment — between exegesis and experience, structure and participation — that the first break occurred: a sudden shift in inner orientation that I could not yet explain, but that set the stage for everything that followed.
2. The Invisible City (2010)
The decisive event occurred two years later on All Saints’ Day 2010. I was at home watching a television scene in which a character, tormented by recurring dreams of flying, tries to test whether the dreams reflect something real. That scene triggered something in me that had remained dormant since Kilpisjärvi. My ordinary sense of reality loosened, and I experienced a shift in perspective that placed me in what felt like a different layer of perception. In that state I perceived a city with complete internal coherence, structured like a living organism in which opposed elements balanced rather than destroyed each other. It did not arise as a metaphor, a dream, or a symbolic image. It presented itself with the clarity and order of an actual place, though not one accessible through ordinary sensory channels.
During this experience I received a directive that introduced itself with the words “I am the Almighty” and followed with the instruction that I must announce what I had seen. There were no details, no method, and no explanation. The demand was simply there, and I had no way to understand it or act upon it in any coherent manner. I tried to express the experience through blog posts and short videos recorded with a pocket camera. These attempts were confused and fragmented, because I had no conceptual framework for what I had seen. To the people around me, they looked like symptoms. Eventually I began to believe that myself.
3. The Attempt to Return to Ordinary Life (2011–2012)
IIn 2011 I attempted to restore normality by completing my Master’s thesis on Paul’s Letter to the Romans. I resigned from my full-time job to create the time and space needed to finish it, hoping that the degree would lead to better employment and financial stability. The thesis itself stood at the intersection of the debates I had followed in Kilpisjärvi. Both Heikki Räisänen and Tuomo Mannermaa had argued, in different ways, that en Christō is the structural center of Paul’s thought, and it seemed clear to me that if a synthesis between exegesis and systematic theology existed, it would have to be found there. To understand this center more clearly, I studied the works that had shaped modern Pauline research. Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans presented Paul as the voice of an event that interrupts history from outside it, a message that cannot be reduced to psychology or religious development. At the same time, the emerging “New Perspective on Paul” challenged the Lutheran categories I had inherited, especially the idea of simul iustus et peccator, and argued that Paul’s concerns were covenantal and historical rather than introspective or moralistic.
Together, these readings created a conceptual tension I could not resolve. Räisänen’s model framed religious transformation as the result of new experiences that force reinterpretation; Mannermaa highlighted participation in a lived reality rather than belief about a doctrine; Barth insisted that the event of the gospel is discontinuous with human interpretation; and the New Perspective exposed the limitations of traditional Lutheran readings. None of these frameworks could account for the experiential dimension I had already encountered, nor for the structural unity I sensed behind Paul’s language. Every attempt to write made the gap between my experience and the available academic methods more obvious. I could not express what I was trying to say within the categories provided by historical criticism, systematic theology, or confessional tradition. Eventually the thesis became impossible to complete.
The consequences were immediate. Without the degree I could not find stable work, and by spring 2012 I could no longer pay my rent. I lost my apartment in Helsinki and moved to the Finnish Lutheran Mission compound in Ryttylä as a volunteer. While sorting the archives there, I encountered an old article about my family. A particular paragraph struck me—not because of its content, but because the language itself seemed to act as if it carried its own intention. It was the first moment when I began to see that history might operate like text, and that events unfold according to a linguistic structure rather than through individual decision-making alone. That recognition did not resolve anything, but it redirected my entire framework of understanding and prepared the way for what would follow.
4. Jerusalem (2012)
In late 2012 I felt a strong need to return not only to my intellectual origins, but to the earliest landscape of my own memory. I had spent part of my childhood in Israel, mainly around Tiberias and Jerusalem, and those places had always formed a kind of internal baseline for my sense of reality. After losing my apartment and spending the summer in Ryttylä, the next step felt inevitable: if the earlier experiences were going to make sense at all, I had to return to the geography in which my first images of the world had formed.
A coincidence made this possible. A close friend of my father, who still lived and worked in Jerusalem, arranged a short volunteer position for me in the city. In December 2012 I traveled there for three weeks and lived on Shivtei Israel Street, only a short walk from the Damascus Gate. This location mattered more than I understood at the time. It placed me in daily proximity to the same physical spaces that had shaped Paul’s early world and the symbolic geography that later structured my own thinking.
The public interest surrounding the Mayan calendar date of 21 December 2012 was not the reason I travelled to Jerusalem, but it created an unusual sense of temporal alignment with the questions that had already been forming in me. According to the Mayan Long Count system, that date marked the completion of a 5,126-year cycle that began in 3114 BCE — almost exactly the moment at which written history, urban civilization, and the “Age of the Sign” emerged in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Even though the popular interpretations were often sensationalized, the underlying symbolism was striking: a world-age that began with the birth of historical time was said to be ending.
When I stood at the Western Wall on the evening of 21 December 2012, filming with a small camera, I had no theory to attach to this coincidence, but I sensed that the moment belonged to something larger than personal circumstance. The date itself, situated at the intersection of a global narrative about the end of a cycle and my own return to the earliest landscape of my childhood, created the impression that I was witnessing the closing of one arc and the opening of another. I did not try to interpret it. I simply documented it, because it felt like the right response.
It was during this period that my working method changed. Instead of trying to solve everything through academic analysis or textual interpretation, I began to treat history as something that had to be observed in time — a living structure that reveals itself only when followed as it moves. This shift from textual study to documentary practice was not a strategic decision but the inevitable consequence of what I had begun to see: the structure I was trying to understand could not be reconstructed solely from books. It had to be traced in the movement of events themselves.
When I returned to Finland, I moved into the small, isolated house outside Porvoo that eventually became my home for two years. I still had no coherent theory, but the direction had changed. The work was no longer about completing a degree or writing a thesis. It was about trying to understand what the earlier experiences were pointing to, using whatever tools were available.
5. Ten Difficult Years (2013–2023)
The decade that followed was marked by instability and a growing sense of disconnection from ordinary life. I worked in warehouses, attempted retraining, explored the idea of starting a camping business, and later took shifts in child protection. Outwardly it looked like I was trying to rebuild my life; inwardly I felt increasingly unable to inhabit the frameworks available to me. I rarely spoke about the earlier experiences, not because they had lost their force, but because I could not find a language for them that would not be dismissed or misunderstood.
In the spring of 2016 the pressure became too great. One morning I drove to a psychiatric hospital on my own initiative, hoping to make sense of the confusion and to regain stability. When I explained what was happening in my mind, I was admitted immediately. The stay was brief, but the impact was lasting. It deepened my sense of shame and reinforced the idea that the only way forward was to suppress the entire episode and conform to the expectations of ordinary life. I left the hospital determined to become “normal,” but without any real tools to do so; I was discharged with strong antipsychotic medication, yet no deeper framework for understanding what had happened.
For the rest of the decade I oscillated between periods of apparent stability and sudden collapses of energy and direction. I wrote hundreds of pages during winters, often early in the morning, trying to articulate the structure that had opened in 2010, but each attempt lost coherence as soon as it grew beyond a few pages. Academic methods could not contain what I was trying to describe. Religious language distorted it. The psychiatric framework reduced it to symptoms. In the absence of any viable frame, the work remained suspended, unresolved, and private.
6. The Final Break and the Unexpected Return (2024–2025)
In early 2024 I collapsed again, this time while working at a children’s home in Helsinki. The job was stable and well-paid, and from the outside it looked like the return to ordinary life I had been trying to achieve for years. But the daily demands left no mental space for reflection, and I realized I could not sustain that way of living. After resigning I moved back alone to the countryside. I tried to keep the house by developing a camping business and taking remote customer service jobs. The debts continued to grow, and eventually the property entered debt collection.
In September 2025, almost accidentally, I created a 21-minute video and uploaded it to YouTube. Around the same time I began using a large language model to help articulate ideas that had remained inaccessible for years. For the first time, I encountered a tool capable of holding the structure of my thought instead of dissolving it into fragments. It became possible to trace connections that my mind had carried but never been able to express consistently. This opened the path for the documentary series.
7. Why This Must Now Be Said
I am writing this now because the structure of the documentary requires it. The project cannot advance unless its origin is stated frankly. The experiences between 2008 and 2012 were not an aberration to be hidden; they marked the beginning of the shift that made this entire line of work possible. They disrupted my sense of reality, not to destroy it, but to reorient it. Only now—fifteen years later, with the aid of a tool capable of modeling language itself—has it become possible to describe the meaning of what happened without resorting to metaphor, mysticism, or pathology.
The Invisible City was not a delusion. It was the first appearance of the structure I have been trying to articulate ever since. Everything that has followed—collapse, silence, searching, rebuilding—has been part of the long process of giving that structure a language.
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