The original Greek of Mark 11:24 (διὰ τοῦτο λέγω ὑμῖν, πάντα ὅσα προσεύχεσθε καὶ αἰτεῖσθε, πιστεύετε ὅτι ἐλάβετε, καὶ ἔσται ὑμῖν) is best translated as: “Therefore I tell you, all things whatever you pray and ask for, believe that you have received them, and you shall have them.”
Okay so my theory (and it is a work in progress for sure 😂) is that some friends got together and ate some plant (peyote, probably because the Middle East) and thought: “MY HANDS ARE SO HUGE, MAN! Can you see how huge my hands are?”
And while laughing the cosmos ignited in his brain showing him how when he enjoyed painting and sculpting he had a simple and joyous life. When he was trying to make money by helping his father with the “family business” he was miserable and made things worse for everyone.
“Oh!”, he tore at his hair and his friends paused whatever nutty business they were up to to see why they heard tearing, “when we are flowing with our natures we are at peace in here!” he exclaims and taps on his chest.
“When we run away from the flow we bury ourselves in the sand.”
The friends spend their psychedelic trip comparing life experiences and in their own words, the bible was created. Their first hand accounts of what happens when you stop dialling into your being and how to get that operator back online.
So I know that the texts that became the Bible were not written by one group at one moment. The Bible is more like a library assembled over roughly a thousand years. Different writers, different eras, different political pressures, different philosophical influences. Shepherd poets, temple scribes, prophets, historians, mystics. Imagine a stack of journals from generations of people trying to make sense of suffering, justice, power, and the strange feeling that life has some deeper pattern.
Now, were altered states part of ancient spirituality? Quite possibly. Humans have always experimented with consciousness. Fasting, chanting, isolation in deserts, rhythmic drumming, incense, wine, and possibly psychoactive plants all show up in various cultures. Mystical experiences are not rare in human history. But for the Hebrew and early Christian traditions specifically, the most common path to “revelation” described in the texts is actually sensory deprivation and intense contemplation — prophets wandering in wilderness, people fasting, praying, sitting with silence until their perception cracks open a bit.
That cracking-open experience is something neuroscientists recognise. When the brain’s usual predictive patterns loosen, suddenly connections appear everywhere. Meaning floods in. Patterns glow. The world feels unified and alive. Mystics across cultures describe very similar states, whether they arrived there through meditation, prayer, fasting, or occasionally substances.
In Taoism, you get the idea of moving with the Tao — the underlying current of reality. In Stoicism, living according to nature. In certain interpretations of Jesus’ teachings, aligning your inner state with what he called the “kingdom of heaven,” which he repeatedly says is not somewhere else but something already within or among people.
When people read the line above from Mark 11:24, they often turn it into a rule about belief forcing outcomes. But another way to read it is that it is about alignment. When your internal orientation matches the life you are actually meant to live, actions become coherent instead of strained. Decisions stop fighting your own nature. Life becomes less friction and more movement.
That does not mean everything becomes easy. Reality still contains randomness, other people’s choices, illness, and bad luck. But the internal war quiets down.
The story about the artist miserable in the family business is a perfect little parable of that idea. When someone tries to live against their own wiring — chasing approval, money, status, or someone else’s script — the nervous system starts grinding. When they shift toward something that actually resonates with how they are built, the system relaxes. Not because the universe suddenly bends to them, but because they are no longer pushing against themselves.
Ancient religious texts are full of these little “operator manual” moments. Not a cosmic cheat code, more like accumulated field notes from generations of people asking the same questions I am asking: How do we live without fighting ourselves? How do we hold uncertainty without trying to control everything? How do we act responsibly while accepting that the world is bigger than our will?
It is less like a psychedelic instruction manual and more like humanity’s long conversation about being human.
And sometimes that conversation does sound exactly like a group of friends sitting around saying, “Hang on… I think we have been making life harder than it needs to be.”
