Sometimes I feel religious practice, especially what Ram Dass describes in Be Here Now,  aims to provide a trippy life without actually purchasing or ingesting anything specifically for it, and shares similarities with the shaman intern fasting & sitting in tents waiting for lights and visions to come ...

When I frame sadhakas as folks desperately working hard to get permanent trippy powers, like the ability to take trips at will, it makes a phenomenal amount of sense . It makes the ritual that religious folks go through, as purposeful now.

There's something for idea that religious practice is something to do with re-training and re-wiring the neural network in your brain so that purpose continues to exist. The 'I' and the voice in your (mind's) ears is just  trace/debug messages from the brain's log file, which  got in front of the brain's headlights.

Fasting is a simple and powerful technique to re-draw the world around you, simply as it exactly was, but two lower degrees of importance . 

Aurobinodo explores the idea that the Vedas pertain to the processes inside the mind , in his this book - Secret of the Veda. 

Book available online at
https://www.auro-ebooks.com/the-secret-of-the-veda/

Pirsig, in one chapter of the famous Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, derives the Tao Te Ching as pertaining to when the subject is aware of the object - again, an internal thing , something happening inside one's head.

What if Brahma was nothing more than the pineal gland, so worshipped by Gaia-Pyramids-Area-51 kinda folks  .... ? The word 'brahm' I've seen used in different contexts - in one, it is creation, as in 'what Brahma wrought', but in other, it is a delusion  - as in tamil we say 'adu ellam bramai'. In the Brahma jaala sutra, AJ Brahmali explains that the Brahma Jala is a net to catch views. 
Equating all three - views, delusions, creation - I feel I can confidently hypothesise, that we are referring to that which sits inside our heads and creates our abstractions. Like, a finger when poked, twitches. There is no 'mind' involved, just signal travelling from sensor (skin,muscle) to spine, and a canned voltage response triggering a twitch. However, the human is much more complicated. There is a human sitting inside ones' head - the image of the self, which the brain can include in simulations of multiple disasters. This is where the second arrow hits. see figure.(tbd)

Alan Watts famously remarked once that "Buddhism is Hinduism stripped for export". 

While the faithful still debate to this day citing this piece of literature and that, 

I put forth the simple formula.  ** Bhakthi minus vishnu equals metta **

and you can put that in your pipe and smoke it. 

The practices and rituals of both deal excessively with handling 'karma' on a day to day basis, and eventually,  beyond the current life (call it mind or soul).