ta Amos. what prompted my post was a comment somewhere about belief as a form of brainwashing. what i was trying to do was to describe the process of "debrainwashing" that some methods of religion or spirituality use.

while i use the term Buddhism, the meditation that i practised was a hindu sourced meditation which had hindu techniques and also practises similar to some Tibetan Buddhist practises.

and in that last sentence, i was trying to observe that whatever form of religious observance or practise an individual may follow, the universe/god is also doing its own thing with regard to soaking enlightenment upon those who seek. but it was hard to say without making anthropomorphic comments about the universe/god!!

i would like to think that those whose approach is to strip away dogma is higher than those whose approach is to lay it on.   but
because of this other factor (random grace of a universal cosmic mind, /God) people from all religions have the opportunity to experience that moment of surrender, whatever approach they use to get there, or whatever approach the universe uses to spring it on them. because we are all limited to our particular thought patterns, while it/the Universe plays games to break our limitations and help us merge/perceive it.

the stripping away dogma thing is more of a philosophical approach to life than a religious practise. the actual meditation techniques which help to retreat from the subjective mind take it onto another level .