On religion (Sankara Saranam - a summary of God without religion)

I've been reading a book by Sankara Saranam called 'God Without Religion', Sankara goes through the negative aspects found in organised religion and raises an important point that, and I paraphrase, if one is no longer having faith in the mainstream religion's ideologies one still attends because of the sense of social group friendships that have developed and grown, something very true even with my own relationship to Catholicism. 
The book goes into a slightly Krishnamurti Buddha tone with Sankara asking each person to disassociate oneself from other beliefs and that they should be able to test the experiences that they've had in the imaginal realm or their visions so that they know what is real to the infinite self. The infinite self to Sankara is the self unbound a self that can gain real knowledge which comes through as one's true 'intuition'. Sankara exposes his breathing techniques(pranayama) as methods to gain entry to intuitive knowledge. The people who are there testing this knowledge he has referred to as intuitive scientists without the traditional form of objectivity but people who are willing to test knowledge gained in the 'infinite self' for knowledge about the universe.
Sankara Saranam feels that we should gather in groups known as 'colloquiums' where we can come to discuss our gained knowledge and to interact with eachother on a post-organised religion sense of understanding. In an interview he had taken these were compared to Theosophical Lodges, places where people could come and discuss various issues in terms of this understanding.
Sankara sees that these breathing techniques were key to early Hebrew and Vedic sages gaining knowledge to the imaginal realm and sources of mystical understanding. Sankara has moderate faith (he critiques it and doesn't totally accept it) in the Kriya Yoga definition of the Ages of Man: four ages(yugas - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugas) which all added up to 12,000 years and two of them nearly add up to the precession of the equinoxes(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession_of_equinoxes) of nearly 26,000 years.
So, to him, much that was done in religions over the period of Kali Yuga(ascending phase) thus much of yoga(hatha the asanas, etc.) were incomparable developments in comparison to pranayama, which he claims was the ideal for the others to live up to.

He also denies the need for ascetism,  one should have a balanced approach to sex, food and other aspects of life, a regulation of these with an understanding of the need for fasting and periodic celibacy as important values for one's spiritual development and of course to gain a positive relationship with these values and one's mentality.