To reach every destination, steps are needed, and for every skill and quality, practice is needed. Our goal is to reach the Divine, and our path is to worship and meditate on God; it is to do good works and righteous acts; it is to develop virtues. All of these require various skills and qualities which can be developed only by practice.
Man does not become righteous automatically, nor virtues are developed by themselves, nor one has enough understanding at birth to be able to worship and meditate on God. All of these need development.
It is true that everyone has some intuition about God as such, and has some tendency towards righteousness and virtues, but these are not enough to reach the Divine.
This is because, in addition to the Divine, Evil also exists and constantly pulls attention away from God and spirituality. It produces negative energies that actively drag the soul down and create temporary forgetfulness and indifference in regard to ethics and righteousness, and takes away the taste for spirituality and knowledge.
In the absence of such active evil force, we certainly would not need any effort and practice, and we would be like angels in Heaven who are always at the height of spiritual awareness and worship God constantly and in the most intense way.
But as humans, we are not in this state. Instead, we are standing at the intersection of two paths, of Good and Evil, and Evil constantly forces us onto its path. We are assailed by many negative forces that degrade the soul, as the poet said: "Angels could not carry the burden, so they loaded it on me, the poor one!" Indeed, it is said that even the highest angels would cry if placed into the human condition.
As a result, in this condition, we need effort and practice to develop and flourish our Divine tendencies. For worship, for doing good works, and for all other aspects of our path, we need practice. To worship and pray to God, we need to practice concentration and various forms of meditation to learn how to transcend the lower spheres of consciousness into the Divine plane, and we need to study scriptures and spiritual literature to increase our intuition about the Divine; to develop virtue, we need to reflect on our daily behavior and practice introspection; to perform good deeds, we need physical exercises to increase physical health and strength, and also psychic exercises to improve emotional balance and increase willpower; and many other practices are needed for the path of reaching the Divine.
The set of all these practices constitutes what we call the Divine lifestyle. The Divine lifestyle leads to Divine life, and Divine life leads to the Divine.
These practices are very similar to what we see in other religions: prayers, meditations, repetition of holy names, rituals, and other religious and spiritual practices. But we do them with a different view: we do them as "means" to reach the Divine; we do them as tools which enable one to develop virtues and other spiritual qualities that can bring us close to the Divine.
But in current religions, these practices are often done as rituals that are required by God and should be done no matter what. For example, a temple ritual is considered as something ordered by God, and by performing it, bliss and forgiveness of sins will descend on the participants. But in our religion, a temple ritual is to remind us of God and keep us focused on Divine ideas such as forgiveness, charity, and other virtues, so that these virtues gradually become implanted in our soul, and it is because of this implantation of virtues that we come closer to the Divine, and not because of performing the ritual alone.
So there is a remarkable difference between us and followers of current religions in regard to religious acts. We both do the same acts; we both pray, meditate, do group chanting and rituals, and outwardly seem to be the same, but inwardly we hold different views on these acts: one considers them as a path to a goal and the other as a goal itself.
A story has been narrated of two brothers, one spending all his time in a temple worshiping God and the other spending all his time in prostitute houses. But one day, the brother who was in the prostitute house regretted, and said to himself: "See, my brother is in the temple of God worshiping, and I'm here in this house of sin! Shame on me!" So he was taken by grief and repentance. At the same time, the brother who was in the temple also regretted, saying to himself: "See! My brother is in that place and must be enjoying himself, while I'm here wasting my time!" And it so happened that on that day both of them died. The brother who was in the temple was taken by Evil to the house of death, but the brother who was in the prostitute house was taken by the angel of life to the house of Light and Divine abode.
This is because the brother in the temple, despite his many worship and spiritual practices, failed to develop love and devotion to God and eventually turned away. But the brother in the prostitute house, despite his lack of spiritual practices, eventually turned to God and repented. And all God wants is a pure and repenting heart, a heart that calls to God in sincerity and desire.
The implication thereof is that God does not care what religious practices we do and how we do them, etc., but only cares about the result of it, which is a pure heart and good works.
As a result of this, the exact form of a ritual, or any other practice, is not important as long as it helps us to develop virtues and Divine remembrance. And we can rearrange and alter the practices. But in current religions, rituals should be done in a fixed manner which they think is ordered by God. For them, all that is important is the physical performance of the ritual or any other religious act and not their effect on the soul and behavior.
Because of this, these religions fail to produce virtuous and holy men, except in very few and exceptional cases. And religion becomes a set of "laws" and rules that are physically performed each day while the followers remain the same each day. But followers of our path and the pure religion make progress daily, and each day better than the day before and each year more spiritual than the year before, until they reach the stage of righteousness and holiness. And this makes a good reputation for our religion and our God, for our followers are indeed virtuous, and not just claimants.
These practices are detailed in the book of practice, where the goal and forms of each practice are described along with the concepts behind them. It is like a medical book for the soul. It is of utmost importance for the followers to do these practices and make progress in virtue and righteousness daily.