The invocation procedure is known as avahana
Step 1: Nyasa
Recite the bija (seed) mantras of a Hindu god while touching your fingers and other parts of your body, as if you were getting your body ready to be the god’s temple.
Step 2: Dhyana sloka
While seeing the god sitting in the heart’s cavity on a lotus, recite the visualization poem known as the dhyana sloka, which describes the shape of the deity you are summoning. Alternately, visualize God shining down on you while hovering above you on a lotus. Holding a flower in the karma mudra, this is done.
Step 3
Exhale into the flower, as if passing divinity from you to it. The flower should then be put on the symbol you are using as your concentrating tool.
Step 4: Manasika puja
Show the five invocational mudras, then do mental worship by giving each of the five things that make up the universe as a gift to the god.
Step 5: Upacaras
At this point, imagine the god seated on a throne before you and perform all 16 services as you would for a lover or distinguished visitor.
Step 6: Stotras
Spend some time singing praise songs or repeating the deity’s root mantra.
Step 7: Visarjana
Restore the god to your heart chakra by taking the flower with the nirvana mudra, inhaling its scent, and then placing it on your head while picturing your happy union and oneness with the deity.
Every component of a ritual has its start as a simple prop, something to help the faltering, distracted mind and heart find a point of reference, something to attach the interior yearning to something that is objectively real. When viewed through the lens of an aspiration that is gradually becoming more intense.
The small vessel of water that is used for ritual cleansing transforms into a cherished instrument of our subjective purification; the water is no longer the liquid that we have just taken from a river, pot, or water filter. Through the practice of tapas, even just a few drops of water may be elevated to a holy status, transforming them into the source of all life and the agent that gives us a fresh start.
The ritual has all of a sudden provided us with a fresh viewpoint, a new way of looking at the instrument and the person who wields it, and how they have been altered. By continuing in this manner, we eventually achieve a certain level of fervor, at which point our normally scattered existence joins together as cohesively as it ever has before.
And at one holy moment, we realize how hopelessly insufficient our seeking was and how childishly full of mistakes our preparation was. But the Deity hears the basic scream of our being and shows up, and from that point on, we materialists will never be the same. The fire has been ignited inside, and we will go on until it has annihilated every last one of us.
Therefore, one might conclude that the rituals are effective. There is a strategy behind it all. By adhering to it, we open ourselves up to the more advanced realms of awareness. Everything hinges on how we approach it and the amount of effort we put into it, just as it does when working toward any other tangible goal.