devotion, rituals and meditation

I am walking along the river bank in the early morning fog. When I walk very fast swinging my hands vigorously, my mental processes are slowed down as if physical activity slows down the thought flow. Thoughts come back when I slow down my pace and the breathing also slows down. Although in brisk walk the mental process is less active, I can not say that the mind can be silent or still in physical activity. Surprisingly, it is when I sit down absolutely relaxed with no physical activity at all that the mind too is calm and can be really quiet. When the mind is thus quiet, thoughts do not interfere with my attention. I am then free to see, hear, feel and smell the surroundings with full clarity as they are in the present. What I see then is of course, real without distortion. But what has it to do with Absolute Reality?
I was brought up in a highly religious, although not orthodox, atmosphere. Head of the matriarchal family was an allopath doctor. Father was an educated and religious person. Temples, rituals, prayers, devotional chants with utmost reverence to deities were routine. We, the children of the house learned mantras to chant them with all the disciplines of connected symbols and correct gestures. I concentrated on the image of the deity in the temple, and also the conceptual images in my mind. We praised the deities in Sanskrit poems with utmost devotion. I do understand now that they helped to develop devotion and reverence in our minds. But in those days we did not know anything about the purposes. It was just because we believed that we will achieve material benefits, prosperity, learning and good health if we perform all the rites to please the gods. Any spiritual advancement, or approach to Reality was nowhere in the picture.
Is my present inquiry into the mind and self compatible with those practices? Prayer and devotion are clearly processes in the mind connected with imagery and thought, and therefore they are of the past. How can it reconcile with the activities to get into a silent mind in order to direct the attention towards the mind and its source? A lot of confusion arose in my mind when as a young man I slipped from chanting mantras into the practice of meditation, the technique of achieving a still, silent mind.
Now I do understand that I cannot ‘create’ a silent mind. I can only probe into the mind, understand it, and look further and further within. And in that process the mind may become still and silent. It is also true that discriminative thought and attention create the possibility of understanding the processes of the various states of the mind, making it possible to develop wisdom.
Then, I feel, that intelligence can be complete, filling devotion, reverence, and wisdom in a silent mind.