Hindu Media Wiki

Devotion by nature is grounded in some variety of emotive experience. It can provoke a sense of transformed identity in which one’s ordinary state drops away and either a fear based (folk bhakti), heart centered (emotional bhakti), nationalistic (political bhakti), or universalist (Vedanta bhakti) devotional emotional flavor emerges.

The emotional experience acts as a psychological breakthrough and situates itself in the  broader context of human aspirations. In a religious sense, devotion in varying degrees can be cultivated through structured ritual, worship of local traditional deities and rites that arise through spontaneous and sudden impulse or through the arts. Nonetheless, the devotee is the vessel of some sort of subdued, ecstatic or intellectual emotional response directed towards the god.