With and Within Mind Visualising (With) Materiality in Bhakti Practices

Abstract

How does materiality matter and function in the absence of its physical existence? This question guides my textual study of structured devotional visualisation, called manasi (with and within the mind). In Hindu bhakti (devotion), manasi is a highly creative yet structured process of imagining and visualising—of creating with thoughts and beholding in mind—interactions with objects, humans, and deities. It involves engaging with materiality within for effects experienced cognitively and viscerally as wholly real, often to access a metaphysical reality within the mind and therein experience singular cognitive engagement with the divine. Drawing on Hindu discourses on manasi, I argue that materials pulsate with meanings even in their non-material existence, as in the form of a thought, because of the complex devotional-discursive contexts within which devotees, materials, and material engagements are embedded. I propose a conception of matter that emphasises the interplay of materiality and non-materiality of humans and objects as both become inter-relationally meaningful through thoughts structured by theological-practical knowledge. Simultaneously, I propose to consider a network of affects, a bhakti assemblage, to identify the contexts that shape devotional desires for cognitive engagements with matter.