Nirgun poetry evokes a deeper level of experience by cutting off normal ways of thinking, pushing the listener to a place that is no-place, to a consciousness where all analytical categories (including nirgun and sagun) collapse. The nirgun deity is invoked in negatives such as invisible, indescribable, ungraspable, beyond form, inconceivable, and unnameable. One conventional way to categorize devotional feeling is with the terms sagun and nirgun.

Bhajan-a word common to most North Indian languages-means a devotional song.