The Verb Beneath the Verb: Body, Mind and Beyond in-between contexts of Neurodivergent Psychology, Sanskrit Antropology and Monist Theology
Why what science calls body and mind is verbs and why its one.
Reality, in its most immediate form, arrives before language does. The body does not have movement — it is movement. The heartbeat, the peristaltic wave, the electrical storm of perception: these are not properties of a static thing called a body, they are the body itself, ongoing, a process mistaken for an object because it is slow enough to photograph. What we call the body is, more precisely, a verb that English has frozen into a noun for grammatical convenience. The same is true of mind. Consciousness does not sit behind experience like a driver behind a wheel — it is the driving, the attending, the remembering, the anticipating. Mind, too, is verb. And beneath both body and mind, conditioning the possibility of either, is prana: the energy-current that precedes the distinction between physical and mental entirely. Science arrives at something similar when it describes the organism as a metabolic field, a web of thermodynamic transactions, or when ecology dissolves the boundary between creature and environment into a single coupled system. Indigenous cosmologies have often known this more simply, calling it what it is — the living current, the activity beneath activity, what is. Three descriptions of the same thing, separated by method but not by subject.
This is not merely a philosophical starting point. It has consequences for how we think about human difference — and, more urgently, for the institutional systems we have built to describe and manage that difference.
Consider the psychological classification system. It presents itself as descriptive: a neutral inventory of how minds deviate from normal functioning. But the historical record makes this neutrality difficult to sustain. Homosexuality appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual as a disorder until 1973, removed not because new neurological evidence emerged but because the cultural and political context shifted sufficiently to make the classification untenable. Neurodivergence — autism, ADHD, dyslexia — occupies an increasingly contested position: traits that generate disability in certain environments can represent enhanced capacity in others, which raises the question of whether the problem is in the person or in the mismatch between person and environment. The history of psychiatry is, in significant part, a history of majority experience being mistaken for universal experience, and minority experience being pathologized in the gap.
This is not an accident of early ignorance that better science has since corrected. It is structural. The system locates problems in individuals rather than in the relationship between individuals and their environments. A person who cannot sit still for eight hours in a fluorescent-lit room is classified; the fluorescent-lit room is not. A person who forms romantic attachments to members of the same sex is classified; the cultural assumption that such attachments are aberrant is not. The unit of analysis is always the deviant person, never the norm that makes them deviant. And this creates a fundamental epistemological problem: the system has no internal mechanism for catching its own errors, because the people being described have no standing within the system that describes them. The authority to say what counts as disorder rests entirely with those whose experience is treated as the baseline.
This is where the transplantation problem becomes acute. Psychological labels are not value-neutral descriptions in the way that, say, the boiling point of water is a value-neutral description. They are tools calibrated for a specific context — the clinical encounter, the insurance system, the legal framework, the research institution — and they carry within them a set of assumptions about what normal functioning looks like, whose testimony counts as evidence, and what the goal of intervention is. Within that context, they do a kind of work: they coordinate action, they unlock resources, they structure the therapeutic relationship. But move them outside that context and something changes. A clinical label applied in a casual social setting, or used to interpret historical figures who cannot consent to the description, or deployed to explain away political disagreement, is no longer doing the work it was designed to do. It has become something else: a moral judgment wearing clinical clothing. The white coat of objectivity, without the institutional apparatus that gives it its (partial) justification, is just a costume.
The tradition knew something about this. If ontic reality is embedded in the body — the verb of sensation, impulse, breath — and ontological reality in the mind — the verb of meaning-making, narrative, conception — then both arise within a field that is not private. Prana, or whatever word you prefer for the living current beneath biological and psychological process, is not something a person has. It is something a person participates in. The error of the classification system is, at root, an error of ontological individualism: it treats human beings as self-contained systems that deviate internally, rather than as nodes in a relational field where what looks like internal deviation is often a response to the shape of the field itself.
To say this is not to say that suffering is not real, or that clinical intervention is never warranted, or that no distinctions can meaningfully be drawn. It is to say that the authority to draw those distinctions should not rest with systems that structurally exclude the testimony of those being described. A true clinical encounter — and the tradition of somatic and contemplative medicine has always understood this — is a relational event. It requires that the person being examined have standing, that their account of their own experience carries evidentiary weight, and that the possibility of environmental causation remain live throughout. The classification system, as it currently exists, satisfies none of these requirements by default.
What would it mean to classify from the verb rather than the noun? To begin not with a static catalog of deficits but with a dynamic account of person-in-environment, attending always to the living current that moves through both? It would mean, at minimum, that the question “what is wrong with this person?” could never be asked without simultaneously asking “what is wrong with this relationship, this institution, this culture?” And it would mean recognizing that the answer to the second question is not merely supplementary to the first — it is often the first question, properly stated.
The body is a verb. The mind is a verb. The energy that sustains both is the verb of verbs. A system that classifies human experience while treating itself as a neutral noun, exempt from the processes it describes, has not escaped the living current. It has simply forgotten that it is inside it.