What is a verb? This might sound a little, a little silly on a YouTube channel about Nonduality, but this is part of a series I’m doing on the intersection between Nonduality and Native wisdom. This week we’re talking about language and how language informs our worldview.
So, what do verbs have to do with Nonduality?
In my last video I talked about how I read the book ‘Braiding Sweetgrass,’ which had a profound change for me in the way I see how human beings understand life. In that book, Robin Wall Kimmerer is talking about the difference between civilized language and her native language. It’s an interesting journey because English is her first language. She decides that she needs to learn her native language.
She starts trying to do that and it drives her crazy because everything in her native language is a verb. It’s maddening to the western mind, ‘How can you have a language where everything is a verb?’ She talks about her process of going through this.
What’s so fascinating about it for me is that I totally don’t understand it. I don’t see how you can possibly have a language that’s all verbs.
Maybe I don’t really understand what a verb is! So, of course I google it—what’s a verb? The answer is very boring. As far as English is concerned a verb is something that comes into play between nouns. That’s the only thing it can do. Verbs are actions between nouns, or an action on a single noun. Everything is really just about nouns.
In our English language, nouns tend to divide the world into things that we have named. ‘The dog jumps over the cat.’ Jumps—is the verb. Dog and cat are nouns.
A verb exists to tell you what the noun is doing.
That just goes to show how limited our language is. It fixes us into a state where we can only see the world as separate things.
What if we were more verby. What if we verbed more?
A verb always connects things. ‘The dog jumps over the cat’—it’s connecting the dog to the action. So how can you have a language that’s mostly verbs? I still don’t get it.
This fits into Nonduality teachings beautifully because one of the biggest things that Nonduality should be creating for us is a sense of curiosity and understanding. The teaching of Not-Two shows that we can’t really divide the world up into things that have labels. Everything is way, way more interconnected, way more mysterious than our critical brains are able to see.
By verbing ourselves more we should be able to mess with our fixed view of how reality works. How can everything be a verb?
Jumping dog. Still cat.
There’s a beautiful scene in ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ where Robin is having the same problem. ‘How can you have a language full of verbs? How can things be only verby?’ She’s sitting on the beach, and she’s like, ‘This is a beach. How can this be a verb?’ But then she sits there and starts noticing. She’s actually listening to the world around her, and the waves are lapping up on the sand, and the sand itself is moving around with the water. And she suddenly realizes, “Oh, beach—it’s not a fixed thing. There is no such thing, in the real world, as beach. There is only beaching.”
It’s the end of fixed concepts. I could draw a picture of a beach and name it a beach. I could draw the water and name it water. We then think there’s the beach here, there’s the water there. But this isn’t true. Beach and water are infinitely interconnected with each other. There really there’s no such thing as beach. There’s more beaching. It’s more like beach moving.
I still don’t get how you would put it into a sentence? I have no idea. Maybe native tongues don’t even really have sentences the way we have sentences. I don’t know.
All I know are two very important things: my language is so limited that I can’t completely, totally describe either the world or my experience of being a human being through it. That’s why Nonduality says to throw away your thoughts until you come to this point of being that doesn’t need thoughts.
And this also tells me that there are so many things that I simply don’t understand and that’s good. It puts me into a place of curiosity instead of knowing. Now I’m moving through reality instead of sitting in a fixed reality. What would it be like to see the whole world verbally? Would I see that everything’s moving; that everything’s interconnected. Could I talk about it?
This is what the native teachers tell us: that when a human being is raised in a society that teaches you this from the very beginning your experience of being a human being is totally different from our current perceived reality.
How do we come from where we are to that place?
This is important because it is our fixation on the world as separate things that is causing us to destroy it. If we saw how interconnected things are all the time, we would be able to create a sustainable world where we can all live beautifully. Ultimately, as far as I’m concerned, this needs to be the goal of non-dual teachings. How do we get to a place where we’re living together differently?
You can’t be ‘enlightened’ all by yourself. You can’t noun enlightenment.
So, we stay curious: what is a verb? How can you have a language that’s just all verbs? You’ll notice that even in writing about this the page is full of nouns. You may also notice that the reality of being curious is not so nouny.