Grok On

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The following passages which I used as an explanatory introduction to this video are from Mark's Daily Apple, http://www.marksdailyapple.com a health site. I enjoyed my visit there. 

We like to throw “Grok” around pretty liberally. It’s the name of our prototypical human ancestor, sure, but it’s also become a rallying cry of sorts: Grok on! What does it mean when we say “Grok on”? Do you know? Do I know? 

Concept:  from Robert Heinlein’s novel “Stranger in a Strange Land,” where it is a Martian word meaning literally “to drink” and metaphorically “to be one with.” Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed – to merge, blend, intermarry… It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science – and it means as little to us (because of our Earthly assumptions) as color means to a blind man.

Verb: To understand profoundly through intuition or empathy.

When I – or anyone else – implore you to “Grok on,” what am I really saying? Does it matter? Is it better left unsaid and unsubstantiated? Is “to Grok” merely an ambiguous, indefinable abstraction, the careful parsing of which would only serve to destroy its strange effectiveness?

 Fact and intuition rule the roost simultaneously in some kind of two-pronged oligarchy – and that’s what makes the phrase “to Grok” so completely perfect for our goals. Heinlein’s “grok” carries two meanings, but we’re only interested in the second, figurative one. To Grok is to know something to be innately, incontrovertibly true; it is to feel that something is so using intuition, as opposed to mere sensory observation. Grokking a concept means you understand it so well that it is absorbed into your very being. You dig it. It’s become second nature, an integrated part of you.
 
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