“Grok” comes from Robert Heinlein’s science-fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), where it is a Martian word, literally meaning “to drink”, for understanding something so thoroughly that the observer becomes part of the observed. It passed from the novel into everyday English and the dictionaries, and Therapeutic Shamanism uses it for knowing another being from the inside out, most of all by shapeshiftingShapeshifting. Becoming another being within a journey, fully enough to know it from the inside: one of the two routes to grokking, a transformation practice, and a direct experience of interconnection. Read the full answer into it in a journey.
Where does “grok” come from? #
From Mars, by way of a novel. Robert Heinlein (1907 to 1988) was one of the best-known American science-fiction writers of his day, and Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961, became his most famous book. Its hero, Valentine Michael Smith, is a human born on Mars and raised by Martians, who comes to Earth as an adult and sees human life with entirely fresh eyes.1
“Grok” is one of the Martian words he brings with him, and the novel insists there is no exact equivalent for it in English. Literally it means “to drink”. On a planet where water is scarce, drinking water and sharing it are sacred, and two beings who share water become ‘water brothers’, joined in something greater than either of them alone. From that root the word grows into its wider sense, given in the novel as understanding “so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed”. The literary critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. has said that the whole book is an extended definition of the word.1 2
How did grok get into everyday English? #
Through the people who read the book. In the 1960s the novel was taken up by the counterculture, and the word went with it. Tom Wolfe used it in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968. One group took the book further still. The Church of All Worlds, a Neopagan church that grew from a circle of friends gathered round Tim Zell (later Oberon Zell-Ravenheart) and Lance Christie from 1962, took its name from the religion in the novel and was formally chartered in 1968.3
Computer programmers adopted the word too. It was in the Jargon File, the programmers’ own dictionary, from its earliest versions in the early 1980s, for knowledge that has become part of you, and it is still used for understanding a piece of code profoundly; in 2023 an artificial-intelligence chatbot was named after it. Along the way it reached the dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with”.3
What does grokking mean in Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Understanding a being from the inside out. Hard as the word is to define, its senses include understanding something profoundly, with intuition and empathy; communicating empathically with it; understanding it so thoroughly that you merge with it and it merges with you. In shamanic work it means moving beyond human consciousness, and even beyond animal consciousness, and in a sense ‘becoming’ something quite different, so as to understand its knowledge and its medicine. GrokkingGrokking. Understanding a being from the inside out (the word is Robert Heinlein’s): deep, embodied, experiential knowing rather than intellectual knowledge. Its two shamanic routes are shapeshifting and dieting. Read the full answer something means being able to resonate with it: to match its frequency, mirror it, and almost become it. To grok a Plant means stepping out of the fast pace of being Animal and really slowing down. Stone can move astonishingly fast, faster than any of the other Peoples, yet most of the time we experience it as slow to the point of stillness, and grokking it means matching both its speed and its vast sense of time.4
It is not only a shamanic thing. It happens between people who know each other very well. Over months and years a therapist and a client come to know what the other will feel or think, and a kind of shorthand grows between them; in shamanic terms, they grok each other. It happens between people and their cats, dogs and horses too. And in most cases, the more we know about someone or something, the more we understand them, and the more we grok them. Knowledge helps us grok.5
The main ways of grokking the Animal, Plant and Stone People, shapeshifting in a journey, shamanic dietingDieting (shamanic). Ingesting a tiny amount of a plant, mineral or other being and observing its effects on body, mind and dreams over hours to weeks: one of the two routes to grokking a being. Homeopathy’s ‘proving’ is a modern reinvention of it. Read the full answer and research, have an answer of their own. See What are grokking, dieting and research in working with the Peoples? and What are transformation practices and shapeshifting?
Why use a word from science fiction? #
Because English has lost its own. Shamanism has been practised all over the world, but in the West the shamans were mostly killed off long ago, and with them went the shamanic terminology.6 So the vocabulary has to be found, borrowed or made. A Martian word that the novel says has no Earthly equivalent fits well for an experience our culture has no word for, that of knowing another being by, in some sense, becoming it.
There is a simple coincidence in the word, too. Heinlein’s ‘grok’ begins with drinking, with taking something in, and one of the traditional ways of grokking a being is shamanic dieting: taking a tiny piece of it and noticing what happens physically, emotionally and mentally over the following hours, days or weeks.7 See How do humans communicate and build relationships with the other-than-human Peoples?
Is grokking the same as empathy? #
It includes empathy and goes further. The psychotherapist’s empathy, coming to know a client from the inside over time, is one form of it. Shamanic grokking reaches beyond the human altogether, into what it is to be Bird, Tree or Stone, and the more we know beforehand about the being, its body, its habits and its world, the deeper the grokking can go. The idea that grokking in a journey with no prior knowledge is somehow purer is a modern conceit; hunter-gatherer shamans knew the beings they journeyed to intimately, having butchered their meat and made tools and instruments from their bones.8
Can someone grok us, and can we grok ourselves? #
Yes to the first, and the second is more subtle. Most of us have known someone who ‘gets’ us, a friend or partner who groks us and with whom we feel at ease. However much of a kindred spirit they are, though, they are still someone else. Meeting our own Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer Soul is different, because the Soul is ourself, the one we should, at some level, feel the most kinship with. It may feel strange at first, like someone who has lived another life altogether, and at the same time deeply familiar. That is why it is important that the Soul, when met, feels right.9 See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
