THE GROK OF LOST: Lost returns tonight, with what looks to be a Sun/Jin-centric episode. For those of you who don't spend hours noodling around looking for theoretical musings, here's an interesting theory on the survivors' cameo appearances in each other's flashbacks, posited by EW's Jeff Jensen. Jensen muses that perhaps the island's electromagnetic energy is causing the psychic boundaries between the lostaways' minds to disintegrate and their psyches to merge. Giving this theory a smidge of pop cultural cred is the fact that Robert Heinlein apparently incorporated this concept in Stranger in a Strange Land, calling it "grok." As a Heinlein character explains, "Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience. It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science—and it means as little to us (because we are from Earth) as color means to a blind man."
Now I am by no means a Heinlein expert -- I've owned the book for 20 years and have never cracked the cover -- but the notion that the many coincidences we've observed in the characters' pasts aren't for real, but are instead a product of the island's juju (hee!) seems quite feasible. And Heinlein seems like as reasonable a place as any for JJ and the Island Band to be deriving inspiration from. What say you? (I am quite confident that we've got one or two Heinlein experts among us -- can you help me out on this grok business?)
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