Ask Dr.Druid . intro
to grok or not to grok
This piece will grok better for you
In the integration of lucid waking & lucid dreaming, our whole druid shaman approach is about honing attention. Achieving grok. Grok is an extravagant attention, a 'drinking in' of an understanding, of a perception.
Among our druid shaman premises are that we have a myriad of dreams we inhabit. For practical and beginning purposes, we have rem real, those night dreams of whatever vividness, and day real, the more-or-less agreed upon masterpiece of reality engineering that we blandly call ordinary life. By practicing a deft, sustainable attention, a fluid 'attention zone,' we can learn to allow all our experiences to become peak, fascinating.
We'll cultivate fascination. You can learn to play fascination just as you can learn to play the guitar or play Scrabble or use a recipe.
Deft is how a butterfly lands on a flower. A drop shot in tennis is deft. A bank shot in pool is deft.
Remember that when we first learn anything, our corrections are awkward. When I first learned to ride a bike, I would way over-correct, over-balance lurchingly from side to side. Eventually I got the bike-riding-balance trick so deftly that I could ride no-hands for miles. Being gloriously and hilariously willing to learn something new is to be willing to be back in kindergarten, to be awkward for awhile without any need for saving face.
The druid subtext to all our lively curiosity is that Everything is Interesting. This attitude of peak gratitude and peak curiosity is the birthright of every person. I always feel as bold an explorer as Balboa. Or sometimes I feel like a curator in the Cosmic Museum – what I devotedly notice is shinily preserved in eternity. The riches of attention, the treasures of attention are untarnishable marvels.
Being a druid shaman is about juggling fascinations with abandon. The abandon comes later. The fascination comes first. Every thing has glamour. (We've narrowed the word to mean women on magazine covers with expensive make-up.) Glamour is an irresistible inner delectability of any thing. Fascination is making a connection with the tricky, mysterious glamour in each thing.
We'll pursue a Practical Alchemy, make the Great Arts Unhidden, turn the lead of the unnoticed to the gold of the admired.
Master druids know only one trick: everything is fascinating. They inhabit a discipline of extreme empathy and vulnerability to their pandream experience. They differentiate between People & AllElse. This immense, intense, immediate, delicate, & stark openness of attention is practiced at first exclusively with AllElse.
Grok on!
Notes:
..Ask Dr. Druid acquaints you with the Isle of Avalon, the Island of Apples, that corpus callosum where your brain hemispheres connect and learn collaboration, irony, mischief, magic. In order for this actual physical activation to occur and stabilize, it's essential that you read the short daily chapters with your mouth as if out loud.. Just like they told you not to in 2nd grade.
Sentences which will trip you up if you read them racingly with your eyes alone, will bloom like zinnias for you when you read them with your lips & tongue as if out loud. I make the chapters very short so you can afford to take the small extra time to read in this forbidden way.
..pandream..'pan' is here a prefix meaning 'all.' Druids learn that lucid waking & lucid dreaming use the same wonderfull attention skills.
..grok..'grok' (a drinking deeply in of understanding)is a necessary Martian word from Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land, a great though painfully sexist sci fi romp.
