Mahmoud screwed up his face. "It means 'identically equal' in the mathematical sense.  The human cliché, 'This hurts me worse than it does you' has a Martian flavor to it, if only a trace.  The Martians seem to know instinctively what we learned painfully from modern physics, that the observer interacts with the observed simply through the process of observation. 'Grok' means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the process being observed - to merge, to blend, to intermarry, to lose personal identity in group experience.  It means almost everything that we mean by religion, philosophy, and science - and it means as little to us as color means to a blind man." Mahmoud paused. "Jubal, if I chopped you up and made a stew of you, you and the stew, whatever else was in it, would grok - and when I ate you, we would grok together and nothing would be lost and it would not matter which one of us did the chopping up and eating."