On this episode of Skeptico, poetry.

Can I leave you with a poem?

It's called The Forest, and I'll just note for the listeners that the forest in this poem

means the inner world.

A forest starts behind your house.

Eventually you'll want to wander there.

Go when you must in the daylight or the night.

Their time is unimportant and the only light is shadow. The eyes of beasts will follow you from

thicket, but so what? You have as much right there as they do. So then it's dappled clearings,

musty star like, this and that, the paraphernalia of noe.

Notice what you can. The forest is immense. No one can notice much.

Eventually you'll find a creek and deeper one per start.

See the way the water moves. Everyone goes upstream, and so will you.

Eventually the earth inclines, and you're deeply breathing.

The water is clear and cold and mumbling something true. Notice what you can and no one can notice much.

Eventually, wild thirst begins, and you'll get so tired of dryness, you'll tear out all your chest bones to let the water in. If you can, kindly let me know what happens next. And squabbling about gurus,

this is a guy who claimed he was God, and he doubled down and saying, I'm God. And every 700 to 1400 years, God, which he's now defining a very narrow definition of what God is. Every 700 to 1400 years, God sends down somebody like me to incarnate, to tear apart, the unrel, untie, I think he says, all these samsaras.

And you believe that, right?

And squabbling about fake, fake techno-gooros.

Harare's claims about the non-existence of divinity or extended consciousness are just as much a matter of faith as any religious belief system.

He is making sweeping claims about the nature of reality. are just as much a matter of faith as any religious belief system.

He is making sweeping claims about the nature of reality that go beyond what can be empirically verified or falsified,

...