Religion is a dissolving of boundaries in order to move to the undifferentiated where there is no definition, where there is no limit to anything, where everything moves into everything else, where everything is everything else. You cannot cut, you cannot chop existence. The consequences are bound to be very different in each approach. By the scientific approach, by dividing, chopping, you can come only to dead particles, atoms, because life is something which cannot be cut into divisions. And the moment you cut it, it is no more there. It is as if someone goes to study a symphony by studying each single note. Each single note is part of the symphony, but it is not the symphony. The symphony is created by many notes dissolving into each other. You cannot study a symphony by studying notes.

I cannot study you by studying your parts, You are not just a total of parts, you are more than that. When you divide and cut and analyze, life disappears; only dead parts are left. That is why science will never be capable of knowing what life is, and whatsoever is known through science will be about death – matter – it will never be about life. Science may become capable of manipulating life, of knowing the parts, the dead parts. It may be capable of manipulating life, but, still life is not known, not even touched. Life remains unknowable for science. By the very method of its technology, its methodology, by the very approach, life cannot be known through it.

That is why science goes on denying – denying anything else other than matter. The very approach debars any contact with that which is life. And the vice versa happens also: if you move deeply into religion, you will start denying matter. Shankara says that matter is illusion, it is not there; it simply appears to be. The whole Eastern approach has been to deny the world, matter, anything material. Why? Science goes on denying life, the divine, consciousness. Deeper religious experiences go on denying matter – all that is material. Why? Because of the very approach. If you look at life without differentiation, matter disappears. Matter is life divided, differentiated. Matter means life defined, analyzed into parts.

So, of course, if you look at life undifferentiatedly and become part of it, in a deep participation, if you become one with existence as two lovers become one, matter disappears. That is why Shankara says that matter is illusion. If you participate in existence, it is. But Marx says that consciousness is just a by-product, it is not substantial; it is just a function of matter. If you divide life, then consciousness disappears, becomes illusory. Then only matter is.

What I am intending to say to you is this: Existence is one. If you approach it through analysis, it appears material, dead. If you approach it through participation, it appears as life, as divine, as consciousness. If you approach it through science there is no possibility of any deep bliss happening to you, because with dead matter bliss is impossible. At the most it can only be illusory. Only with a deep participation is bliss possible.

Tantra is a love technique. The effort is to make you one with existence. So you will have to lose many things before you can enter. You will have to lose your habitual pattern of analyzing things; you will have to lose the deep-rooted attitude of fighting, of thinking in terms of conquering.