Love Is Not Permanent

''Love is not permanent, because in life nothing is permanent.

Only plastic flowers are permanent.

Real roses are born in the morning

and are gone by the evening.''

-Osho

It is not anything difficult. It is as simple as your heartbeats or your breathing. It comes with you, it is not given to you by the society. And this is the point that I want to emphasize: love comes with your birth – but of course it is undeveloped as everything else is undeveloped. The child has to grow.

The society takes the advantage of the gap. The child’s love will take time to grow; meanwhile the society goes on conditioning the mind of the child with ideas about love which are false. By the time you are ready to explore the world of love, you are filled with so much rubbish about love that there is not much hope for you to be able to find the authentic and discard the false.

For example, every child everywhere has been told in a thousand and one ways that love is eternal: once you love a person you love the person always. If you love a person and later on you feel that you don’t love, it only means you never loved the person in the first place. Now this is a very dangerous idea. It is giving you an idea of a permanent love and in life nothing is permanent…the flowers blossom in the morning and by the evening they are gone.

Life is a continuous flux; everything is changing, moving. Nothing is static, nothing is permanent. You have been given the idea of a permanent love which is going to destroy your whole life. You will expect permanent love from the poor woman, and the woman will expect permanent love from you.

Love becomes secondary, permanence becomes primary.

And love is such a delicate flower that you cannot force it to be permanent. You can have plastic flowers; that’s what people have – marriage, their family, their children, their relatives, everything is plastic.

Plastic has one very spiritual thing: it is permanent.

Real love is as uncertain as your life is uncertain.

You cannot say that you will be here tomorrow. You cannot even say that you are going to survive the next moment. Your life is continuously changing – from childhood to youth, to middle age, to old age, to death, it goes on changing.

A real love will also change.

It is possible that if you are enlightened your love has gone beyond the ordinary laws of life. It is neither changing nor permanent, it simply is. It is no more a question of how to love – you have become love itself, so whatever you do is loving. It is not that you specifically do something which is love – whatever you do, your love starts pouring through it.

But before enlightenment your love is going to be the same as everything else: it will change.

If you understand that it will change, that once in a while your wife may become interested in somebody and you have to be understanding and loving and caring and allowing her to go the way her being feels…this is a chance for you to prove to your wife that you love her. You love her – even if she is going to love somebody else, that is irrelevant. With understanding, it is possible that your love may become a lifelong affair, but remember it will not be permanent. It will have its ups and downs, it will have changes.

Answers by other people :

Anonymous : Love is actually a certain chemical activity in the brain. It can go away, but I think most people always have special feelings for past lovers. My relationship with my first love ended three years ago and the love I feel for him is always growing, even though I've accepted the loss of the relationship and have been involved with other guys since then. I can have romantic feelings for other people (even though I thought for a long time I never would), but even if I did fall in love again, I know I'll never feel exactly the same way about anyone else as I do about my first. He'll always be the most special to me.

Erin said :