How can a moment of total love have a lasting impact?

Beloved Osho, a glimpse of your eyes, a flash of total love -- it happens in a second but stays forever. Osho, how could this happen?

It is a simple phenomenon. A moment of love is a moment of eternity. The depth of it is so great that time cannot erase it. Although the happening was in a single moment, it is like a woman becoming pregnant: the happening is in a single moment, but it gives birth to a child who may live seventy, eighty years, who may give birth to many more children. It may become a tree: many branches, and each branch bifurcating into new branches. I am reminded.... If you go to Bodh Gaya, where Gautam Buddha became enlightened, the tree under which he was sitting is still there, although it is not the same tree but the continuity of the same tree, a child of the same tree. When Ashoka was the emperor of India, he sent his daughter Sanghamitra, who had become a sannyasin, to Sri Lanka with a branch…

Osho, on the one hand Doolandas sings of life’s transience, and on the other, after drinking the nectar of love he plunges into carefree ecstasy where time becomes infinite! Please explain this paradox to us.

Narendra! A moment too is a fragment of the eternal—just as the drop belongs to the ocean, the atom to the vast. In a single small leaf the sap of the whole tree is flowing. In a tiny flower the entire existence has poured its beauty, its color, its fragrance—its all. The great poet Tennyson has said: if we could fully understand even a single flower, we would understand the whole of existence. For what appears small from the outside is, by unending pathways, joined to the whole. This flower would have no fragrance if it were not of the earth. It would have no colors if it were not linked with the sun. It would have no life if the breath of air did not move through it. The deeper you inquire, the more you will find the flower has already disappeared; little by little, the whole cosmos has…

Beloved Osho, there is the love between man and woman -- active, sensual and playful; and the love between master and disciple -- passive, cool and silent; and there is the possibility of simply being love every moment. Is love something that is always changing, coming and going, taking on different flavors and colors, or is love simply everything that is and every moment that is?

From your so-called love affairs, learn only one thing: that there must be something authentic and real and eternal which is reflected in the mirrors of your relationships. Unless you know that love, you will suffer much, and you will gain nothing. And it can be known because it is your intrinsic capacity; you are born with the seed. You just have to take a little care with it, and it will start growing. Soon you will be full of flowers -- the spring has come. And once it comes, it never goes. To the very last moment it remains there. A very beautiful story is told about Gautam Buddha. He informed his disciples that on a particular day, the coming full moon night, he was going to die. As the full moon disappeared, he would also disappear. It is a rare coincidence that Gautam Buddha was born on a…

Question: BELOVED OSHO, SITTING IN MY ROOM THOUSANDS OF KILOMETERS AWAY FROM YOU, I CAN FEEL YOU. AND IF HAD HAVE EYES TO SEE, I WOULD SEE YOU STANDING RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. I REMEMBER WHEN YOU SAID TO US IN DISCOURSE `IF YOU DON'T FEEL ME WHEN YOU ARE NOT HERE, YOU HAVEN'T LET ME IN.' IT'S SO TRUE -- BUT WHAT A GIFT THAT YOU REALLY, REALLY CAME WHEN I WAS OPEN, THAT YOU REALLY FILLED MY BEING. IN SOME MOMENTS SITTING IN FRONT OF YOU I GOT IT. IN OTHER MOMENTS IT HAPPENED BUT I WASN'T AWARE OF IT AT THAT MOMENT. PUTTING THIS OUT TO YOU MY HEART IS BEATING FASTER AND MY HANDS ARE TREMBLING. FOR THE FIRST TIME I FEEL TO SHOW SOMETHING OF MYSELF. THIS IS A GIFT ALSO.

And remember that the moment is the penetration of eternity into time. The moment is not part of time; the moment is something that comes beyond time. In fact, the real moment is between two moments of time. It is just as these two fingers are there and there is a gap. One second passes; another has not come yet, is just coming. Between the two is the vipal, the gap between two time moments. And that gap is from eternity. It has not time in it... it is timelessness. That is where one finds bliss, that is from where bliss enters your being. Bliss is transcendental to time. Time is misery, time is hell. Time is madness, because time is a constant hurry -- rushing somewhere, not knowing where exactly, but rushing... trying to reach something somewhere in the future. Time is desiring.