Problems as such are always abstract. You cannot live a problem: you can live only a mystery. But for that you will have to drop all problems.

“I love a dying violet.”

But why? Why can’t you love just a violet? Why does it need to die? Why can’t you just love a violet? Why “dying”? Somehow you must be suicidal. Somehow you are death-oriented. Somehow you are destructive. Somehow you enjoy only sadness.

And again, let me repeat: the violet is not dying; the violet is only reborn. It is only in your mind that the violet is dying. But you enjoy death. There is something obsessive in you. It may be just because you are incapable of enjoying life – you have created a substitute: you enjoy death.

I am not against enjoying death, but I would like to say to you: if you cannot enjoy life, you cannot enjoy death – because death is the culmination, death is the crescendo. Death is the last touch, the finishing touch…. Death is not against life: it is life’s greatest peak.

The third question:

Osho,
How to know when it is appropriate to end a love relationship?
How can one go deep with a person when he is afraid?

Mantra, relationship and love are totally different things. Love is never a relationship, and relationship is never love. Love relates, but it is not a relationship. Relationship is a dead thing, a closed thing. Love is a flowing.

You ask me: “How to know when it is appropriate to end a love relationship?”

So the first thing to be reminded of: love is never a relationship. Then something else is masquerading as love. Maybe you are searching for a husband or a wife – you are searching for some security, you are searching for some structure. A structured life is a murdered life.

There is a fixation in the human mind for structures, because in a structured life one feels secure, one knows where one is, one knows where one stands in relationship to the other. It seems that because man is born in the womb of the mother and for nine months remains in a structure, that continues deep down in the psyche – and man is always trying to find a structure somewhere.

If he loves, he wants to make a relationship out of it immediately! He wants to get married. He wants to create a certain conditioning. He wants to make it a contract. Or he enters a church, or he enters a political party, or he enters into any club and he wants to be structured, he wants to know where he stands in the hierarchy, in what relationship. He wants to have an identity – that “I am this.” He does not want to remain uncertain.

And life is uncertain. Only death is certain.