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the science and soul of an innocent world

Is There Any Such Thing as Everlasting Love?

By Jeevan Ullas & Ma Anand Mayuri


Small Magellanic Cloud Photo Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Recently I read an article called, “There's No Such Thing as Everlasting Love (According to Science)” and began wondering whether, as usual, science was wrong to be eager to make a proclamation like that. While thinking, my life went through my mind like a movie featuring all those moments when I felt it, and I felt it deeply.

Sometimes, being together, it’s harder to see the realities of the depth of love. A fish who lives in water doesn’t know the value of water, and mammals like us being in air, breathing unconsciously every moment, don’t know the real need or depth of the need until that air is taken away. In the same way, departing has something beautiful and helpful in it. Remember those moments, if you have had them, when you were parting from your lover? It felt like everything was in slow motion, standing at the train stationrailway platform or bus station or airport, holding hands, just drinking those last few moments like precious wine. Then suddenly the train or bus starts moving; you are still holding hands and a little bit walking with it and then almost running and then you have to let go of the hand… and… there comes the moment when life stops. The whole existence around you becomes meaningless—the crowd, the sounds, all the nonsense. Nothing exists… you are in some space which is totally out of this dimension.

What is that space? What is that feeling? Is that just a moment or is it an eternity? I felt it was eternity. Anyways our puny human minds can’t comprehend eternity the way eternity is. Eternity is made of very small pieces of time and saying that the moment which is part of that eternity cannot be eternity itself would be absurd, almost like saying a drop from the ocean is not the ocean. One moment of that feeling is larger than eternity; at least it was for me.

drop of water

The scientific part of love is that science still doesn’t really know what love is. Science may know the symptoms and effects on the biological side of it, but not really what it is. I doubt it will ever be possible to learn or understand love through science alone. One has to embrace the counterpart, the inner science; what is generally called science is actually only the outer science. Certainly dissecting the heart or finding different hormones is not helping at all-- that is why we have weird conclusions coming out, saying, “There's No Such Thing as Everlasting Love (According to Science).”

The saying, “One person’s garbage is another person’s treasure” quite resembles how one feels when in love. The flowers, trees, wind and a whole lot of things which were there before change when one is in love. You see and live in a space which was there but was absent without the eyes of love—actually, the space was there, but you were blind, missing it. Love changes so much around you that to put it in a mere biological scientific study is to miss totally the other dimensions of love.

In the end, it would be criminal to not talk about the love of enlightened people, and the love they felt for other fellow human beings in the path to their own enlightenment. The patience and the difficulty of transmitting the experience of enlightenment are beyond my comprehension. How can one go on and on telling the same thing a thousand and more times tirelessly and still love us, knowing we didn’t get it? Isn’t that the highest form of love, where they don’t even get anything in return?

A morte de Sócrates

"A morte de Sócrates" by Jose Maria De Medeiros, 1878

What about the love Jesus had, in which he forgave the very people who put him on the cross? What about Socrates who, after being poisoned, kept talking to his disciples until he couldn’t speak anymore? He saw even his own death as an opportunity to learn, and to help them. When he could no longer feel his feet, he told them, “My feet are dead, and yet I am alive; so I am not my feet.” When the poison spread to his legs, he told them, “My legs are dead, and yet I am alive; so I am not my legs.” He continued on like this in order to give them confidence in their search for the inner, showing them that they are not their bodies, and physical death is not the end. I call that love beyond time, eternal and everlasting.

Editors Note: What do you think of everlasting love? Do you think it exists? Was there a time in your life you felt it? Please share your thoughts below.

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