nope, you can't let the plant keep its flowers forever, it will hermie, seed up and eventually die. I think!
What you can do indeed is to chop the flowers (why wouldn't you, anyway??), and reveg it. I guess you can do it on 12/12, and have it start flowering right away, that would be sort of equivalent to flowering from seed or clone - it will still need a few weeks to grow some before it will start flowering.