t is true that love is the complete immersion in one’s experience. This is what all those mystics are talking about. It is also true that this is the most accessible to ordinary people uninterested in the mystical when another person intrigues you so much that they make you forget momentarily about yourself.

This catches ordinary people by surprise and they are almost shocked by its mystery. Unfamiliar with the dissolution of self awareness, such people attach all sorts of complicated explanations to this experience and the whole discussion becomes convoluted.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera writes, “...love is a continual interrogation.” The interrogative nature of love is testament to the curiosity that comes from such complete immersion in another person. But then Kundera says something interesting: “...in that case, no one loves us more than the police. That’s true. Just as every height has its symmetrical depth, so love’s interest has as its negative, the police’s curiosity.”

Let us take this second quote and dissect it. First, you must acknowledge that certainly this negative is not only manifest through the actual police. Surely, we have all found ourselves being the vessel for police’s curiosity. It is a state of being — a mood, if you will.

Since love is the dissolution of self-awareness, all the cases where self-awareness kicks back are to be considered outside of love. Here, you will notice that I have made love into an almost ungraspable ideal. Yes, this is what I have done, because love and the mystical experience are both an act of self-forgetting and, therefore, equally idealistic.

Love becomes an abstract idea. Experience also becomes something one constantly comments on internally. Inside one’s head. It is all intellectual.

While the love of another person causes self-forgetting, it is not a permanent state. We inevitably find ourselves coming in and out of that state. In other words, we find ourselves remembering ourselves. This is often when the police’s curiosity can make us its vehicle and play itself out through us. We start to act in self-defence. This is because to remember the self is to act in self-interest. They are one and the same thing. It’s unavoidable. When one is thinking of the self, one can only see who is in front of us as the other. This creates an inherent conflict. This state, I consider to be outside of the experience of love.

Furthermore, curiosity that is in service of creating an image of the beloved and therefore is a covert attempt to trap them is outside of love. As Kahlil Gibran writes, “Those who understand us enslave something in us.” Any curiosity that seeks to create an image and therefore trap is police curiosity.

Today, however, love has become all-inclusive. It includes self-interest and will even accommodate police’s curiosity, given that it comes out in a politically acceptable way. So, love becomes a mental thing rather than the melody of one’s experience. It becomes an abstract idea. Experience also becomes something one constantly comments on internally. Inside one’s head. It is all intellectual.

Uneeb Nasir writes about culture, art and identity. More of his work can be found on instagram.com/un.eeeb