What happened to these people? What happened that suddenly there was no other option left for them but to die? Their souls were imprisoned in their safes. When the safe died, they died. This jumping…. Nothing else had happened, the whole world was unchanged; just some digits in the bank’s ledgers had disappeared. Digits! In somebody’s name there had been a ten-digit figure, now only two digits remained. Where there had been a long row of figures in credit to his account, now there remained none. All this happened in the banks, on paper, but their souls were imprisoned in those bank ledgers. Those ledgers were their lives. Any direct attempt to kill them would not have succeeded, but the safes became empty and they simply died.

Somebody is in love with someone. Then one of the two lovers dies and the life is finished for the other also. If we all search within ourselves we will find that our souls are also imprisoned somewhere or other, in some parrot or other. As long as your soul is imprisoned somewhere you are not settled in your self. Then your life is not present where it should be. It should be within yourself – but it is not there, it is somewhere else.

Now this being somewhere else can be of many types. One person thinks that his body is his soul; then this person is also somewhere else. Tomorrow he will start becoming old; then he will be in pain, he will feel miserable because his body is wasting away, becoming wrinkled, ugly, sick and aged. Such a person will feel himself dead before his actual death because the young body in which he had kept his soul is now fading.

There can be differences as to where you have imprisoned your soul, but if your soul is outside you, you are living in attachment. Attachment means your soul is not in its rightful place, it is somewhere else. You may run in a reverse direction, but still the soul will be somewhere else.

The definition of nonattachment is that your soul is within you, settled in yourself; nothing pulls you and nothing creates any sort of ripples or waves in you. Hence nonattachment is the door to bliss, because for one who has settled in himself…there is no way to make him unhappy.

Remember, those children’s stories are saying the right thing. One who has settled in himself, one whose soul has come back within himself – there remains no way to kill him. Souls never die, it is only the parrots that die. Wherever else you put your souls, those things slip away, they die. Hence the person starts feeling himself as good as dead. The soul is immortal, but we attach it to mortal things. Those mortal things are bound to disintegrate – if not today, tomorrow. That is their very nature. When those things disintegrate you will have an illusion that you have died. This dying of the self is an illusion that is created by attaching yourself to mortal things.

Nonattachment is when in the breaking of all relationships one has come to know that which was relating – one’s own self.

When no desire arises for objects worthy of being enjoyed…And is it okay for the opposite desire to arise? No, when desire as such does not arise – desire of any sort – then…know this as the ultimate in nonattachment.