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people all around me is that of money, they measure people by their money. How much you have is the weight of your soul. If you have nothing, you have no soul.
But wealth, in whatever currency, is external -- and you are within; whatever you have, there is no way to take it within. There is no way to take your safes inside; they will have to stay on the outside. Great kingdoms too will have to stay outside, there is no way to take them within. And you are always within, there is no way that you can be brought outside. This is why wealth and soul never meet. Soul means interiority, wealth means outer, always outer, and these are two lines that can never intersect each other. They simply do not meet anywhere, ever; there just exists no way of their meeting. Their dimensions are different, they are two different worlds.
But we measure a man by what he has -- how much education, how much status, how big a position, how much power! You are what you have -- this is our criterion. This criterion is utterly wrong. Because of this criterion, if someone asks us of our inner experience, "There is no other refuge but money" will be the essence of our answer. We even weigh the mystics in monetary terms. Had Mahavira been born in a poor family, Jainas were not going to recognize him as their tirthankara, their spiritual master. I say this with absolute certainty, because all twenty-four tirthankaras of the Jainas are sons of kings. It is worth considering that in thousands of years not a single person from a poor family became a tirthankara. Is it that only the sons of kings can become tirthankaras? Then the future is dark, because there are no kings now, so no one will become a tirthankara. Now this is a great difficulty.
Gautam Buddha is a tirthankara, a jina, he attained to Buddhahood, but the public mind would not have accepted him either had he not been the son of a king. Give birth to Rama and Krishna in poor families and you will see, they will not be acceptable as avataras. Our mind measures even the mystics in material terms. So if you look at the Jaina or Buddhist scriptures, the Jainas recount therein how big an empire Mahavira had. It was not
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