He feels good when he has much, when he feels his hands are full, at least apparently full. He feels good, he feels he is achieving, he is being successful. This is “the old man” – in the terminology of the Bauls, this is the old man. It has always existed. This is the rotten man, this is the diseased man.

It is a sort of illness, this very idea of having too many things, wasting your time and energy and not knowing at all who you are. The Bauls call that direction noble in which you start thinking in terms of being, in terms of a certain inner solidity, of a certain inner consciousness, of a certain rootedness, centering, of a certain realization of who you are.

Have you watched it; that sometimes you come across a person who may not have anything visible, but still you feel a tremendous energy surrounding him? His impact is almost magnetic, mesmeric. He looks into your eyes and you cannot see into his eyes – a great power. It is not the power of things; he may not have any. He may be just a beggar on the road. It is not the power that comes through politics. He may not be a prime minister or a president because that power is bogus. That power belongs to the chair, not to the man. It belongs to the chair and not to the chairman. Once he is out of the chair, he is as powerless as you.

Look at Richard Nixon: a tremendous power was there when he was the president. Now, he is just simply Citizen Nixon. All power has disappeared. That power was not his; it was a reflected glory.

And you can see it, it is not very difficult. You know men who have much power – the power of things, the power of big palaces, the power of politics, money, prestige, heritage – but you can see that they are poor people. They don’t have any personal power. They don’t have any magnetism in their souls. If you put their things aside, they are more ordinary than ordinary. All extraordinariness disappears. Kings and queens, once they are not kings and queens, are simply ordinary human beings – almost empty, nothing in them.

But you sometimes come across a person whose power is not derived from the outside, whose power comes from some inner spring, some inner source. He is a reservoir of power. Wherever he sits, the place becomes sacred; wherever he sits, the place becomes a throne; wherever he moves, he moves like a king amongst men. But his kingdom is of the within.

That’s what Jesus goes on talking about: the kingdom of God is within you. He knows his within, he has come to face his own within-ness. His eyes are turned within. He is no longer dependent on the outside world. His glory is not a reflected glory, it is his own, authentic. He can be thrown into imprisonment, but there he will remain a king.

It is said about Diogenes, one of the contemporaries of Alexander the Great, that even Alexander the Great became jealous of Diogenes.