When you have a great bank balance you feel you are. The moment the bank balance disappears you start disappearing. People commit suicide when they go bankrupt, as if their soul was in the bank. Their bank balance was their soul. How can they live now without a soul?
Just watch how attached you become to things. Your house, your many scientific gadgets, which are nothing but toys – how deeply you become obsessed with them. And slowly, slowly you forget completely that you are a no-thing.
Not only that you forget that you are a no-thing, you forget that your wife is not a thing, that your child is not a thing. Surrounded by things and things, living in a thingified culture…. That is the real name for a materialist culture. One tends to forget all that is spiritual, and one tends to reduce everything into a thing. Even persons are reduced.