Thank you for your comments, Robert. I agree on the whole, although I would not say we are “insignificant.” For Buddhists, as for all enlightened beings, everything that lives is sacred — and at the same time, their autonomous identity (the “self” we so cherish) is ultimately an illusion, since everyone and everything is interconnected, and we exist only due to our interaction with everything else. My favorite formulation of this fundamental insight is that of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., when he said “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, caught in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Or as Buddhists succinctly put it, “This is because that is.”