Look at the ant with its small body and delicate form.

Look at the ant with its small body and delicate form. It can hardly be seen in the corner of the eye, nor by the perception of the imagination; how it moves on the earth and leaps at its livelihood. It carries the grain to its hole and deposits it in its place of stay. It collects during the summer for its winter, and during strength for the period of its weakness. Its livelihood is guaranteed, and it is fed according to fitness.

Allah, the Kind, does not forget it and Allah, the Giver, does not deprive it, even though it may be in dry stone and fixed rocks.”[^1] Imam al-Sadiq ( ‘a ) narrates a thorough hadith that Zaynab the perfume seller came to the Noble Prophet’s (S) house and asked about the majesty of Allah, the Exalted.

In response to her question, the Noble Prophet (S) embarked upon comparing the cosmoses and seven skies and the galaxies and also the minuteness and smallness of every one of them with the other; one of his statements was: “This earth and that which is inside it and that which is above it is in the face of the second sky like a finger-ring that has fallen [or been lost] in the desert.”[^2] This relationship also exists regarding every cosmos when compared with the cosmos above it until we arrive at the seventh sky, which too is nothing when compared to the Divine Throne.

In order to give rise to wonderful fruits from meditation about the expansiveness and greatness of the cosmos and to perceive the minuteness and smallness of man, the scholars of ethics and divine instructors have recommended that when you want to recite your prayers and attend to the divine Essence, go to an expansive desert with boundless vastness because it is in that case that you will better perceive your minuteness in the presence of His majestic creation.

It is natural that as a result of man being confined to a closed and confined environment, his imagination of the cosmos is limited to that same tight environment but once he goes to the expansive desert and witnesses the mountains and seas, he will have another conception of the world. It has to be borne in mind that this is just in regard to the expansiveness and greatness of the world, regardless of the comparison of the earth with the sky and the first sky with the rest of the skies!

Nowadays, information which has been attained from the galaxies and stars by means of telescopes and spaceships gives invaluable help to man in understanding the created world.