Building My Heaven

I face my fears and conquer my demons and overcome many an enemy and foe

I conquer the darkness within and without. Victorious over more than you know

Those who seek to destroy me and break my bright hopes

In the end they'd have all stumbled and fell.

As they try I'll be within myself building my heaven

While the others are building their hell.

         The greatest use of the mind is creativity. It is the most valuable and important faculty of our being. Without creativity, all the most fundamental and important components of our species, our condition, and our cultures would be impossible without the human mind's capacity for creative expression. Ideas, ingenuity, innovation, and human progress would be all but impossible without the imagination.

As a result, I feel like the most important "muscle" to exercise is the brain, or more precisely, the mind. From my faith and my understanding, the imagination has a lot more legitimacy than people give it credit for. We can conceive of possibly countless forms and ideas, some of which are applicable in our reality. Some of which are not completely. Those forms, ideas, and the systems we can design with them in our minds and in our world are what enable innovation and human ingenuity. Without such things, it would have been impossible for us to rise much higher than a base animal.

Since I believe our imaginations have a level of "realness" to them, I believe what we can conceive in our minds is more real than we give it credit for, regardless of the applicability of the concepts or forms in our world. They can be applicable somewhere else in our existence, in some way.

So as I meditate, I look at the world building and idea-building I do in my mind as having a legitimacy to it, even if just within my own internal world. I believe my internal world is just as real as the external, but it is a world that only I can see and only others see through my words and my actions. They never see the whole thing, though. 

I call this process of world-building, idea-building, and systems building "building my heaven."

Imagining an existence of countless worlds, countless forms, and countless ideas is a process within myself that constructs what I believe to be something within the possibility of my future, some of that future in this lifetime, but the vast majority of it exists after I am no longer of this world. 

I believe God takes into strong consideration our dreams, our ambitions, our desires, our hopes, and our loves and interests, and our goals when he plans for our futures, both in life and in eternity. Since he considers these so strongly, I look at my actions of imagination and creativity as a sort of "sowing the seeds" for my heaven. Constructing it in a way. Like "laying up treasure in heaven" like Jesus told us to do. 

I'd rather construct a heaven in my internal world than construct a hell. The creativity involved in doing so, the building of many worlds and many ideas, for me, is either a foreshadowing of what may/is to come or the act of constructing it. At the least, it is the revealing to God, who dwells within me, of my biggest hopes and aspirations for my existence and what kind of reality(s) I want to live in. What kind of glory I want to inherit and the adventures and wonders I can experience. 

I've heard heaven described as being more glorious than I could ever imagine. This is why I exercise my mind to the fullest, because no matter how powerful it gets and how big and glorious my dream of heaven is, God's glory and creativity would still greatly exceed mine.

That's why I build my heaven.

It prevents me from building a hell.