© 2025 Marc Bubel

Welcome back to Meta Zen. The podcast for cleaning the mind and unlocking its potential. 

I am your host and mentor, Marc Bubel.

To get the best experience from this podcast, listen to the episodes in sequence for your first time. 

When we think about mediation, we view it as an opportunity to reset ourselves…like returning our technology to factory settings. We are also attracted by the indirect promise meditation gives us, which is to achieve a dawning of understanding that changes our lives from that day forward.

Then, when we look into the furthest recesses of meditation, we find the concepts of moksha and nirvana, which share the same theme as heaven on earth from Abrahamic religions. These concepts are what I called the world’s greatest ambition in the previous episode.

Knowing this theme is important as without this knowledge, whatever we do becomes the ignorance of bliss where we argue the narratives we’ve learned or we parade around like Hans Christian Andersen’s emperor with new clothes. 

These might seem like strong words, but the more you study zen, the more you will realize no truer words have been spoken.

Now, if the path between today and heaven on earth is a sequence of milestones, each worldview of this path found only pieces of the sequence. Interestingly, when we put the pieces from the different worldviews together, the path becomes far more transparent.

In this episode, we’ll put the pieces together in a brief and transparent package. We’ll also modernize the sequence into something we can follow like an Ikea assembly instruction. Then, we’ll have a strategy for achieving the world’s greatest ambition so that it continues to the end of time.

Let's get started.

The origins of concepts

While heaven is the highest goal we know, heaven on earth is the highest goal for living beings like ourselves. In order to achieve heaven, we have to pursue heaven on earth. Otherwise, we're lying to ourselves.

In ancient China, they have the concept called Tian, a similar idea though instead of it being a place, it’s an overarching principle. 

Their overarching principle is like gravity that holds the planets in orbit around the sun.

It’s a focus on being in harmony or in balance with each other and with everything—like learning how to enjoy winter when you’re outside. 

In summary, heaven on earth is like a place you can travel to and build whereas Tian is already around us and we have the opportunity to be in harmony with it.

In ancient India, the highest goal has materialized differently. Heaven on earth and tian received layers like how a pearl forms over a grain of sand. In ancient India, the moment when writing became possible, they wrote down all of the ideas people had stored in their minds for possibly thousands of years. They wrote mantras, hymns and ideas.

Before writing. They remembered the matras, hymns and ideas through meditation. They remembered these concepts because their community was determined to break free of the cycles of life that burden them, which is the concept called moksha. When writing appeared, it likely hinted to them that they were starting to become free from remembering their mantras, hymns and ideas.

In summary, heaven on earth is like an ideal place, Tian is an energy to align with, and moksha is liberation. They’re all pieces of the same puzzle that leads to achieving the world’s greatest ambition.

Then Siddhartha Gautama introduced the concept of nirvana.

The origin of Nirvana

Siddhartha Gautama was born in the region of Nepal which borders India. The world knows him by the name Buddha. I’ll call him Gautama as it helps to maintain the grass-roots feel of what he introduced to the world.

The concepts of heaven on Earth, Tian, moksha and meditation were already at least one thousand years old by Gautama’s time. 

In his time, people meditated on a singular focus and occasionally switched to another singular focus in their next session. Like switching from breathing, to a mantra, to gazing, to visualization. 

We know Gautama practiced one meditative tradition with a level of conviction Olympic athletes would appreciate.

After many years of making no progress toward his goal, he contemplated what he would do with his life from that point forward. 

After several days, he had an epiphany. After several weeks, he created two mnemonics to become the focus of a new style of meditation.

Mnemonics are memory aids like the acronyms FYI, LOL, FAQ and so on. 

Gautama created two progressive sequences of singular focuses that were less than 30 words combined. They were easy to remember…and they virally spread.

Gautama later introduced the word Nirvana to his teachings. 

To understand this term, we need to understand how it came to be. 

To do this, first, write the following series of seven milestones on the left of a blank page spread in your journal and evenly space them vertically down the length of the page. This will give you room for your own notes:

1. Objectivity
2. Epiphanies 
3. At least one big epiphany
4. Enlightenment
5. Nirvana
6. Liberation
7. Heaven on earth

As I explain these milestones, we’ll understand how he found nirvana and how it fits into the series.

We discussed objectivity in the previous episode. It’s the modern word for the ancient concept also discussed in the previous episode.

When people with different points of view have objective conversations like friends, epiphanies are a natural result. An epiphany is like this:

Ooooh! That’s what you mean.

I began my study into ancient philosophies because I was attracted to the epiphanies or insights they gave me.

Every insight gives us a small experience of elation. When we link these experiences of elation together, it gives us a flow state.

Look at the charts you drew in your journal from the previous episodes. You likely experience moments of elation as you reflected on the charts. The potential the insights contain also stockpiles  elation for us to experience later. This stockpile of elation enables us to sustain flow states for longer.

People who objectively continue to learn from different points of view experience moments of elation plus they stockpile potential to be realized at a later date. 

When these insights share the same theme, like Gautama's mnemonics, at some point, the implications of the theme hit us like a tonne of bricks. This is what I call a big epiphany.

I had a big epiphany 4 years ago and here is how it unfolded.

I was at work going about my day as usual. Then, it was like thousands of epiphanies released at the same time like a landslide or avalanche. I was lost for words in some respects and a warmth covered my whole body for several hours. Seriously.

When I look back at the experience, it was around this time I shifted from an experience that was like persevering as I climbed a hill to an experience that was like keeping my footing as I was running down a hill. 

It’s like all of my mental pathways became reorganized. Like reorganizing furniture in a room. 

I’ve had a second and third big epiphany though they were progressively smaller. In my words, they were refinements to the reorganization of my mental pathways. I don’t expect I’ll have any more.

A big epiphany seems to be closely related to the concept of bliss. I’m much more in favor of revising the definition of the word bliss as it appears like an outsider’s point of view, which encourages the ignorance of bliss. This is why I call it a big epiphany.

Some might say this means I’ve become capital-E Enlightened though let’s pace ourselves.

Every epiphany comes with an obvious understanding that makes us more enlightened. My big epiphany came from an accumulation of understandings. 

The experience of a big epiphany gave me a taste of nirvana. I would like to stay there but I can't. Why would I let this experience die with me? That's becoming like Gollum in Tolkien's Middle Earth.

Nirvana is great, but if we enjoy it too much, it becomes selfish, which is unsustainable. Naturally, nirvana is something to share, which enables us to genuinely enjoy it for longer. 

When we begin concentrating on enabling others to be objective and experience epiphanies with growing frequency, at some point, it will dawn on us that we know how the world achieves heaven on earth. When we understand this, we’ve become capital-E Enlightened. 

We’re almost finished but we need to insert the topic of liberation into the discussion.

Remember Gautama created two mnemonics that enables others to do the same as himself. What he had done worked because it turned into the phenomenon we know today.

Let's say Gautama enabled 10 people to do the same as himself, which means they each enabled 10 people. This means he was surrounded by at least 110 Enlightened people. 

By this point, when Gautama went out of his way to mentor another person, his successors most likely said, Leave it to us. Go, figure out what comes next and tell us all about it. This most likely was the time when Gautama formalized the concept of Nirvana.

Now think about this. When we progress through the seven milestones you wrote in your journal, eventually liberation will become a common experience. When we as a civilization routinely concentrate on liberating people by the age of 20, we'll achieve heaven on earth.

Becoming official 

To officially complete the Red Belt, you know the only way to achieve heaven on earth is to be friends with all people, even those that have different points of view. We have to be the change we wish to see in the world.

If we don't, we find the ignorance of bliss which means we risk becoming like Gollum from Tolkien's Middle Earth or like a dictator from our past, which are the same thing.

Said another way, you officially complete the Red Belt when you know you'll endeavor to never play negative sum games ever again. 

As you are enjoying Meta Zen, enable people to stumble upon it. Buy some Meta Zen stickers from moxiefrontier.com and put them where you and others will see them.

The Meta Zen sticker is our invitation to come back home and relish the world of objectivity.

It's a great time to be alive.