Manjusri: The Second Bodhisattva of Finance

Hey There!

Announcing the first Q&A of Cultivating Your Riches, where I answer Michael's question on how to know you have enough to retire. The short answer? 🍞+🐘

This week's letter clocks in at a 7-minute read, so here's The TLDR for those of you in a hurry:

• Ignorance is denial, confusion, and collusion.

• You can feel Ignorance in your body, your mind, and your spirit.

• Clarity comes when you are willing to see the truth.

• There's inner clarity around your desires and intentions.

• There's outer clarity about seeing what's really going on around you.

• You need clarity before you can take soul-aligned action.

Thank you to all of you who are sharing this letter with friends, sending me kind words and thorny questions, and are giving me the gift of your attention.

🙏🏼 In gratitude,

Mariko

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When I first learned about Buddhism, I thought it was bullshit.

“All suffering is due to the 3 poisons – anger, greed, and ignorance”. No way did I buy that when I was a kid. Greed and anger? Sure. But not ignorance. Just read books and poof! No more suffering.

I thought the antidote for ignorance was knowledge. 

Everything important about humaning not acquired from direct experience, I learned from books. Books raised me. No one taught me about menstruation, sex, tampons, or babies. My parents figured I had it covered when I left a 2-foot tall stack of books on puberty and female anatomy on the coffee table. 🙄 Given my feral, nerdy upbringing, it’s not surprising I concluded “suffering from ignorance” was a non-problem.

I was wrong.

It took years before it finally clicked. “Ignorance” to me is not not-knowing, but unknowing. It’s what you don’t know because you choose not to know (consciously or unconsciously). It’s the pain you inflict on yourself and others by refusing or being afraid to see – much less accept – the truth because you don’t trust yourself to have your own back.

Refuse to see the truth to spare yourself pain. Pay the price with your integrity.

When it comes to money, Ignorance means not knowing your credit card or student loan balance, or that you spend more than you make, or that the Ponzi scheme sounds like a moneymaker. Where to start cultivating your discernment?

Learn how ignorance feels in your body:

You feel confused
You have brain fog
You can’t make up your mind
You feel pulled out of your body
You feel a pressure building within
You have a vague feeling of discomfort
Your head feels it's in a garbage can with someone banging on it

See how your mind creates suffering for others:

You collude
You gaslight
You mind read
You ascribe motivations
You willfully misunderstand
You know what’s best for them
You deny or choose not to see reality

Witness your spirit creating self-suffering:

You overgive
You muzzle yourself
You keep yourself small
You make pointless self-sacrifice
You take responsibility that’s not yours
You blame yourself for someone else’s sins

How do you find your way to the truth?

Call upon Manjusri, the bodhisattva of wisdom and insight. He wields a flaming sword that cuts through the fog of confusion, releasing the light of clarity. He connects you to your unflinching inner wisdom, which sees things as they are. He cuts through all the worldly bullshit.

Once you see the truth, you can’t unsee it. 

You lent money to your brother-in-law, who says he can’t pay you back, yet bought a new car. He ain’t ever gonna pay you back.

Your boss says the company can’t afford to give you a raise, but they’ve just hired 3 more people in your department at a higher salary. Start looking for another job.

Your client wants the package discount rate but wants to pay you piecemeal, at each session. They just want somethin’ for nothin’.

The truth, as painful as it is, will set you free.

You also need to cultivate both inner and outer clarity before you can take right action, whether it’s with your finances, your relationships, or yourself.

By inner clarity, I mean getting in touch with both your truest, deepest soul desires, and your inner wisdom. I’m talking about the desires that live buried within you, untouched by societal expectations, ancestral trauma hand-me-downs, toxic family dynamics, and the lies you’ve learned to tell yourself. 

Maybe you were told to keep silent while your father drunk raged.

Maybe you were never asked how you felt, so you never learned to name your feelings.

Maybe feelings were so painful it was easier not to have them.

Maybe it was easier not to want anything – to make do, to roll with things, to accommodate rather than be disappointed.

Get in touch with what YOU want.

Make friends with your desires. Sit quietly and figure out what you really want out of a situation. Not what you expect to feel, nor what others tell you you should feel, but what, in the very marrow of your bones, you desire.

Your life belongs to you.

Find your North Star so that there’s no gap between what you truly want and what you think you want or what you’ll allow yourself to want. There’s only one desire, and it’s 100% yours, at the soul level. 

In short, if you want to go to Chicago, don’t load LA as the destination on your navigation system.

Live your life in congruence and integrity with your deepest desires.

By outer clarity I mean learn how to tell if someone is fucking with you (however well-intentioned). One way to do that is to follow the money. Who’s paying? (If you are, you’re the client and they work for YOU. If it doesn’t feel that way, it’s a red flag.) Who stands to profit, and how? 

There’s an infinite list of reasons why people will try to gaslight, guilt, shame, or otherwise manipulate you that have nothing to do with you. You don’t ever have to collude with someone else’s fantasy or denial. 

Remember, it’s not personal. 

Here are 3 signs that discernment is needed:

1. When it seems like someone turned on a fog machine in the room

2. When it feels like a concussion grenade just exploded in your face

3. Or when you feel all your energy has been sapped faster than your blood at a vampire convention.

Trust that your instincts are spot on, and someone is fucking with you, even if they mean well. Think about what’s really going on behind the fuckery.

Our capacity to delude ourselves is vast.

Even professional spy catchers are not immune. In his book Talking to Strangers Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of Ana Montes, a Cuban spy who went undetected for 20 years. Time and again, her suspicious behavior was explained away, coming up clean even after an internal investigation. 

Until one day she was caught. Years of previously dismissed evidence suddenly became crystal clear and everyone felt like idiots. The truth had been visible the whole time, the willingness to see it not so much. 

Manjusri distills clarity from confusion in a single stroke. He can help all that financial overwhelm and confusion and galvanize you into action a lot faster than the CIA. 

It’s not just the CIA – we fool ourselves all the time.

We all have a friend who was the last to know her husband was cheating on her. She accepted all the “plausible deniability” stories – the late nights at the office, the business dinners, and the lipstick on the collar – until she came back early from a trip and caught her husband in flagrante delicto. In a flash, the filter of truth-that-can-no-longer-be-denied gets activated, and all his previous lies become, in hindsight, obvious. 

Ignorance is your psychological defenses, weaponized.

Sometimes you’re the one turning on the fog machine. When you are denying, hallucinating, or bullying others into believing an “alternate reality”, you cloud your own discernment in the process. If you suppress, collude, or gaslight truth, no matter how you justify it, you will cause suffering for others as well as yourself.

Discernment without judgment is what creates clarity.  

When you see how things really are without losing your grounding, without judging yourself or others, you take action from a place of equanimity and peace. Your action is not driven by fear, desperation, or neediness. 

And if you’re ready to take right action, stay tuned for Daruma, coming up next week. The Third Bodhisattva of Finance, Daruma is all about being willing to make mistakes and focused, resilient action, taken time and again.

Cultivating Your Riches Q&A:

Here's where I answer real questions from real readers (hi Michael! 👋). Send me your thoughts, questions, the money aphorisms you grew up with… It can be lonely out here in cyberspace, where even crickets are scarce…

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Q: How do you know when you have enough? (And why do I suspect that it has something to do with "you already have enough, no matter how much you have"?)

But seriously, you can't ignore it, but it feels like one assumption on top of another in retirement planning, so is there any relief to the concern absent gazillions in the bank?

A: I am not a Financial Planner, I just play one in a newsletter. 😆 So yes, “enoughness” is both a physical reality and a state of mind. There are actuarial tables, Monte Carlo simulations, tax tables, and social security estimates that a financial planner can use to come up with an answer that’s somewhere between a bread box and an elephant.🍞🐘

Predicting the future doesn’t result in a single point that would tell you, given your ages and your expenses, what precise amount is "enough". The truth is, no one knows the precise number 🤷🏻‍♀️. 

To know, you’d have to know what interest rates, inflation, tax rates, social security payments, medicare coverage, your health, your expenses, are going to be, for decades. 

Find out how close to the bread box you are in the worst-case scenario and see how that feels.

But even if your planner tells you you’re closer to the elephant, you’re still going to have trouble letting go and trusting that you have enough. It’s human nature. Our scarcity mindset is groomed in a million different ways by society. 

If it makes you feel any better, I know so many multi-millionaires who are afraid of exactly the same thing, despite owning a herd of elephants. 🐘🐘🐘