The Buddha had a term for those whose minds are untrained, tossed about by the waves of the world, entrapped in suffering—uninstructed worldlings. For many in our world, our minds are untrained and thus qualify as “uninstructed worldlings.”
For us (most of us would fall into this category), the mind is controlled by what the Buddha calls the eight worldly concerns; pleasure and pain; gain and loss; praise and blame; repute and disrepute. They are four pairs of opposites that elicit polar emotional reactions in the uninstructed worldling’s mind.
When pleasure occurs, such a mind reacts with attachment. When pain occurs, the same mind reacts with resistance or avoidance. With gain, the mind reacts with attachment and possibly pride. With loss, anger and possibly despondency. With praise, again attachment and pride. With blame, again anger and dissatisfaction. With good repute, one is attached and clings to applause and accolades. With disrepute, one fears and avoids with aversion. As you can see, such a mind is far from being free and peaceful.
From my observations, it is clear that the hypergrace prosperity pseudo-gospel does not produce a trained mind. On the contrary, it reinforces and encourages the emotional reactivity of the eight worldly concerns. Driven by covetousness and lust, pride and fear, we easily succumb to the false messages of hypergrace prosperity ideology to pray and declare all kinds of worldly goods into being: wealth and gain, protection from loss, physical comfort and pleasure, worldly success, and the like. It is plain to see that many of these goods fall under the categories of the eight worldly concerns. Addicted to pleasure, gain, praise, and good repute, while averse to pain, loss, blame, and disrepute, we are stuck in affliction.
The Buddha admonished his disciples to train their minds with the Dharma he taught. This is done by first working with our gross reactivity in relation to these eight worldly concerns. Through ethical discipline of the precepts; simplicity of needs and lifestyle; guarding the sense doors with mindful vigilance of sensory stimuli; progressing into broader mindfulness of body, sensations, mind states, and phenomena, one is primed to cultivate deeper unification of mind through single-pointed meditation (shamatha) in tandem with deep insight (vipassana). Taken together, particularly the earlier stages of practice, one is able to protect the mind from enmeshment in the topsy-turvy emotional roller-coaster of the eight worldly concerns.
One meaning of the term “Dharma” is “that which protects the mind.” Protect from what? Protect from the poisons of greed, hatred, and delusion leading to affliction and suffering, for self and others. It is self-evidently clear to me that without Dharma practice, there is no inner stability and even-mindedness, much less meditative development and spiritual growth—let alone sanctification of soul. Without sanctification, we can forget about salvation, even if we blithely profess our belief in Christ as Saviour yet fail to follow Christ as Lord.
Let us be conscientious in our inner life and step away from being uninstructed worldlings to become trainees on the Path vigilant about the eight worldly concerns. Only then can we have any hope of meditating fruitfully and moving towards awakening, liberation, and salvation first precipitated by the uprising of saving faith and powered by the outworking of sanctifying faith. Shall we start?
