"Balanced and Harmonious Life" -- do you agree?

-"self control or temperance will be a condition of internal harmony, all the parts being content with their legitimate satisfactions. Justice finally appears, no longer only as a matter of external behaviour towards others, but as an internal order of the soul, from which right behaviour will necessarily follow. Injustice is the opposite state of internal discord and faction." (139)

-"And it will be the business of reason to rule with wisdom and forethought on behalf of the entire soul; while the spirited element ought to act as its subordinate and ally. The two will be brought into accord, as we said earlier, by that combination of mental and bodily training which will tune up one string of the instrument and relax the other, nourishing the reasoning part on the study of noble literature and allaying the other's wildness by harmony and rhythm." (140)
 

-"At the same time, those two together will be the best of guardians for the entire soul and for the body against all enemies from without: the one will take counsel, while the other will do battle, following its ruler's commands and by its own bravery giving effect to the ruler's designs." (140)
 

-"And again, temperate by reason of the unanimity and concord of all three, when there is no internal conflict between the ruling element and its two subjects, but all are agreed that reason should be ruler." (141)
 

-"In reality justice, though evidently analogous to this principle, is not a matter of external behaviour, but of the inward self and of attending to all that is, in the fullest sense, a man's proper concern. The just man does not allow the several elements in his soul to usurp one another's functions; he is indeed one who sets his house in order, by self-mastery and discipline coming to be at peace with himself, and bringing into tune those three parts, like the terms in the proportion of a musical scale..." (142)
 

-injustice - "This must surely be a sort of civil strife among the three elements, whereby they usurp and encroach upon one another's functions and some one part of the soul rises up in rebellion against the whole, claiming a supremacy to which it has no right because its nature fits it only to be the servant of the ruling principle. Such turmoil and aberration we shall, I think, identify with injustice, intemperance, cowardice, ignorance, and in a word with all wickedness."

-Plato's Republic

 

There is a lot to think about here:
 

- is fragmentation such a bad thing? what about the extreme highs and the lows that justify and validate and real-ize each other?
 

- okay and what about God? is true happiness and harmony this kind of fragmented control over quivering entities, threatening to bust out, implosion-style, or do I talk about the oneness of being one can reach because there's that option to "seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you."? It's like a oneness of mind, like focusing all your brain energies and heart energies into being aligned with the Creator of the Universe, and letting all the sub-decisions and sub-importances fall in place, because they will. but would Plato answer to that, that this is just assigning the Higher Power control over the "business of reason" within your entity of identities? or maybe this whole line of reasoning would just implode in his brain, Null Null Null, because there is no Jesus-God for Plato.
 

Okay so there actually wasn't too much to think about there. Or maybe my mind's one-sided ramblings just gave me the answer to its own question. On a side note, Plato is taking over my life.
 

Off to write the essay now.