The Ancient Greeks had it all figured out but we ignored their wisdom. Listen to Gorgias, 485-380 BC; "The order proper to a city is being well manned; to a body, beauty; to a soul, wisdom; to a deed, excellence; and to a discourse, truth - and the opposites of these are disorder.

Democritus, 460-370 BC, had also figured out how to navigate life; "The end is cheerfulness, which is not the same as pleasure, as some mistakenly took it, but a state in which the soul exists calmly and stably, not disturbed by any fear or superstition or any other emotion. Democritus also calls it well-being."

Quotes from Phaedo, the dialogue written by Plato in which Socrates discusses the nature of the soul and the afterlife with his friends in the hours leading to his death, is fascinatingly insightful;

"The soul is most like the divine and immortal and intellectual and uniform and indissoluble and ever unchanging, and the body, on the contrary, most like the human and mortal."

Now that is certainly unrivalled stability.

The dialogue in Phaedo both down to earth and other worldly; "One soul is said to possess sense and virtue and to be good, and another to possess folly and wickedness and to be bad."

No blurring the lines there.

And this is certainly other worldly; "It is perfectly certain that the soul is immortal and imperishable, and our soul will exist somewhere in another world."

To these Ancients, the thirst for justice and mental stability appeared to be one and the same, and that is certainly comforting;

"For if death were an escape from everything, it would be a boon to the wicked, for when they die they would be freed from the body and their wickedness together with their souls. But now, since the soul is seen to be immortal, it cannot escape from evil or be saved in any other way than by becoming as good and as wise as possible. For the soul takes with it to the other world nothing but its education and nurture."

Aristotle (384-322 BC) brilliantly defined the absolute dominance of "the soul" in the following terms;

"It is obvious that the soul is actuality in the first sense, viz. that of knowledge as possessed, for both sleeping and waking presuppose the existence of soul, and of these waking corresponds to actual knowing, sleeping to knowledge possessed but not employed, and, in the history of the individual, knowledge comes before its employment or exercise. That is why the soul is the first grade of actuality of a natural body having life potentially in it."

To our detriment, we have failed to appreciate the significance of this wisdom, and Aristotle evidently did the best job defining it all as follows;

"What is soul? - an answer which applies to it in its full extent. It is substance which corresponds to a definitive formulae of a thing's essence. At present we must confine ourselves to saying that soul is the source of these phenomena and is characterized by them, viz. by the powers of self-nutrition, sensation, thinking, and motivity. Further, since by or with which primarily we live, perceive, and think: - It follows that the soul must be a ratio or formulable essence, not a matter or subject. For, as we said, word substance has three meanings, form, matter, and the complex of both and of these three what is called matter is potentiality, what is called form, actuality. Since then the complex here is the living thing, the body cannot be the actuality of the soul; it is the soul which is the actuality of a certain kind of body."

The Ancient Greeks tried to make the soul good to obtain stability, mental and otherwise, while in North America, the new science is evidently more concerned with changing what is considered to be the malleable brain.

I think the Ancients had it right because it is obviously more productive to eliminate prejudices and disturbing emotions rather than to influence through what is potentially more manipulation. Of course, the science which indicates that bad habits can certainly be eliminated and replaced is potentially very productive, but the healing process is far more complicated, involved and nuanced and as long as we flounder in a sea where instances of mental illness are skyrocketing out of control, we must use every source of wisdom we can possibly gather, to be in a better position to tackle the crisis.

The ultimate goal everywhere converges to the point where we all agree about the need to fulfill individual potential, and that is certainly a good consensus we should build upon, in effort to minimize the plight of mental instability.

Perhaps, if we care to recognize the ageless dominance of the soul, we can rediscover the positive influences of Ancient Wisdom. The literal meaning of the Greek word for psychiatrist is "soul doctor" and we can probably all use some more of that in our lives.

The Greeks evidently appreciated the inverse relationship, more justice, less mental instability, and it is evidently time to better contemplate the need for this essential reform.

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Next: This should make your life more meaningful.