All Roads Lead To and From O

We're still pondering the ins & outs of having a complementary pair of cerebral hemispheres, and what this tells us about the cosmos. 

To put it analogously, left brain is to horizontal as is right to vertical -- this being the case however we construe the neurology. In other words, the important point is the two ways of knowing, and the two worlds they know, not their basis in brain anatomy. 

Conversely, angels don't need bilateral brains because they don't need brains at all. Rather, they penetrate directly to the essence without any need of mediation, so it is as if they have access to a form of knowing that combines left and right, or more likely, that our form(s) of knowing is the bifurcation of a prior unity. 

Indeed, if we proceed all the way up, there is a timeless unity of intellect, will, and everything else in a way we can't conceptualize, precisely because we know via the mediation of concepts. Help us out here, Thomas!

 "Angels"

possess perfect knowledge of intelligible truth, [and] have no need to advance from one thing to another, but apprehend the truth simply and without mental discussion.

End of discussion, for this is true whatever you call them and irrespective of whether or not they exist. We say this because once you understand what man is, and therefore who God is, you have posited a vertical hierarchy that necessitates these angelic links on pain of absurdity.

I am somebody.

Yes you are, minus the body.

I am nobody.

Correct: I am somebody. To be precise,

It seems that the soul does not differ from an angel except in its union with the body.... The body is not of the essence of the soul; but the soul by the nature of its essence can be united to a body, so that, properly speaking, not the soul alone, but the composite, is the species. 

And the very fact that the soul in a certain way requires the body for its operation, proves that the soul is endowed with a grade of intellectuality inferior to that of the angel, who is not united to a body.

Ha ha (Muntz).

Now, if man has prerogatives, they are all functions, so to speak, of the Prerogative, AKA the Prime Vertical Directive:

It is often argued, in a theological climate, that the human intellect is too weak to know God; now the reason for being of the intellect is precisely this knowledge, indirect and indicative in a certain respect, and direct and unitive in another (Schuon, emphasis mine). 

Left and right, rational and mystical, human and angelic, respectively. We only know about angelic intelligence because we partake of it in an analogous way. 

Now,

Each of the prerogatives of the human state, being in its own way a cosmos, comprises two poles, an active and a passive, or a dynamic and a static (ibid).

And we may trace this complementarity all the way up and into God, who is the "motionless mover," or the transcendent Center whose immanent Periphery is everywhere, or the Son who has been proceeding from the Father since timelessness out of mind. 

Thus, in our intelligence we see the "discernment and contemplation" or "analysis and synthesis" of what some folks attribute to left and right cerebral hemispheres, which is to reverse cause and effect, but that's okay. 

For again, if you want to travel with me all the way up to God, well, first of all, we're not going anywhere without Thomas, who holds that 

creation -- the emergence of creatures from God, the first principle -- finds its explanation in the fact that even in God there is an "emergence from the Principle," namely the procession of the Word from the Father (Torrell).

Damn right it's a circular argument:

Thomas's thought is itself profoundly impregnated with this circular vision of the world, to such an extent that he does not hesitate to say that "circular movement is the most perfect of all because it produces a return to the beginning. In order that the universe may attain to its final perfection, it must therefore return to its beginning" (ibid).

On the left (Aristotelian) hand, "all men by nature desire to know." On the right (bi-logical) hand, man is the only being "capable of a complete return to its source," AKA beautitude." All truths are emanations of the True, just as all goods are prolongations of the Good.

Help us out here, Thomas!

Although they find themselves in a dispersed state in all creation, these goods are gathered together in man, for he is a kind of horizon, the limit where bodily and spiritual nature meet (if I may be so bold).

Now, who is that spirals down the celestial firepole on wings of slack, seizes the wheel of the cosmic bus, and abides in a bewilderness adventure of higher nondoodling while careening right over the subjective horizon?

Being a kind of midpoint, he participates in both spiritual and temporal goods.... That is why when human nature was reunited with God through the mystery of the Incarnation, all the rivers of natural goods returned to their source

And all the roads end and begin in Celestial Central:

Whose New Testavus for the Restavus blows the locked doors of the empyrean off their rusty old hinges and sheds a beam of intense darkness on the world enigma? Who is the Biggest Fakir of the Vertical Church of God Knows What, channeling the roaring torrent of O into the feeble stream of cyberspace?

Talk about a short bus.