Simple in complex ways

Pleasure and pain, joy and sadness – these are experienced in the left hemisphere as distinct from each other but in the right as convolved with each other. Approach avoidance are perhaps in the first place clear and separate but in the more robust experience they are parts and parcels of each other. 

Things may be simple but they are simple in complex ways. In the left hemisphere we experience the uncertainty of either/or; in the right hemisphere we experience the ambiguity of both/and. Hence the left hemisphere likes choices and considers the act of decision-making the exercise of selection over a menu of choices; the right hemisphere likes mixtures and considers the act of decision-making the maintenance of conflicting opposites in a suspension of harmonious wholeness. 

Tastes and preferences are left hemispheric artifacts. They place values on outcomes that result from tactical decision-making. In the right hemisphere desire is experienced as longing and yearning. They place values on outcomes that result from strategic decision-making. 

• Yearning and longing seek the union or the re-union with one to whom one belongs. 
• Yearning and longing strive for a different sort of belonging than what is the usual property right. 
• Yearning and longing are not relieved by acts of will but rather by acts of faith. 
• Yearning and longing more describes a durable condition of the self than a well-defined desire for consuming some object.