All there is

I believe that the drive toward simplicity, is possibly the deepest feature of living process, and its most essential feature.
Anything that does not have this drive toward simplicity cannot, really, be taken seriously as a living process. And this is a very tough criterion, a hard task-master.

Economy, simplicity, drive the formation of ice on a pond. They drive the formation of flames in the fire. And they drive the formation and simplicity of what is most valuable in the sparseness of a simple room that contains hundreds of complex relationships boiled away almost to nothing, leaving only a quiet which approximates the void.

We have, then, a guiding force: The search for simplicity, newly defined as the search for the living. Every living process searches for the simple. The structure that is created by successive application of the fifteen transformations, with the incoherent continually boiled away — that is living structure.
Living structure may be understood, remembered, as that which remains behind from a continuous striving for the simple, and from the removal of dross. But this “simple” will be both simple and complex. It will be a deep structure capable of holding the most intricate content, yet boiled away, until nothing is left in it, except the few lines which awaken the heart.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/17 Simplicity#