\section{Transformation}

\lettrine{W}{e} have seen how our exterior world transforms from lesser to greater sophistication: 
from amorphous gas after the Big Bang to stars and elements, 
from non-living amino-acid soup to living cells, 
the self-inflicted mass extinction of plant-like bacteria that made animal-like life possible, 
to the Cambrian Explosion in which the multicellular life that had existed for millions of years suddenly exploded into the full complexity of animal bodies.

All of it in seeming defiance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Of the status quo.

When I look at my own interior life, and that of others, I see something similar. Not identical, more like --- it rhymes. Occasions when the status quo ``isn't enough,'' when deep transformation becomes necessary.

Why didn't the primordial amino-acid soup stay that way, instead of crossing the threshold from non-living to living? Why did primordial cells organize themselves into plants, then animals --- including humans?

The universe does not merely sit there.

It unfolds.

It organizes.

It reaches thresholds and then exceeds them.

It's \textit{as if} the cosmos is longing for --- what? To experience? To become \textit{more}?

I'm not saying the Cosmos literally experiences Longing --- although there are some who believe it does.

\textit{I am} saying that there's an interesting rhyme here, that's worth exploring on a mythic and metaphorical level. 
Which I hope to show has something significant to tell us.

We are not trying to do biology with mystical language. We are noticing a pattern: that Reality does not appear merely to persist. It appears, at times, to reach.

Not always cleanly. Not always upward in any simplistic sense. Evolution is full of waste, violence, contingency, extinction, and blind alleys. But even so, something in the whole drama seems to still press toward greater complexity, greater sensitivity, greater inwardness, in spite of setbacks.

Toward eyes.

Toward nervous systems.

Toward consciousness.

Toward Plato, and da Vinci, and Beethoven, and Einstein.

Toward the question of why there is something rather than nothing.

For if the same pattern appears both in our interior life and in the unfolding of the Cosmos, then perhaps longing is not merely a private quirk of consciousness. Perhaps it belongs more deeply to the structure of Reality than we usually allow.
