Many sudden (or instantonic) processes in nature, such as, e.g., crackling noise, exhibit scale-free statistics often called the Zipf's law. As an explanation for this peculiar spontaneous dynamical behavior, it was proposed to believe that some stochastic dynamical systems have a tendency to self-tune themselves into a critical point, the phenomenological approach known as self-organized criticality (SOC). STS offers an alternative perspective on this phenomenon. Within STS, SOC is nothing more than dynamics in the N-phase. Specifically, the definitive feature of the N-phase is the peculiar mechanism of the TS breaking. Unlike in the C-phase, where the TS is broken by the non-integrability of the flow, in the N -phase, the TS is spontaneously broken due to the condensation of the configurations of instantons and noise-induced antiinstantons, i.e., time-reversed instantons. These processes can be roughly interpreted as the noise-induced tunneling events between, e.g., different attractors. Qualitatively, the dynamics in the N -phase appears to an external observer as a sequence of sudden jumps or "avalanches" that must exhibit a scale-free behavior/statistics as a result of the Goldstone theorem. This picture of dynamics in the N-phase is exactly the dynamical behavior that the concept of SOC was designed to explain. In contrast with the original understanding of SOC, its STS interpretation has little to do with the traditional critical phenomena theory where scale-free behavior is associated with unstable fixed points of the renormalization group flow.