John Hagelin / Nat Goldhaber 2000

DENVER, Jan. 14 - Frustrated by their low profile around the state, Colorado's four minor political parties have agreed to combine their efforts and pool some of their limited resources to raise their visibility and get more of their candidates elected.

The loss of control of the U.S. Senate by President Bush and the Republican Party was historically unprecedented. But it was also inevitable.

Bush's hairline victory in November suggests that, even then, he was only marginally in step with the American people. To many, Bush seemed an anachronism, a call back to another era.

As Theodore Roosevelt often emphasized, civilization evolves. There is a slow, but inexorable evolution of thinking as humanity, collectively, absorbs the lessons of history.

While Bush seems stuck in an adolescent time warp, America is growing up. Our world view has been challenged, our horizons stretched by TV images of anti-U.S. rallies in traditionally allied nations, and by the very real drop in America's global influence during these first months of the Bush administration.

America is awakening faster than its President. Bush, once marginally in synch, has fallen behind. He has strained the patience of the Congress (apart from the far-right Christian ideologues), alienated our youth, enraged the environmentalists, infuriated the moderates and even fallen substantially in the polls among the knee-jerk Republicans who elected him.

A government that no longer accurately reflects its people is an unstable government. A government destined to be replaced through election, revolution, or whatever twist of circumstance jostles the unstable equilibrium. In this case, it was a senator with a conscience.

Rarely has such shift in power been so swift and noiseless, similar in impact to the Republican revolution of 1994 but without the chest-beating and electoral fanfare. The shift of power in the Senate subcommittees will constrain Bush's runaway legislative agenda, his arrogant unilateralism and dangerous brinkmanship. Expressions of jubilation are resounding worldwide, and are barely constrained even among our allies.

But what, ultimately, will be the result of a senatorial shift in power from Republicans to Democrats? Or indeed, how would America have differed today if Al Gore had won the struggle for the presidency?

I have been forced to confront this question, for had I not run as a Natural Law Party/Reform Party presidential candidate in 2000, Gore, and not Bush, would now be in the Oval Office. My vote totals in Florida were considerably larger than Bush's disputed margin of victory.

Gore is smarter than Bush and more moderate. But the fact is, no one is competent to govern the affairs of so vast and mighty a nation, neither the president, nor 535 members of Congress. A higher order of intelligence is needed.

Management prodigies like General Electric's Jack Welch receive seven-figure salaries to tackle the challenges of companies with tens of thousands of employees. The U.S. government, with its millions of employees, is expected to coordinate and manage the affairs of 280 million citizens, in a global community of six billion.

There are innumerable trends and tendencies pulsing within our hugely diverse population. The historic inability of the government to meet these diverse needs has led to the system of compromise we call electoral politics. A leader is chosen by majority vote, and is only expected to satisfy a majority constituency. A majority approval rating is enough to ensure one's re-election.

But this is a deplorable and archaic standard. It would be hard to imagine a poorer outcome if there were no federal government, a point passionately argued by libertarians.

This inability of government to deliver broad satisfaction is obsolete, and utterly incongruous with the vast resources and power of the federal government. All citizens, Republicans and Democrats, surrender their income in the form of taxes, whether they are members of the in party, or among those earmarked for compromise.

Scientifically, such failure is difficult to justify. It is literally unnatural. It reflects a lack of understanding of natural organizing principles by which nature governs the vast universe without problems. There are 71/2 million species in Earth's complex ecosystem, each evolving and growing in magnificent concert in an intricate web of mutual interdependence and mutual nourishment.

Today, these principles of nature's organization are understood by science. And the callous neglect for the minority must no longer be tolerated.

Fortunately, here again, we see a worldwide awakening. There is a growing appreciation of the inequity and inadequacy of the current system. And we are witnessing the emergence of a more complete, more natural and effective system of administration through natural law.

During the past two decades, modern science has uncovered deeper, more unified levels of the laws of nature, culminating in the recent discovery of the unified field, a single, universal field of intelligence at the basis of all forms and phenomena in the universe.

As a Dartmouth and Harvard-trained unified-field theoretical physicist, I have been fortunate to have worked closely with the world's foremost scientist in the field of consciousness, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. From the ancient Vedic wisdom of India, Maharishi has derived scientifically proven technologies of consciousness that provide direct experience of the unified field in the most settled state of human awareness. Through such experience, individual thought and behavior become aligned with all the laws of nature, and widespread problems born of the violation of natural law, including most illness, crime and social conflict, are naturally prevented.

As citizens grow in the capacity for self-government, as behavior grows spontaneously more life-supporting, the orderly administration of society becomes increasingly automatic.

Research conducted at over 200 independent universities and research institutes throughout the world has documented the profound effectiveness of this new scientific approach of administration through natural law.

As a patriot and scientist, I am prepared to provide our government with the scientific knowledge and the proven, natural-law-based solutions to the problems that confront the nation -- problems that inevitably result when human intelligence is applied to an organizational task that is beyond such limited intelligence.

Sen. James Jeffords's principled and laudable willingness to break from blind partisan allegiance signals a broader break in a dam that has bottlenecked the evolution of our nation's collective consciousness. I predict that people will soon demand that government, by applying the latest scientific knowledge and proven organizational principles, should be able to meet the needs of everyone.

Fortunately, it seems that the trends are with us. We have passed a milestone in our collective evolution: We have outgrown George W. Bush. And now, we have the means to accelerate the evolution of collective consciousness and the betterment of humankind, by bringing national life into accord with natural law.

Hence it is no longer a question of whether, but when. So why not now? It's time we put an end to pervasive problems and needless suffering by harnessing the proven, time-tested organizing principles that so exquisitely govern the natural world around us.

John Hagelin, a physicist, was the Natural Law Party's candidate for president in 2000.