It's the night of the presidential inauguration, 2009. We are in the White House with the new presidential team that has just transformed the political system of the United States.

The president is having a good time. Her beautiful red velvet gown shimmers in the candlelight, while her long dark hair frames her intelligent face in casual splendor. Her vice president is standing behind her, recounting their amazing victory. It is a moment of reminiscence and celebration.

Something radical has just happened, despite the predictions of the pundits and the mass media. The presidential team has been swept into victory by an 11th hour popular uprising. They developed a campaign so powerful at the grassroots level that they are being called the founding mothers and fathers of the next stage of democracy. They were the first team who could begin to appeal to the higher needs of an incipient majority for unity, compassion, and a comprehensive approach to the environmental crisis. They are basking in the glow of a truly great achievement.

Just as the experts had been astonished when the Berlin Wall came down in 1990, so now the pundits sit in stunned amazement at the White House celebration, speechless for once in the face of the vast social uprising that came forth during this campaign. Here are but a few highlights of what happened. The full history has yet to be written.

Making the Decision

In 2006, in the privacy of her heart, after deep contemplation and prayer, a woman made a critical decision. Eve Fuller (a fictional name) was a mother, an author, and a student of evolution, history, and social/spiritual change. She knew we were a global system at the edge of chaos. A small perturbation could transform the whole system, for good or for bad. Since it was a whole-system crisis, what was needed was a whole-system response. The American people needed a realistic vision of positive options for the future; not single examples of hope, caring, and success against the tide of despair, but innovations and breakthroughs that were interconnected and that together represented the natural evolutionary trend-the organizing intelligence of nature itself toward a more cooperative and life-enhancing world.

Eve's ideas had been shaped by Abraham Maslow's humanistic psychology that each of us has intrinsic growth needs for higher values and chosen, meaningful work; by Teilhard de Chardin's idea that God is at work in the process of evolution, leading to ever more complex systems with ever greater consciousness and freedom; and Buckminster Fuller's awareness that we have the resources, technology, and know-how to make this system work for everyone without damage to the environment.

Eve's profound indignation for the suffering of billions of people was combined with a passionate love of science, quantum physics, the space program, and the evolutionary significance of high technology as, potentially, an expansion of human consciousness and freedom. She saw that these new powers were preparing the way for our species to evolve from its self-centered, planet-bound, scarcity-ridden condition to its whole-centered, spirit-centered, literally universal phase.