Last Monday, as you’ve probably heard, for the first time since 1226, we experienced an observable Great Conjunction between the two titans of the solar system, Jupiter and Saturn.

Their relative proximity created such a bright light that astronomers and religious leaders alike speculate that this conjunction in fact created what we call the Star of Bethlehem.

A friend recently sent me a blog by famed astrologer and New York Times bestselling author Chani Nicholas about what this Great Conjunction means in astrological terms.

Even if you don’t believe in astrology, it’s fascinating to read what she has written, particularly in light of the bumpy ride we’ve all experienced in 2020.

These past 12 months, with Capricorn emphasized in our collective horoscope, it was always going to be a ‘this is going to hurt’ kind of year, she says, with ‘themes of boundaries, restrictions, denial, restraints, responsibilities and downturns.’

That certainly sounds familiar, given all the challenges we’ve faced, to health, our personal liberty, our career and finances, our ability to be with our nearest and dearest.

But the good news, says Chani, is that we are about to experience one of the most important astrological reboots we’ll ever live though. With Saturn moving into Aquarius, we’re all moving to the frontier in order to rebuild over the ashes of the old.

Chani writes: “2021 asks us to think beyond ourselves, beyond the herd mentality, beyond the binaries we’ve been forced into.

“There are material, intellectual and spiritual riches on the frontier, but to seek them requires a break with the known,” she says. “To become the leaders that the world needs, the Great Conjunction calls us to venture towards the edges, to new ways of working, living, learning, and building with one another. There is no way to sugar coat the extreme travesty this year piled upon the entire globe, but if there is anything that we can take away from it, it’s that we know for sure what is essential.”

So what is the takeaway here?

In the grandest terms it means that the time has finally come – indeed, has been forced upon us all – to write a new human story more consistent with who in fact we really are.

For more than 300 years, we have lived according to a story that has idealized separateness. From the moment we are born, we are told that for every winner there must be a loser. From that constricted vision we have fashioned our world.

And that is precisely why life as we know it is no longer sustainable and we witness it collapsing around us.

But as I’ve been writing for more than 20 years, at our essence, we exist as a unity, a relationship — utterly interdependent, the parts affecting the whole at every moment.

The implications of this new story on our understanding of life and the design of our society are extraordinary.

If a quantum field holds us all together in its invisible web, we will have to rethink our definitions of ourselves and what exactly it is to be human.

If we are in constant and instantaneous dialogue with our environment, if all the information from the cosmos flows through our pores at every moment, then our current notion of our human potential is only a glimmer of what it should be.

If we’re not separate, we can no longer think in terms of ‘winning’ and ‘losing.’ We need to redefine what we designate as ‘me’ and ‘not-me.’ and reform the way that we interact with other human beings, run our world economy and even view time and space.

We have to reconsider how we choose and carry out our work, structure our communities and bring up our children. We have to imagine another way to live, an entirely new way to ‘be.’

We have to blow up all of our societal creations and begin again, building over scorched ground.

And, it’s fair to say, the wrecking ball has already struck.

But here’s the good news. The stripping away of society as we know it, the destruction of the superficial and the fallacious, forces us to finally recognize that we are something far more impressive than evolutionary happenstance, a genetic survival machine.

We must finally acknowledge, in the deepest core of our being, that there is unified intelligence far grander and more exquisite than scientists like Darwin or Newton had imagined, a process that is not random or chaotic, but intelligent and purposeful.

We must truly accept our birthright, the limitless and profound power of our own human potential, which the most severe of Covid restrictions can never shut down.

In the past, individuals have accidentally evidenced some ability – a premonition, a ‘past life,’ a clairvoyant image, a gift for healing – which was quickly dismissed as a freak of nature or a confidence trick. The science and my own work constantly reaffirm that this is a capacity neither abnormal nor rare, but present in every human being.

And this hints at human abilities beyond what we’ve ever dreamed possible.

Despite all of the present commotion, these upheavals also promise to give us back a sense of optimism, something that has been stripped out of our sense of ourselves with the arid vision of 20th-century philosophy, largely derived from the views espoused by science.

We are not isolated beings living our desperate lives on a lonely planet in an indifferent universe.

We never were alone. We were always part of a larger whole.

We have far more power than we realize, to heal ourselves, our loved ones, even our communities.

Each of us has the ability – and together a great collective power – to improve a lot in life. Our life, in every sense, is in our hands.

But it’s no longer possible to sit back in your armchair and enjoy the ride. Each of us must become a disruptor in his or her own right.

So my question to you to ponder over this holiday season is just this: what is the particular path of disruption you are going to choose?

I send my fondest wishes to you to be comforted and reassured this holiday season and New Year.

We’re going to be fine. We just need clamber around a bit while we find that new path.

May the brightest star in the sky light our way.