Listening in with … Robert Ohotto

Robert Ohotto is a renowned teacher of higher consciousness and psycho-spirituality. He’s known for his straight talk, sharp intuition, and the insightful way he weaves together astrology, archetypes, mythology, and ancient mysticism. He’s best known for his teachings on fate vs. destiny, which help people discover and embrace their life purpose. Fate, he says, is what’s predetermined about our lives before we incarnated—while destiny is what we choose to create within those boundaries. “Destiny isn’t a reward,” he explains. “It’s earned every day of your life, one choice at a time.” Taken together, fate and destiny create what Ohotto calls our cosmic contract, which includes how we agreed to serve in this lifetime. Determining your contract, he says, is not about “figuring out how life is going to happen to you, but how you can happen to life.” Here, Ohotto talks with Unity Magazine editor Katy Koontz about his radically new take on the ancient art of astrology.

KATY KOONTZ: You’ve expanded your understanding of astrology to incorporate the concepts of archetypes and even quantum physics. Is this the next evolution of astrology?

ROBERT OHOTTO: I truly hope so. Unfortunately, a lot of astrology today is what I call stereotypal astrology—using astrology to stereotype yourself and others by saying, for example, “I have a sun in Aries, so I’m hot tempered.” That’s very medieval in structure. It’s based on causality, and it’s not actually true. We are who we are. That is the astrology of victim consciousness because it says, “I’m this way because of fate,” instead of “I’ve got this base, this arc of patterns, and my level of consciousness is going to determine how I use those patterns in the world because I recognize that I do have options.” That’s where astrology is really useful. I teach a new understanding of astrology that is archetypal and intuitive, based on soul agreements and cycles of energy and patterns. That’s using astrology to reveal yourself, not define yourself.

KK: That seems much more dynamic—and useful.  

RO: The astrology I work with is astrology for the cocreator. I’m getting ready to teach some cycles soon, talking about things coming up ahead, and I want to refer to these cycles as transformative opportunities, not things that are going to happen or not happen. I want to say instead that this is the karmic field of life, and astrology is incredibly brilliant at mapping what’s possible in that karmic field. And if you know those coordinates, then you can work with that consciously as a cocreator and start to turn lead to gold as an alchemist. Otherwise, we’re just looking to ask if the god of fortune is finally smiling on us, or if it’s going to be another year of being smacked down by the Fates.

I think it’s more useful to say Okay, we do have fate. We do have limits. Some of that is changeable and some of it isn’t, but let’s talk about how we change what is changeable, and through that, how we serve each other and the holism of life. That to me is the gravity, the magnetism, the sun of astrology, if you will, the point everything revolves around. We’re all interconnected, and we need to start really understanding karmic forces and what our options are within them.

So I’m hopeful that we can move forward into the astrology of the cocreator for an archetypal, quantum, and intuitive age in which we’re exploring these things not as ways to define ourselves, but ways to reveal our potential—specifically our potential to serve each other through our destiny.

KK: I love the idea of using astrology to help us move forward instead of just hiding under the covers because it’s Mercury retrograde yet again.

RO: Or like this year, we have Jupiter in Taurus, and astrologers have been writing about how it’s this big year of abundance. But astrology’s what we live. And if we actually look at what we’re living, we see that we’re headed toward recession and some economic challenges. And we have a climate issue that is compounding every year. To speak in these bubbles, as if because Jupiter’s in Taurus suddenly all of that vanishes, is not to understand how to use this tool.

With Taurus being an Earth sign, to me that means we’re meant to learn how to work with the laws of nature—because we haven’t been, and we have to get this down, you know? It’s cyclical, it comes back to karmic lessons around whether or not we’re living in harmony with the ecosystem and the biosphere, with the sustainability of all these things, and can we continue to consume (because one of the shadow archetypes of Taurus is the glutton). We’ve got to recoordinate before we can unlock our bigger potential, which is what Jupiter is about. Otherwise, we’re just going to live in the fate side of a cycle versus our destiny.

Astrology is not some system in the sky that you can just lean into with magical thinking. It gives you incredible intuitive data and guidelines, certainly around timing and energy and archetypes, as to what is in the psychic holographic field right now as well as what your calling is within that. What always calls you is holism. You’re part of the all. So how do you want to live, create, act, choose, and love like the truth that you are part of the all?

KK: You describe astrology as a map of synchronicity. What does that mean? 

RO: Synchronicity is like an interwoven web or cosmic fascia that runs through everything, like electrical filaments that go out everywhere in the spherical nature of life. Carl Jung saw it as an acausal principle in which two things happen at the same time—again, not through causality but through some sort of correlated sense of meaning.

While I think that’s absolutely accurate, I also think there is causality in synchronicity when we are really focused on something for quite some time, and all of the sudden we start to get these signs and things start to occur that we know are meaningful. When that happens, it means that whether it was conscious or not, we activated that fascia of the cosmos and its transdimensionality. The holism of the cosmos is now talking to us, and it says, Okay, based on your question for guidance, here’s the read. So synchronicity is a messenger, and it’s usually transdimensional.

Astrology, through correlation, shows the connectedness of all of the psychic fields and dimensions of Earth school. It shows how it all flows through time and how synchronicity as a messenger of time speaks to us. For example, you mentioned Mercury retrograde.

KK: Yes, a popular subject these days.

RO: Mercury in its orbit around the sun is not literally going backward—none of the planets do that. But from our vantage point on Earth, it looks as if that’s what’s happening about every three and a half months. That means something because we create correlations, just like the ancients did. They saw things that happened in nature and in the sky and they noticed that they all matched up. Then they started to create this mapping of how energetics and cocreation work on planet Earth. It’s not that Mars or Mercury or Jupiter or Pluto cause anything. This is where Jung was spot on. They’re connected in a correlation to creative forces both inside and outside of us. If we can watch them, then it’s mirroring back those forces. That’s where you get the saying, “As above, so below.”

Synchronicity is a bit misunderstood. I think it’s a force that is both causal and acausal.

There’s both in there, and astrology is one of the tools that simultaneously straddles both causality and acausality. It’s fascinating to consider that we have this call and response happening—synchronicity is the messenger that both takes our call out into the universe and also brings a response back to us in the form of events and alignments.

KK: That’s such a rich explanation. 

RO: Synchronicity is really a shamanic force. It’s transdimensional. Oftentimes, it brings us our message outside of the current consciousness or dimension we’re in. That’s its role—to get us from one dimension of potential to another. But sometimes we can get the trickster archetype because we don’t want to hear the truth. We just want the answer to affirm what we want. And so then our angels say, “Okay, now we must trick you into the truth by giving you the trickster version of your answer.” A Mercury retrograde cycle is like a big trickster cycle of us undoing all that our wounded egos are grasping for so we can actually let something more holistic, nourishing, and soulful in. 

KK: Your description makes me feel not only connected to the whole, but also held by it.

RO: I love that. I think sometimes when we speak about being cocreators, we take on this hyper-responsible sense that we’re the only creative force in the game. And thank the gods we’re not because our power alone can’t pull off our destiny. It just can’t. We are cocreating—there is a co there.

I look back at my life as a gay man and at the lives of other minorities who have broken through barriers to have massive successes. For example, The Oprah Winfrey Show nourished the culture for 25 years. Oprah was phenomenal. If we’d gone back in time and seen an African-American woman 30 years before Oprah who had a vision board that included being a talk show host, do you think that could have happened then?

Absolutely not, because there are forces in culture that either allow or don’t allow our creative options, and we are all cocreating within those social karma forces. It took Rosa Parks to create Oprah’s moment. It took Martin Luther King Jr. It took so many other pioneering love rebels to open a door for an African-American woman named Oprah Winfrey to come into people’s living rooms and blow up in popularity for 25 years.

KK: We’re all connected, so I can definitely see that.

RO: Destiny isn’t about some narcissistic expression of “Aren’t I wonderful? Look at me and look at what I’ve manifested!” It’s about a call to serve the whole the way your soul agreed to. In that sense, your destiny has nothing to do with you because it’s not about you. Ultimately, it’s both, but to make a point, it’s also about those you came to serve.

So how did Oprah get so successful? Because she nourished her audience through her grace and talent, with her compassion, in her relatability. We reach that kind of soul success by really attuning to our calling, which sometimes speaks to us through what breaks our hearts the most, and sometimes through what lights us up the most. Often, it’s both.

Also, in my teaching, I reframe a lot of what’s out there in so many best-selling books regarding positive manifestation because what they say is not the whole story. In fact, it’s barely any of the story because it preys on the wounded ego trying to get to enough versus the soul trying to emerge and serve.

Positivism is wonderful and useful medicine, but sometimes it’s not the right medicine, or it’s not as useful. I’ve had doors open for me in spite of me, not because of me. Let’s just say I was not all love and light—I was messy on the floor, rocky on the ropes—and a door would open. So I think both can happen.

“Astrology gives you incredible intuitive data and guidelines, certainly around timing and energy and archetypes, as to what is in the psychic holographic field right now as well as what your calling is within that.”

KK: Why is that harder path sometimes preferable?

RO: Lightworkers were born to go where it’s dark and shift darkness to light. So we’re often emerging from a darkness within ourselves. That’s the wounded healer pattern, where you’re coming from the darkness of your own wounding, and in the process of your journey of healing yourself, you cultivate medicine to heal other people.

Often, lightworkers must make their own darkness conscious before they can transform the darkness of others—which ain’t easy. That’s not true for everybody in every way, but I think there’s a thread of truth in that when it comes to service, destiny, and living your potential in this time. It’s where the magic can really happen.

KK: That takes our experience of the dark out of victim consciousness.

RO: And it mystically opens new doors. There’s a perennial question around the nature of evil that comes up when people ask, “If everything is part of God, what about Hitler or Putin or some of these other people in the world who do so much damage?” To pivot on what you just said, embracing the dark also positions us into cocreator consciousness and answers this question about evil.

So you might ask, why do people starve in the world, or why is there a war happening in Ukraine? Pick your crisis. Obviously, there are very complex karmic dominoes that tip us into these events. But there’s also a fundamental truth underneath that people starve because we collectively let them. Wars happen because we collectively let them. A political polarization is now active because we’ve collectively empowered it through our participation, or we’ve ignored it and thus empowered it by doing nothing.

We often act out of our own victim consciousness as if we’re entitled to the light instead of channels for the light. This shift is a daily practice. I’m not saying I got this down. I’m a messy human. But I think we’re all called to come together in a shared responsibility at this axial time of crisis. There’s not one person on this planet who did not cocreate climate change, consciously or unconsciously, because everyone’s been in a car, been on a plane, or used a stove—pick the way you put carbon in the air. That’s not to make anyone wrong, it’s just to level the playing field so we stop pointing fingers. Until we understand that, we can’t address the issues.

We have to come together. We can’t be polarized politically anymore. We can’t be tribal because as long as you’re tribal, you’re not thinking for yourself—the tribe is thinking for you. That applies to every side. Unfortunately, right now we’re in more of a kindergarten phase of cocreative consciousness that involves fantasy and magical thinking.

We’re at such crisis points, and victim consciousness has us horizontally anchored into entitlement and hyper-PC culture, as well as people being shamed for being woke. If it doesn’t stop, we’re going to continue to spiral down. But if we come together, just imagine the power we could wield!

Robert Ohotto is a spiritual teacher, intuitive consultant, and the author of Transforming Fate into Destiny (Hay House, 2008). He is also the founder of HoloKompass, an online institute for intuitive, archetypal, and astrological studies. Ohotto has worked as an intuitive strategist with Fortune 500 companies and often teaches with his colleague, best-selling author Caroline Myss. Visit ohotto.com.

This article appeared in Unity Magazine®.