Meet Robert Mitchell: Astrologer and Alchemical Agent

I started my own business as an Astrologer because it was the thing that I was the most passionate about. I grew up in a culture where Astrology was seen through the lens of newspaper sun sign columns and light, cliched filled books. Over thirty years of my study and work with people I found that Astrology much more resembled quantum physics than it did what most people think of it as. Every single person, whether they believe in Astrology or not, has a chart that communicates the unique structures of their consciousness that creates their perceptions and experiences.  This field of experience is present at the moment of their birth and will be a constant presence during their lives. Astrology offers the opportunity to partner with this intelligence and co create with it, rather than assume that one’s reality is static. I didn’t see anyone offering this kind of counseling to people, and despite it not being viewed accurately by the culture at large, I wanted people to know that there was an intelligent design to their lives that was as unique as their DNA or their thumbprint. People suffer from the impersonal nature of the collective, from the one size fits all models of reality. Astrology shows that each person’s consciousness is unique that it is trying to transform unique challenges into wisdom, skill, and talents that nobody else’s experience can do. I feel super inspired to work with people and map out the unique structures of their consciousness and the opportunities for transformation that are built into who they are, and the times in which they find themselves. Nothing else is as compelling to me. It is a vocation, and not a job, and my deepest pleasure to chaperone people into the deeper mysteries of their unique experience.

My art is Astrology. I help people facilitate a relationship between themselves and the intelligence that animates everything, physical and non physical. What sets me apart is my intellect, my intuition, and my training as a religious scholar and as a therapist. Astrology to me is a catch all art that includes Depth Psychology, Quantum Physics, and a technology that separates the transitory aspects of consciousness from the eternal. It places the individual life in a transcendent space of transformative potential and can tell them where they are in their journey, and what changes are being asked of them. What sets me apart from other astrologers is how I am able to link up their actual experience both previous to our knowing one another and in the times after it, to the intelligent design of their life. Modern life can be alienating, and our situations can seem random and non sensical. We can see ourselves as the product of our history. But, our history is never profound enough to explain our states of consciousness. I am able to show people that there were structures in their consciousness that shaped their histories and the ways that they recall them and how they construct themselves in the moment. It is my greatest thrill to show people the architecture of their illusions, so they can construct new visions of themselves and their life in cooperation with the forces that shaped their lifetime and continue to communicate with them from outside of it. It has not been easy getting to where I am today professionally. When I first began to study Astrology in the late 80’s, it’s reputation had been damaged by the lack of discrimination of new age thinking in the 1960’s and it was an outlier in western culture. It was not known as the source of esoteric knowledge that it had been for thousands of years. As a man, it was also seen as something that was mostly done by women. It was a feminine art. So fighting through the cultural prejudices to share its bounty was a challenge. Living in Los Angeles, I have of course been approached on numerous occasions by entertainment companies wanting to use Astrology as entertainment with the focus on romance, money and future prediction. This is just one small aspect of Astrology, as it is just one small aspect of life. My work has always focused on what the greeks called “religare” to reconnect. While it isn’t sexy, Carl Jung thought that all psychological problems are in fact religious in nature. They occur in the areas where one’s ego state has lost touch with it’s primordial origins that proceed this life, and will follow it. To be in touch with these origins, and to be informed by them is not only profound, but the epitome of mental health. Nobody’s experience offers them enough contact with these origins, no matter how satisfying their upbringing was. So, it has always been my calling to “re-connect” my clients with these origins. The seriousness of my work hasn’t always been in fashion. And though I make it fun, the deeper questions of life always come into play with my clients, and my serious and profound nature has a big impact on them. I haven’t always been comfortable with my seriousness and the importance of the work that I offer people. We live in a superficial and alienating culture, and the forces that shape most people’s lives are unknown to them. So to offer this to people in a culture that has a short attention span and offers collective thinking in the form of the internet, twitter, facebook, and innumerable dating apps requires a commitment to being seen by some as “strange.” I think that I over came the challenges by seeing the suffering that I was able to abate in the people that I was working with. In seeing people live with new frameworks, and not see their experience as random or meaningless, but fitting into larger patterns that are their lives, I feel joy and utility. I did for a long time feel alienated from this culture. But at a certain point I realized I had an enormous contribution to make to it, and that if I focused on the contribution and the well being I was creating in others, the misunderstanding of Astrology didn’t matter. Most people don’t believe that Astrology is “a real thing”, or germane to their lives. Those people have Astrology charts, too. And the forces that animate their lives are objectively observable and verifiable. My greatest joy is working with the parents of new borns because I am able to show them that the structures of consciousness that will determine their baby’s experience are identifiable at birth. That is true for each and every one of us. It is the failure of our culture that this is an unknown resource. I myself saw my own children’s charts hours after they were born and was able to see that there were parts of them that were beyond my reach and the best I could do was be as empathetic as possible for who they were, and not superimpose my ideas of who they should be over who they were. What I want people to know about me and my work is that it is a serious matter. There are transformations available to each of us, built into the challenges of our lives, and to articulate them, and be aware of them, and to work with them consciously can expedite our learning and deepen the satisfaction in our lives immeasurably. I work hard for my clients to bring them into communion with the intelligence that oversees their lives. There is nothing “New Agey” about what I do. In fact it is more “Old agey.” Astrology is a 5,000 year old art and science, where the sub atomic mechanics that move and shape the solar system are identified as being an influence on the consciousness of individuals. Each of us is an ambassador of that intelligence, and a portal through which it sees into the world. A person becoming aware of that relationship becomes new in a way   I take the initiation of a person into this awareness seriously. It is a sacred responsibility. I work with people from all over the world, in all kinds of leadership positions, with all kinds of successes, and it is my experience that nobody is beyond the feelings of awe and purpose that these connections to an eternal intelligence reveal.

The first stop on my L.A. itinerary will always be the low tide walk from Point Dume past Paradise Cove along the beach at low tide. It takes some want to to get down to the beach, even moreso now that the stairs have been removed. But it is a low populated experience where one can be alone with one’s thoughts and walk for miles. One should also visit the Vedanta Center in Hollywood. It’s the place where Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood studied Vedanta. It’s always beautifully kept up and there are always the most amazing flower arrangements in the chapel . I would also suggest people get to Soho House Malibu where the food is great and you can gaze out onto the endless pacific. A trip to Santa Barbara is always fun. Getting up into the mountains for skiing or hiking is fun as well. There is so much to do. Use your imagination.

I think that one of the people that I found the most inspiring in my life was my mother. She was a successful novelist, and for her, writing was not a job, it was a vocation. She wrote everyday, and was always working on something. Her stories sprang from her, and she was obsessed with working through them till they were finished and sitting on a bookstore shelf. She never had a job in her life, other than writing and while she was an unconventional mother, I was inspired by her passion, eccentricity, and complete disinterest in conventions. She made it possible for me to consider a life guided by one’s daimon, and didn’t ever make me feel like I had to fit in to conventional life. I remember being in college and deciding that my major was going to be Religious Studies, because those were the classes that I felt inspired to take. Her response was that it was great that I had found a study that I felt passionate about, and she never questioned its’ practicality.