The Hierarchy Of Authorities
Let’s look at decision making and how Human Design suggests we should experiment with our process.
So, right now up until this point, it’s likely that you’ve been going through life making decisions with your mind. How else to make decisions right? Your gut, maybe?
Knowing Human Design and understanding how the undefined centers work, you’ll be familiar with the idea the mind can take us astray and how it allows our not self to play out.
And now… we looking for an answer - a solution to this dilemma - right?
Many practices tell us to move away from the mind and Human design is another one of them. Unlike other practices, Human Design pinpoints your unique inner or outer authority. Something which you can rely on as an individual when making decisions.
In the past, we were mind dominated beings. That’s how we made decisions for a while. But since the mutation from seven centred to nine centred beings, our mind is no longer our authority. Now, the mind is never the authority. The mind is not listed as an inner authority.
So, if the authority is never the mind - for anyone - and we want to try moving away from not self decision making - let’s look at these potential authorities and how to know which one is yours.
Firstly, understand these three things:
Authorities are something we can rely on to make decisions as an individual. It is a fixed defined centre within us.
We work out which authority is ours by seeing which of the centres - we have defined in our chart - are the highest ranking in authority.
You will only ever have one of these overall authorities ever… even if you have all the authority centres defined. And, that will never change.
Authority Hierarchy
The inner authorities in order of hierarchy are listed below:
Solar Plexus
Sacral
Splenic
Ego
G
Continuing on, the outer authorities are listed below also in order of hierarchy.
6. Outer
7. Lunar
When you have an inner authority, you have a reliable fixed inner process in which to filter your decisions through. We will explore each of these in more detail as we move through the course.
When you have an outer authority, you don’t have a reliable inner process in which to filter your decisions through. You have to rely on processing decisions in a way that is dependent on things outside of yourself. This is what we will look into in a moment. We will be looking at the Environmental/outer Authority. And, later on in the course, we will cover the moon/lunar authority process - which is what Reflectors use.
Authority percentages
You may be interested to know that we don’t all make decisions in the same way using the same process. Or at least, we aren’t designed to… There really is a range of ways we as humans are designed to make decisions in our own unique ways depending on our unique definition.
Jovian Archive keeps data sets on how common each authority is. They are as followed:
Emotional Solar Plexus - 50%
Sacral Center - 32%
Splenic - 9%
Ego - 1-2%
G - 2.5%
Outer - 3.5%
The most common type of authority is the Emotional Solar Plexus. I think its interesting to note that while most of us are moving through life making decisions with our mind, or our gut feeling, with that emotional authority, there is no truth in the now - with a lot of the authorities there isn’t - and we need to wait for clarity before making a decision. You can see just how much we’re getting ourselves into trouble here when we don’t take into account or listen to our authority and its process as per our design. We rush and make decisions with the mind, we can make decisions which are incorrect for ourselves. Most of us just need to wait longer.
Authority vs the mind
Before we look into the first authority, I wanted to reiterate that the mind is never the authority whether its defined or undefined.
It’s not the authority because that is where the conditioning we have picked up throughout our lives journey plays out. Our mind never makes decisions based on the unique definition we have within us… but from the not self conditioning we are all experiencing as we move through life.
We can never trust it regardless of how clever we are. Because its not about intelligence here. Ra once said something along the lines of, the problem is, you all here are intelligent. You are researching life and are thinkers. Although this isn’t a direct quote, he was talking about it in relation to some farmers he spent some time with. He said he’d watch as they’d move through life with little intellect from a western perspective, but they’d be in sync with their environment. They’d listen to their body and live much happier lives. We all here are thinkers and it can get us into trouble.
So, the mind is the spokesperson for the undefined/open centres within us. And it will always try to overrule and second guess our authority. Our true authority. It will always think it knows better.
But the mind doesn’t ever ever know whats coming next - right? It guesses. It bases it on probability… all on potentials and then convinces us that that IS the outcome. The mind is our reason maker… our analyst. But it’s not our decision maker.
In fact, when we use our authority, the mind will probably be wondering what is going on…
Ra used an example of his splenic authority. He said one day when he was driving he saw himself unconsciously putting on his seatbelt. His mind watched and was confused. A couple of moments later, someone drove into the back of his car. His mind didn’t know it was going to happen, but his splenic authority did.
I think its a beautiful example of how our inner authorities are here to guide us individually.
We can never turn off our mind - why would want it to? Its great for a lot of things. But we need to reposition the role of the mind in our lives. We can use the mind to see the progress we make in our human design experiment. We can observe the interaction between the mind and the centres. Our mind is here to watch… to experience… but not to decide. Remember, it’s the passenger in the vehicle. It’s here to watch the movie of life. We just need to align to what is correct for us using our true inner authority so we see and experience the movie that was designed for us.
