Part V The Throne
The Throne
Epistemic Authority and Inner Alignment
Part V of the Solomonic Consciousness Series: The seat of decision-making within consciousness. Stop living as a colonized consciousness. Reclaim your throne.
1. The Deepest Problem: Someone Else Is Sitting on Your Throne
Everything we have discussed so far—the Solomonic Self, the valley of ants, the fields of awareness, the horses of the evening—all of it points toward this single realization:
You are not making the fundamental decisions in your consciousness.
The throne is the seat of decision-making. It is where you determine what matters. Where you establish values. Where you direct attention. Where you interpret reality.
But if you examine your actual consciousness, you'll discover this shocking truth: The throne is occupied by something that is not you. Someone—or something—else is sitting there, making decisions in your name, determining your reality, speaking through your mouth as if it were you.
Not colonization of land or resources. But colonization of consciousness itself. You have been occupied. Your authority has been usurped. Your power has been transferred to something other.
The deepest problem is this: You have abdicated authority over your own consciousness. And you've done it so completely that you've forgotten it was ever yours to claim.
Your throne is occupied by forces that are not you.
2. Who Occupies the Throne When You Don't?
If you're not on your throne, who is? The answer is rarely one voice. Usually it's a coalition of forces:
- The Pattern/The Horse: The dominant thought structure that runs your consciousness unexamined. It decides what matters. It interprets events. It directs your choices.
- The Introjected Voice: The internalized voice of a parent, teacher, cultural authority. You've swallowed it so completely that you experience it as your own thinking. But it's not yours. It's theirs, speaking through you.
- The Collective Imperative: The unspoken demands of your community, culture, or era. "Success means this." "You should be that." These invisible forces occupy your throne as if they were your values.
- The Survival Strategy: The protective mechanism you developed early to ensure safety. It's still protecting you from dangers that may no longer exist. But it's never left the throne.
- The Body/Reflex: Pure stimulus-response. When consciousness isn't present, reflex controls the throne. You become a biological machine following pre-programmed patterns.
The revelation: These aren't evil forces. They're not your enemies. They arose because they served you. But they've become so automatic that you've lost the capacity to see them as separate from yourself.
And here's the dangerous part: You experience serving them as being yourself. You've become so identified with these occupying forces that you believe they ARE you.
Patterns, voices, strategies—everything but you.
3. The Body on the Throne: From Reflex to Awareness
There's a hierarchy of consciousness occupying the throne—from least aware to most aware:
- Reflex/Automaticity: Pure stimulus-response. Something happens externally, something happens internally without your awareness. You are completely unconscious.
- Pattern/Belief Operating: You operate from established patterns and beliefs without questioning them. There's some consistency, but no real awareness of why you do what you do.
- Introjected Voice Speaking: You operate from internalized external voices. You believe these thoughts are yours. In reality, you're channeling your parent's values, your culture's beliefs, pretending they're your own authentic thinking.
- Authentic Presence: You operate from genuine awareness. Your actual values, your authentic choices, your conscious decision-making. This is rare. This is the throne occupied by you.
Most people oscillate between levels 1-3. They experience occasional moments of authentic presence, but mostly they're being run by reflex, pattern, or internalized voices.
The work is not to achieve peak moments of authenticity. The work is to develop the capacity to occupy level 4 as your baseline. Not occasionally. Not in crisis. But as your normal, everyday consciousness.
From reflex to authenticity: the levels of consciousness.
4. The Introjected Voice: Your Parent's Voice Pretending to Be You
This deserves special attention because it's the most insidious form of throne occupation.
You have internalized voices—not as external authorities you choose to listen to, but as if they ARE your own thinking. You can't hear them as separate because you've swallowed them whole.
Your parent's voice telling you "You're not good enough" becomes your own self-criticism. Your culture's voice saying "You must achieve" becomes your internal drive. Your society's voice declaring "This is what success looks like" becomes your own ambition.
You experience these as your own thoughts. But they're not. They're possessions. You've been intellectually colonized.
The work: You must develop the capacity to hear these voices as separate. To recognize "This is my father speaking, not me." To notice "This is cultural conditioning, not my authentic value."
This is terrifyingly difficult because it means:
- You must recognize that much of what you believe is not authentically yours
- You must face the grief of realizing how colonized your consciousness has been
- You must develop new values from scratch—knowing what you actually choose rather than what you've been made to believe
Your thoughts may not be your own. Listen more carefully.
5. Why Reclaiming the Throne Is Terrifying
If the throne is empty of you, why don't you simply sit down and occupy it? Why is it so difficult?
Because sitting on your own throne requires facing absolute responsibility.
As long as you're run by patterns, introjected voices, and collective imperatives, you can blame them. "I had no choice." "I was programmed that way." "That's just how things are done." These stories protect you from the terrifying reality:
Not in the sense of positive thinking or "you attract what you think." But in the actual, structural sense: the quality of your consciousness determines the quality of your choices, and your choices create your reality.
Furthermore, there are real obstacles:
- You haven't developed the capacity: Authentic choice requires clarity, courage, the ability to hold complexity, the willingness to be alone with your own consciousness. These are capacities that need to be developed.
- Parts of you are guarding the throne: The patterns that occupy your throne are protecting you. They're keeping you safe from what you fear. To displace them means facing that fear directly.
- You don't know what your authentic desire actually is: After a lifetime of being colonized, many people have no access to their own authentic values. They've never experienced themselves making a genuine choice. So sitting on the throne feels impossible because they don't know what to do with it.
- The cost of authenticity is real: If you sit on your throne and choose differently, things will change. Relationships may shift. Your social position may alter. You may have to give up belonging in order to gain yourself.
This is why so many people would rather stay occupied. Better the familiar colonization than the unknown territory of authenticity.
Freedom has a price. Authenticity requires courage.
6. The Throne Inquiry: Four Movements of Return
Here is the actual practice. When you notice you're not on your throne—when you recognize that a pattern has captured you, an introjected voice is speaking through you, or you're being run by reflex—what do you do?
The Throne Inquiry has four movements:
- Noticing: You observe that you're not on your throne. A pattern has captured you. An external voice is speaking through you. You're being run by automatic response. Simply notice this without judgment or self-blame.
- Recognition: You recognize with absolute clarity: "This is not me. I am being run by something other. I have been colonized." This recognition is the pivot point.
- Invitation: You invite yourself back. Not with force or shame. But with genuine invitation: "I can return. I can sit on my own throne. I can be conscious here." This creates the possibility.
- Seeing from the Throne: From the recovered awareness, you look at the situation again. What do you actually choose? What do you actually value? What does conscious decision look like from your own authority?
These four movements are the core practice of the Solomonic way. They are simple but profound. And when repeated consistently, they transform consciousness from colonized to sovereign.
Notice. Recognize. Invite. Choose. Repeat.
7. The Declaration: Stop Betraying Yourself
This is where the work becomes a declaration rather than a technique.
Self-betrayal is the fundamental wound.
Self-betrayal happens when you know what you actually want but you don't pursue it. When you know what's true but you pretend it isn't. When you silence your own voice to please someone else. When you abandon your own values to fit in.
Every time you do this, you're sending yourself this message:
The cost of this self-betrayal is immense. It creates a kind of exhaustion that no amount of rest can touch. It creates a despair that no success can lift. Because at the deepest level, you're abandoning yourself to external forces. You're living as a colonized consciousness.
The Solomonic declaration is this:
Your consciousness matters. Your authentic values are more real than external demands. Your genuine desire is legitimate. You have the right to exist as yourself.
This is not selfish. This is sovereignty. And sovereignty is the foundation of all genuine ethics, all genuine relationship, all genuine contribution to the world.
The practice is deceptively simple: In each moment, ask yourself: Am I being authentic here? Am I honoring my own consciousness? Or am I betraying myself to meet an external demand?
Let that question guide you back to the throne.
But recognizing the throne is not enough. You must learn to live from it. Part VI awaits.