Have you been religiously setting your intention as a way to get what you would like to have in life? If so, how well is it working?

Access Consciousness™ has a different way of creating: it’s called asking the universe. “Ask and you shall receive” is one of the truths in the Bible, observes Access Consciousness founder and best-selling author Gary Douglas.

Is it just semantics? The words you speak and think do create the reality that shows up for you, Douglas points out. “What you see is what you get.”

What’s the difference between asking and setting your intention?

Actually the difference is substantial. First of all, asking is a question, while setting your intention is usually a statement. A statement is a kind of answer. It assumes everything is known and nothing outside of what is known is of any value. A question, on the other hand, is an invitation to the universe to show us what else, that we haven’t yet considered, could be possible.

Or, as Douglas has been saying for years, “Questions empower, answers most often disempower.” Most statements are expressions of decisions or judgments that you have decided are true. When you have decided they are true, is it even possible for you to perceive anything that is outside of that box of pre-conceptions you have built for yourself?

Some of the questions that could create greater possibilities include:

• “What if this could turn out even better than I could ever imagine?”
• “What are the infinite possibilities?”
• “How does it get even better than this?”
• “Who am I and what grand and glorious adventures await me today?”

One client of Douglas’s, when asked why she was not participating in an activity she loved, replied, “I ran out of money.” A facilitator trained by Douglas asked her, “Is that a question?” Her reply: “Really, I used up my savings!” Could the most diligent universal fairy of financial miracles find her even if she wanted to? No, the fairy of financial miracles would have to pass by the woman’s bank account because she had stated her judgment and decision: her savings were gone, she was out of money.

Even if you don’t believe in the fairy of financial miracles, surely you do know that the universe is a big place. It has possibilities available to it that you may not have considered. What if asking a question enables the universe to arrange things so that you receive what you’re asking for?

“You have imagined that the universe doesn’t like you,” observes Douglas. “Has it ever occurred to you that the universe may like you more than you like you? It hasn’t dropped a crane on your head yet, has it?”

Sometimes it does take time for the universe to orchestrate what’s required to send you what you’re asking for, so patience is recommended. What’s NOT recommended is coming to a conclusion like, “I asked for it and it didn’t work!” Is there any question in “It didn’t work!”? That conclusion alone can turn off the universe’s efforts to flow whatever you’re asking for towards you—and who knows, what if it might have been the very next drop to come out of the tap if you had only not come to the conclusion that stopped it instantly?

Consider the wording of “set an intention.” Doesn’t the word “set” remind you of something that is literally ‘set’? Such as concrete for example? You can only set an intention that’s as great as what you can imagine. What if the universe had far greater possibilities available?

When setting your intention, how often are you vested in the outcome of it? Do you ever feel like there are only a certain number of choices available? And in that how easy is it to come to conclusion about how you would like only outcome A to occur, not outcome B, C, or D? If you have a preference as to how it shows up, and have decided that A is the best outcome, then have you created a situation in which you will consider yourself a success only if option A turns up? Is that really your best choice?

Douglas has noticed that when using consciousness to manifest, being vested in the outcome is often a way to guarantee that things will not turn out as you would like them to. To be vested in an outcome means you have judgments and decisions as answers to the situation you’re working on, and that very process of deciding on the answer is often what creates the limitations.

Would you consider un-setting all those intentions now? It might make the ground under you feel a lot less solid, but it could be a lot more fun. What if the universe could truly send you outcomes that were greater than you could imagine? What a terrible world that would be!