What happens when you encounter a space of blankness in your life, when you do not have an answer? Do you rush to conclusion and do your best to tie all those annoying loose ends up in a knot as fast as possible so as to avoid being uncomfortable?

Would you consider that your longing for that nice neat answer and having everything neatly resolved could be preventing you from having everything you’ve been wanting?

This may be a different point of view for you, but then, a different point of view is one of the things Access Consciousness™ founder and best-selling author Gary Douglas is most known for.

The blank space is where all things are possible because nothing has been eliminated by your conclusions or judgments. Douglas calls it the “blankness of creation” because it is the space from which you can actually create everything you’ve been desiring. And he does mean everything—this applies to money, the relationship you’re looking for, the change in your body you’d like to have.

The blankness of creation is being willing to sit with the energy that you cannot define until it exposes itself as an energy that you can refine. The blankness is a lack of answer that is the beginning of awareness.

“I don’t know” is the one thing you are asked not to say in an Access Consciousness class.

We’re taught from the time we can talk to look for answers. We’re rewarded at home and school for cleverly coming up with “the right answer” that agrees with the adults around us.

Douglas has a broader definition of answer than you may ever have considered. An answer is anything that is a conclusion or a judgment because all of these block your awareness of anything that doesn’t match or agree with them.

Anything that ends with a period or full stop, in other words, is an answer. And plenty of sentences that end with a question are nothing more than statements or answers with question marks attached to the end of them.

The purpose of questions as he recommends them is not answer, says Douglas. The point of a question is to create awareness. Sometimes it takes hanging out in that blank space to allow that awareness to surface. This requires cultivating patience.

“The difficulty is that you all think that impatience is just a flower,” he wryly observes.

When you say, “I don’t know,” you are really lying to yourself, Douglas points out. “I don’t know” is a lie because, as an infinite being, is there really anything you don’t know? Whenever you buy a lie, even if it’s your own, you create an area in your life in which you cannot get clear.

Instead of saying, “I don’t know,” when asked a question, Douglas says, “I don’t have an answer for you right now.” When making that reply, he is acknowledging the potential of the blank space he’s willing to live in. From that blank space, awareness can occur, if he’s willing to sit with it long enough.

Even when we ask questions, we often do not use these questions to create awareness, unfortunately. Instead of asking questions that truly create awareness, we tend to ask questions that give us the sense that everything’s going to turn out fine, or reinforce the answer that we’ve already decided is correct. In Douglas’s book, these are not really questions.

In failing to ask and live as the question, we block our own awareness. That awareness has the ability to transform the solidity—including the lack and “stuckness” of our lives.