Now that we no longer have the Mayan calendar or its expiration to worry about, how are you going to know what predictions to follow now? What if the best predictor of your future is actually YOU?

“Is it a truth or a lie that you cannot know the future?” asks Gary Douglas, best selling author and founder of Access Consciousness®.

“Far more of the future is available to us to know than we are willing to acknowledge,” Douglas says. Our judgments, decisions, conclusions and points of view about what it would be like to live in that future, keep us from knowing it and from using that awareness to our own advantage.

Perhaps as a young child you had a perception that someone was about to die—and you concluded you caused it just because you knew it. That conclusion could block your ability to perceive the future now.

If we were willing to look at everything as just interesting point of view, even the future we could perceive but not “like,” we could have more awareness than we now have. “Many of us work hard in order not to know what the future is going to look like,” Douglas says. In doing so, we make ourselves powerless in relation to the future.

There is another way, he points out. “If you were willing to know and be in allowance of it, then you could go, ‘OK, that’s interesting. I wonder what that’s going to look like?’ If you live as the question, then nothing throws you.”

The decisions and judgments that keep us from knowing the future can come from past lives as well as this one. If you were a seer in a past life and told people the future and you were killed for being a witch, you could easily have made a decision that you never wanted to do that again. Or people could have used your ability to see the future to make them money, and if it didn’t work like they wanted it to, they could have gotten you killed.

Another common point of view is that knowing the future would make our lives boring. “Not so,” says Douglas. Plenty of mystery remains if we’re willing to know and take advantage of the future we know, because it will always happen in ways we cannot foresee.

No matter what you ask for, “It never looks like you think it’s going to look,” Douglas’s business partner, Dr. Dain Heer, likes to remind his clients.

Another common misconception we have is that to know the future, we have to see it. If we don’t get that picture, we think we’re not seeing the future. We ascribe much too much power to those pictures. “The biggest mistake we make is thinking that knowing the future is a picture,” says Douglas. As Heer points out, “you cannot see energy,” yet the future is an energy.

Douglas says, “You can know the future, but it’s not a picture. People think that they can have a vision of the future, which is a picture of it. The vision of the future is really an energy, it’s not a picture of it. What if the picture is always a limitation anyway? The future is the one thing we have been told we have no access to. But that’s a lie.”

Knowing the future doesn’t mean seeing the whole movie—it can come in small increments and be as slight as “having a feeling” that you shouldn’t take a particular route to do an errand, only to find out entire sections of the highway you would have been on were closed. The voice of your parents or teachers in your head might be telling you, “You can’t know that!” but in fact, you did know.

In the experience of Douglas, who has been exploring consciousness since he was a child, our idea that time is linear is a distortion and a limitation. Time is actually much more simultaneous than we allow ourselves to perceive.

“If there is a simultaneity of time, space, dimensions, and realities, can you truly not know the future? Or can you only pretend not to know the future?” he asks.

There are some useful tools for every situation of every day that can also be applied here. These four questions, “What is this energy? What do I do with it? Can I change it? If so, how can I change it?” work just as well for the future you perceive.

Douglas taps into our unrecognized ability to know the future with a tool he currently shares with clients and seminar participants who would like assistance in making a choice. For every choice, he suggests asking, “If I choose this, what will my life be like in 5 years?” Five years from now is far enough away that our decisions and judgments about it are not fully formed enough to cloud our knowing.

If you’re willing to dare to see the future, there are some clearing statements you could run, if you chose.

How many lifetimes have you been a seer of the future? How many times have you lost your fortune or been killed for the fact that you’ didn’t get it exactly right? All the DJCCs you have around all that, will you revoke, recant, rescind, reclaim, renounce, denounce, destroy and uncreate it all? Right and wrong, good and bad, POD, POC, all 9, shorts, boys, and beyonds

What are you refusing to know, that you truly do know, that if you would allow it would change all realities and allow you to see the future? Everything that is, will you revoke, recant, rescind, reclaim, renounce, denounce, destroy and uncreate it all? Right and wrong, good and bad, POD, POC, all 9, shorts, boys, and beyonds

As you run the process, the energy will get lighter because you’ll be creating a willingness to perceive and receive the energy of the future. Douglas has several examples of how it could be quite useful to know the future. If you’ll allow yourself, you can feel the energy of it and figure out whether you want to go to that future or change it.

“If you lived in San Francisco and there was going to be a seven-point earthquake sometime in the next six months, would you want to be in town for that? No. By being willing to recognize that you can know the future, in order to create that lightness, that knowing there is this lightness you can experience, when the earth started to feel heavier, you’d go, ‘let’s go on vacation,’ and you would fly out of the city and the earthquake would occur. You would still be able to be in the light zone that you were in, because you were willing to see what the future was going to bring.”

“If you knew your friend was going to die, do you have control over whether they choose to die or not? No. But if you were willing to know that, would you choose to do something different now?”

What if instead of wishing and hoping for a happy new year, you could actually know what the future held? Would you dare be that potent?