Are you committed to your spiritual path? It’s almost mandatory these days. Now that the Mayan calendar has fallen off the edge of the world, how are we to know how to live our lives? Doesn’t everybody need some kind of guru, whether it’s the bearded, beaded guy from India, alive or dead, or a contemporary version? What’s a self-respecting seeker to do?

Before you swear total allegiance to your path, you might consider this. What if you were already an infinite being?

“What’s that got to do with it,” you might ask. Quite a lot, actually. Does anyone on a path to enlightenment actually reach it? Or it is yet another standard by which to judge ourselves, yet another way to justify to ourselves how very wrong we are?

Would an infinite being need a path to enlightenment? If they’re infinite, would enlightenment be someplace they weren’t? Or would it, like everything and every place, be something they already are? Is it possible that in journeying on your oh-so-sacred-path to enlightenment, you were actually investing your energy in committing to keeping yourself a finite and limited being? Is that really in your best interest?

You may be grabbing your hat now, anticipating an even wilder ride into the future. Change is clearly accelerating on planet earth with no abatement in sight. If there’s no path because there’s no place you have to go, how are you ever going to decide anything? Is lying on the couch with the couch potato wand more choice than you can handle already? Are you wondering how to even survive once you pass the front door?

How are you going to choose?

Fortunately, thanks to the very different approach to self-help, spirituality, or personal growth—whatever your preferred phrase is—called Access Consciousness^®, there is a new, better, and easier way.

Founded by best-selling author Gary Douglas, Access Consciousness^® has a set of tools and processes that invite you to trust your most reliable guide yet—your own knowing!

“But you can’t know that!” is something that most of us were told by well meaning but misinformed teachers and parents since we began to talk. Unfortunately, rather than keeping us in our place, this admonition taught us to distrust our own inner knowing. What if this inner knowing were really our own personal pipeline to the wisdom of the universe, more accurate than anything anyone else could tell us because it’s uniquely ours? Who could possibly be more of an expert on you than you?

If this makes sense to you but you suspect your own knowing is gathering dust in a closet that’s been locked since you were five years old, there is still hope for you!

Douglas recommends an incredibly simple tool that will enable you to access that knowing, despite all the yard sale rejects you may have piled on top of it. What’s that tool? Ask questions!

“Questions empower, answers disempower,” notes Douglas. “When you ask questions, you create possibility. Answers create no possibility.”

In our lifelong training to take the path to answer-land, we tend to ignore the real purpose of a question. “If a question just leads you to another answer, what’s the point?” you might ask.

Therein lies our error. The purpose of a question is not to come up with an answer, but to create more awareness. That awareness may not pop up instantly when you ask the question, nor will it always come as you expect it. It probably will not simply appear as an SMS on your cell phone.

The key to the use of the question is to take it for a walk. Let the universe provide you with the information you’ve requested, without putting your own demands of time on that answer. It can take time for the universe to arrange everything to bring you the information you’ve requested with your question. And keep in mind that not everyone in the universe may cooperate totally and immediately with the universe’s work on your behalf.

And the answer may not look anything like you expect. In fact, “it will never show up the way you think it’s going to,” says Dr. Dain Heer, frequent co-author and co-developer of Access Consciousness® with Douglas.

The unexpected answer may come as a newspaper headline you see out of the corner of your eye, a sentence overhead at a neighboring table in a restaurant, or out of the mouth of a rap-music-playing skateboarder cruising down your street.

How do you know when to believe these messages from apparently random messengers? There’s another Access Consciousness® tool for that. What’s true for you will always make you feel lighter, while what’s not true or a lie will always feel heavy.

Douglas has yet another tool in assisting you on your journey off-road from your spiritual path to the land of the choice that’s always been available to you. That tool is another question.

“If I choose this, what will my life be like in 5 years?” he suggests you ask when faced with any choice. Five years in the future is not where most of us put a lot of energy, which is a key to how this tool works. It by-passes the decisions and judgments we have made about what we should be doing, since most of us haven’t put a lot of energy into what our lives will be like that far ahead.

How’s your path seeming to you know? Is trudging along it feeling a bit heavy? That’s a clue—one of the deceptively simple Access Consciousness® tools in action. Would you like to use that message from your own infinite knowing? If you do, what will your life be like in 5 years?