Access Energy Transformation is an American "new age" practice founded by Gary Douglas of Santa Barbara, CA in 1990, and would have to be classified as an offshoot of Scientology, as Douglas spent many years in Scientology and Access has many ideas derived from there. Like Scientology, its goal is “clearing” of negative fixed ideas held in place by “emotional charge” acquired from incidents earlier in this life and/or past lives. To this end, “processes” are “run,” consisting of repetitive questions or statements, to stir up and then clear the charge.

Group-Oriented Clearing
Access places a far greater emphasis on "group processing" than Scientology does. In the group processing, it uses convoluted, repetitive “clearing statements” designed to confuse the conscious mind to bypass it so that the unconscious can be addressed and cleared. The workshops are a combination of teaching various Access therapies (mostly cognitive and hands-on physical), and the group processes run by the “facilitator” on the students. Access, being group-processing oriented more than one-on-one, is necessarily less ambitious than Scientology in its clearing goals, and is geared toward providing just enough clearing to help the person change his/her life for the better, often in one particular area.

Advanced Scientology?
Access processing is similar to the so-called “advanced levels” of Scientology only in that the student is handed themes (deemed to be universal) to clear by the facilitator (arguably, "leading the witness"), and in the use of repetition (called "repeater technique" in Scientology) until all available charge is felt to have been discharged. However, as in Scientology, although the students are told what themes to run, the process is not run unless it “reads” (is deemed to have charge on the group as a whole) at the moment before it is to be run. “Read” is another term taken from Scientology, although in Access it is not a physical read from a meter, but a psychic perception on the part of the facilitator. Access facilitators are taught to “follow the energy,” much the way a Scientologist is taught to follow the meter reads. Additionally, the Access facilitator is expected to be a sort of “orchestra conductor” of the energy, often using hand motions to “move” and dissipate the energy.

Exorcism
Another area it has in common with advanced Scientology is its use of exorcism, although the techniques are different. The Access techniques are simpler, and have the advantage of not requiring an answer from the entity being exorcised. Perhaps they have more in common with Catholic exorcist Malachi Martin's technique, which involved getting the "mission" of the entity and then addressing the entity's purpose and past purposes to get it to leave.

"Living in the Question"
Exorcism is not the only thing that doesn't require answers in Access. One of the most original Access concepts is the idea that one should not seek answers but, instead, should ask rhetorical questions of the universe. This is called "living in the question." For example, if things are not going well, repeatedly ask "what is right about this that I'm not getting?" until some hidden truth emerges or things start synchronistically going well again. Or if something surprising happens, ask the universe "how does it get better than this?" whether the event was good or bad, which invites (rather than demands) the universe to give you something better. Much of Access philosophy involves the issue of abandoning conscious control and opening self up to infinite, unforeseen possibilities.

Size and Importance as a Movement
As of 2006 Access largely consists of Gary Douglas jetting around the world (mostly the U.S. and Australia/New Zealand) delivering 4-day workshops, with an additional few dozen other facilitators in a handful of cities around the U.S. and “down under” delivering lower level classes, which consist of both clearing and training in the basic techniques of Access. On a scale where Transcendental Meditation and Scientology are considered major new age practices, with Eckankar and Reiki perhaps only "minor-major" practices, Access would probably qualify as a "major-minor," with less than a thousand serious practitioners around the world and little organizational structure, but well above the various emerging practices one sees at new age expositions or psychic fairs. Unlike many of these practices, Access avoids the controversial tactic of declaring Access to be “the only way,” and in fact most Access practitioners are involved in other new age practices.

The official Access website is http://accessraz.com/

Sources

http://accessraz.com/
http://www.accessbeing.com/
http://www.access4oneness.com/