Most young children live in a paradise state. This is not an accident.

The Taoists say that when the child is in the womb, breathing the mother’s blood, they exist in Early Heaven, a state of complete union with the Tao.

The moment a child takes their first breath, Later Heaven (this physical dimension) begins, and it is from that first breath that their destiny unfolds.

Watch any child in the first four or five years of life, their heart is wide open, love and creativity pour out of them, they are fully connected to the Tao, without knowing it and without trying. But then something happens, some painful experience closes the heart just a little. Again, and again.

The Tao intends for this to happen so that through the right use of our will we can rediscover it and complete the potential that heaven seeded in us at conception. This is the True Expression that only you can bring into the world.

The Tao Te Ching opens by telling us that the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. The moment we name something we are already separate from it. Interestingly, in Taoist teaching, the word for name also means destiny and illumination. It is the naming of things, the uniquely human capacity to attach meaning to experience, that creates both our separation from the Tao and the possibility of our return to it by fulfilling our destiny.

We each have to lose the connection to rediscover it, to separate from the Tao in order to return to it. And when we return we do not return as children, but as sages. Every experience we have lived, every wound and distortion of our virtue becomes wisdom and that wisdom then becomes food for other human souls. This is the great mystery of life.

This quiz is designed to point you toward the unburdened heart of your early childhood, and the gross and subtle masks we carry to protect us from the orginal pain of that closing. No one finds rest untill this is done.

It is my deepest intent that everyone who takes this quiz reawakens their original unburdened heart and completes their destiny. Your true expression is not just for you. You are the one that we have all been waiting for, the one who, by their own liberation, liberates the world. There is no greater thing a human being can do with the life they have been gifted by the Tao.

With Love Andrew Kenneth Fretwell.