December 19, 2002 from HoustonPress Website
At first glance, they look like perfectly ordinary first-graders scribbling feverishly on the blackboard, but there is something striking about the boy’s deep blue eyes that suggests a maturity well beyond his years.
Jake’s in advanced classes and already
reading at a third-grade level. Jan is the quiet one, but has a
presence that immediately draws attention. Her predilection is
toward art, though at the moment she is choosing to write math
equations on the board, erasing them as soon as she’s completed each
of her computations.
These are babies
born with an inherent knowledge of art, language and spirituality,
possessing an impressive wealth of wisdom. Some will even go so far
as to say these kids are not only prime candidates for the gifted
and talented program, but the next step in human evolution.
The one thing all these groups do agree on is that the kids are out there, and they’re coming to teach us a lesson.
The term Indigo Child was coined 17 years ago by Nancy Ann Tappe, a parapsychologist who developed a system for classifying people’s personalities according to the hue of their auras, described in her 1982 book, Understanding Your Life Through Colors.
According to her,
auras have been entering and exiting Earth throughout history. For
example, aura colors such as fuchsia and magenta disappeared from
the gene pool 100 years ago (though she was recently shocked to find
a fuchsia living in Palm Springs). It stood to reason that a new
life color was about to make an appearance.
He found religion and started traveling around the world giving "self-help" seminars. Accompanying him was Tober, a practitioner of metaphysics and hands-on healing as well as a jazz singer who had toured with Benny Goodman and Fred Astaire.
The genesis of the book came when they began noticing similar accounts of strange behavior in children from teachers, counselors and psychologists who attended their seminars. As they began to look into these occurrences, they found kids were indeed being born with an "unusual set of psychological attributes" and displaying "a pattern of behavior generally undocumented before."
Using a collection of essays and interviews from experts in the field - mostly counselors working in such New Age areas as Angel Therapy and alternative medicines - the book focuses on raising an Indigo Child.
Some of the main attributes they describe are a sense of "deserving to be here" and "knowing who they are," difficulty with authority, a dislike of activities that don’t require creative thought and a feeling of royalty (and acting like it).
As a toddler, Jan sometimes spoke using her own language. Instead of "cookie," she would say "cookah" and refused to call a sandwich anything but a "phonic." Odder still, she didn’t begin speaking until she was three years old.
For Jake’s part, he had trouble
grasping the concept that he was not in charge. "He has to be told,"
Jake’s mother says. "He doesn’t think he needs permission."
Spence
noticed a similar idiosyncrasy in her granddaughter. "You have to
coax her to do her homework," she says.
She feels that must have something to do with Jan’s ability to see auras. She also points out the plant Jan drew with watermelons, pears and other fruit growing on it.
Jan doesn’t quite agree.
Like many Indigos, she’s very shy about discussing her abilities.
Once she has
drawn for a few minutes, Jan feels comfortable enough to talk. She
admits she feels she’s different "when Satan tries to come in my
head." Most of the time, she says, Satan tries to come in at night.
(Indigos often receive their visions through dreams.) Jan shrugs
when asked what sorts of information she receives, and continues to
draw. She says she knows she’s an Indigo because "my mother told
me."
What he needs to do in this world, she says, is to learn to be human.
The hardest part about raising an Indigo, she says, is not getting the chance to be parents.
She starts to recount one epiphany she had when her son realized some insects he caught had a mother and father.
Just the other day, Jake said he didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but that his other mother was prettier.
Jake runs into the school bathroom, slams and locks the door. "I’m not making fun of you," his mother calls after him. If she doesn’t talk about him, she explains through the door using her most soothing voice,
After a few moments, she says that Jake probably feels she’s betrayed his trust, since he doesn’t want other people knowing about his gifts.
Jackie Brahm, a local "medical intuitive" who counsels Indigos, says it’s not uncommon for their parents to have no control over them. Because they’re so advanced, the kids don’t feel like they have to obey.
According to Brahm, this is why many Indigos get misdiagnosed as having ADD or ADHD.
Through her practice, Brahm has been able to hone her abilities for spotting these special children, and says she’s been seeing an increasing number of them in public places.
She found one three-year-old Indigo recently at a museum, critiquing one of the paintings on the wall. When the mother asked her how she could know, the girl explained that she used to be a "master."
But when the mother asked if she would like to take up painting and demonstrate some of the abilities she learned in a past life, the girl thrust her hands on her hips, and said,
Similarly, Jan refuses to do her homework because it’s boring.
She often objects by saying,
Brahm says that behavioral problems usually lie with the parents.
To help, Brahm suggests including the children in the
decision-making process, even allowing them to determine the
punishments they should receive for infractions.
Giving a child too much leeway or too little guidance can cause problems because the last thing to develop in the brain is the ability for abstract reasoning and planning, he explains. Some people don’t fully develop that until the age of 30, he says.
For that, they need parents to guide them.
They often become underachievers, rebel or internalize their frustrations until they become depressed.
Back at the Baytown school, Jake finally wanders out of the bathroom and walks straight over to the chalkboard.
The reason he’s upset, he says, is his mother broke her promise not to tell people his secrets.
She told his best friend, after promising not to.
If the older Indigos are any indication, the future of these children is very much in doubt.
Spence’s daughter, who was an Indigo, had Jan at the age of 15. Because of her daughter’s problems with drugs and alcohol, Spence took over rearing Jan when she was only six weeks old. Brahm’s son, who is one of the first Indigos, was at the head of his class until the ninth grade, when he began to feel like he couldn’t continue functioning in normal society.
He stopped participating in school and started to fail his classes, eventually turning to drugs and alcohol.
Now he’s an auto mechanic with a wife and two Indigo kids.
Though working on cars doesn’t appear to be the career that will
bring the human race to the next state of consciousness, Brahm now
believes her son’s main purpose was simply to bring her
grandchildren, who are the real teachers. She admits that her son
and daughter-in-law, a fundamentalist Christian, don’t agree that
he’s an Indigo.
Indigos are also highly susceptible to peer pressure.
She believes her
12-year-old daughter will be the real teacher.
Owner Janet Dee has been known to have a soft spot for homeless kids, whom she often lets hang out in the store. Almost all of them, she says, are Indigos. One homeless Indigo youth, William Wolf, has a lot of "bad energy," Dee says, and sometimes he has to be asked to leave the Planet. (She confirms she’s referring to the store.)
Wolf once told Dee that all "cats and Jews" should die.
Many homeless Indigos do drugs and steal, Dee explains, because they just don’t know how to adapt to society’s strange, alien ways.
Brahm recounts the time she counseled a little Indigo boy who wanted to shoot people because he didn’t think anyone could stop him. Brahm explained to him that yes, he could shoot people, but he’d be put in jail.
"They don’t put little kids in jail," the boy said, but
Brahm
told him that oh, yes, they do. As long as they understand there’s a
consequence for everything they do, Brahm explains, they behave.
Just be careful to phrase it as an explanation, not an order.
Rachel Stegall is 26 years old with a bachelor’s degree in marine biology and works in a lab at University of Texas Medical Branch.
With Brahm’s help, she discovered that she was one of the early Indigos.
She always had a fascination with things from the past, particularly medieval weapons, and yearned to return to the Middle Ages because she wanted to "remember someplace that was happy."
She also loved to collect crystals, stones and fossils, and without anyone having to tell her, she instinctually knew that if she put the stones on her cat while it was purring, the vibrations would heal bones.
Discovering she was an Indigo made everything seem to fall into place.
Last summer
during a boat trip to the Amazon, she decided her purpose was to
teach people about protecting whales and the tropical rain forest.
The introduction to Carroll and Tober’s book An Indigo Celebration, published last year, proclaims somewhat incredulously that readers of their first book,
A brief
browse through their Indigo Children Web site certainly shows how
people might have come to that conclusion.
Each channeling begins with the greeting "This is Kryon of
Magnetic Service," directed to his followers, whom he refers to as Lightworkers. The messages contain instructions for communicating
with spirit, healing and reaching the next "level." Carroll is also
the author of several Kryon books, including
Don’t Think Like a
Human.
Boylan instead
believes parents are being abducted by aliens and having their DNA
manipulated to create enhanced offspring capable of telekinesis and
ESP. He’s seen absolute proof, but as so often happens in these
cases, it’s been locked away in some secret government lab. He
doesn’t suggest doing DNA tests on any Star Kids because any
irregularities are so subtle that they can be recognized only by an
expert. And as so often happens in these cases, the expert is dead
of cancer. (Or was that really the cause of death?)
People turn to weird ideas, he says, because they want to believe in something that transcends the ordinary, gives certainty in an uncertain world, or helps them deal with their own mortality.
Our brains are designed to find patterns,
and sometimes we just connect dots that aren’t there.
During their first meeting, Brahm informed Spence that her
brother was probably an Indigo, which was why he had such problems
dealing with our world. After hearing more about Spence’s difficult
daughter, Brahm determined that both Spence and Jan were probably Indigos as well. Brahm told Spence that her granddaughter had wanted
to be raised by her all along, but had to "go through Mommy" because
Spence couldn’t have children anymore.
These groups
tend to be intentionally vague about the specifics so that potential
converts can find whatever might fill an emotional void in their
lives. Although these ideas may provide peace of mind, Shermer
doesn’t buy the argument that they aren’t harmful. "What’s the harm
in doing drugs to avoid reality?" he asks. In the end, it’s always
better to believe harsh truths rather than comfortable lies.
What’s the difference between an Indigo and some kid who just doesn’t like to do homework or follow directions?
She is asked what she likes to do most in school.
He liked all the playtime, she says, because it was unstructured and gave him the ability to learn at his advanced pace. During playtime, she says, he could study the things he wanted to, without being confined to the same rote assignments as the other children. It bores him, she explains, because he’s so far beyond that.
Ah, the wisdom of children. Adults can always learn something from them. All they have to do is listen.
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