Jon Ronson meets the Indigo kids

by **nomo** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 5:46 pm

<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/family/story/0,,1837295,00.html">www.guardian.co.uk/family...95,00.html</a> The chosen ones Nikki Harwood believes her daughter is a super-evolved, psychic being with powers to heal the world. And she's not the only one. Jon Ronson meets the Indigo kids Saturday August 5, 2006 The Guardian Eight-year-old Oliver Banks thinks he sees dead people. Recently he thought he saw a little girl with black hair climb over their garden fence in Harrow, Middlesex. Then, as he watched, she vanished. When Oliver was three he was at a friend's house, on top of the climbing frame, when he suddenly started yelling "Train!" He was pointing over the fence to the adjacent field. It turned out that, generations earlier, a railway line had passed through the field, exactly where he was pointing. Oliver's mother, Simone, was at her wits' end. Last summer, at a party, she told her work colleagues about Oliver's symptoms. He wasn't concentrating at school. He couldn't sit still. Plus, he'd had a brain scan and they'd found all this unusual electrical activity. And then there were the visions of people who weren't there. Maybe he had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)? At that moment, a woman standing nearby interrupted. She introduced herself as Dr Munchie (her real name is Manjir Samanta-Laughton). She said she couldn't help but eavesdrop on Simone's conversation. She was, she said, a qualified GP. "Well, then," Simone replied, "do you think Oliver has ADHD?" Dr Munchie said no. She said it sounded very much like Oliver was in fact a highly evolved Indigo child - a divine being with enormously heightened spiritual wisdom and psychic powers. Oliver couldn't concentrate, she explained, because he was being distracted by genuine psychic experiences. She said Indigo children were springing up all over the world, all at once, unconnected to one another. There were tens of thousands of them, in every country. And their parents weren't all new age hippies. They were perfectly ordinary families who were realising how super-evolved and psychic their children were. This was a global phenomenon. Soon the Indigo children would rise up and heal the planet. Perhaps, Dr Munchie said, given this new diagnosis, Simone and Oliver might like to attend an Indigo children meeting at the Moat House Hotel in Bedford? Channel 4 was going to be there. Maybe the TV crew could follow Oliver about? Simone was desperate for answers. She wasn't going to close off any avenue. So that's how she and Oliver ended up appearing in the forthcoming C4 documentary My Kid's Psychic. It is a touching but badly named programme. Oliver isn't psychic. He has ADHD. I telephone Simone after watching a tape of the programme. She tells me he's responding well to cod liver oil. In the documentary, Simone looks bewildered to be at the Indigo conference, which seems like an incongruous mix of hippies and spiritualists and normal but frazzled families like hers. "That woman, Dr Munchie, seemed to be running it," Simone says. "Some of the people there were really away with the fairies. Most of them were. 'I see this and I see that.' One man was saying his children were 'the best people ever'. I don't want my child being called an Indigo child, thank you very much." Still, Simone doesn't regret appearing in the programme: "It really helped Oliver enormously to learn that other people see things." I'm curious to know more about the Indigo children - this apparently vast, underground movement. Although Indigos say they communicate telepathically, they also communicate via internet forums, such as Indigos Unplugged, which is where I discover a 21-question quiz: "Is Your Child an Indigo?" I decide to take it on behalf of my seven-year-old, Joel. "Does your child have difficulty with discipline and authority?" Yes. "Does your child refuse to do certain things they are told to do?" Yes, he bloody well does. "Does your child get frustrated with systems that don't require creative thought [such as spelling and times tables]?" Yes. This is getting eerie. "Does your child display symptoms of attention deficit disorder?" No. "Is your child very talented (may be identified as gifted)?" Of course! "Does your child have very old, deep, wise-looking eyes?" No. "If you have more than 15 yes answers," it says at the bottom, "your child is almost definitely Indigo." Joel has 16 yes answers. "Realise that if you are the parent of one of these spirits you have been given a wonderful, marvellous gift! Feel honoured that they have chosen you and help them develop to their fullest Indigo potential." I decide not to tell Joel that I'm honoured he's chosen me. It might turn him into a nightmare. I track down Dr Munchie. She lives in Derbyshire. I call her. She sounds very nice. She says it was the American author Lee Carroll who first identified the Indigos in his 1999 book, The Indigo Children: the New Kids Have Arrived. The book sold 250,000 copies. Word spread, to Ipswich among other places, where she was working as a GP within the government's Sure Start programme. "Sure Start is designed to give underprivileged children the best start in life," Dr Munchie explains. "One mum came in talking about it. And I immediately saw how important it was." Even though Dr Munchie is a GP - that most pragmatic of professions - she's always been secretly spiritual, ever since she had a "kundalini experience" while doing yoga during her medical school years. (A kundalini experience is a spiritual awakening that sometimes occurs during yoga.) And that's how she became an Indigo organiser. But, she says, I happen to be looking at the movement during a somewhat rocky period for them. "There have been lots of reports of parents saying to teachers, 'You can't discipline my child. She's an Indigo,'" Dr Munchie says. "So it's all a bit controversial at the moment." "Do you sometimes think 'What have I helped to unleash?'" I ask her. She replies that, in fact, she sees herself as a moderate force in the movement: "For instance, lots of people think all children who have ADHD are Indigo children. I just think some are." My guess is that the weird success of the Indigo movement is a result of a growing public dissatisfaction with the pharmaceutical industry. It's certainly true in the case of Simone, Oliver's mum. Simone told me that all the doctors ever really wanted to do with Oliver was dope him up with Ritalin. "Ritalin didn't help him," Simone told me. Then she added, sharply: "All it did was keep him quiet." No wonder that when Dr Munchie approached Simone at that party she was open to any idea, however nutty-sounding. Novartis, the drug company that manufactures Ritalin, says that in 2002, 208,000 doses of Ritalin were prescribed in the UK. That's up from 158,000 in 1999, which was up from 127,000 in 1998, which was up from a paltry 92,000 in 1997. I call Martin Westwell, deputy director of the Oxford University thinktank the Institute for the Future of the Mind. I tell him about these statistics. "You've got two kids in a class," he explains. "One has ADHD. For that kid, Ritalin is absolutely appropriate. It turns their life around. The other kid is showing a bit of hyperactivity. That kid's parents see the drug working on the other kid. So they go to their GP ..." Martin pauses. "In some ways there's a benefit to being diagnosed with ADHD," he says. "You get a statement of special needs. You get extra help in class ..." And this, he says, is how the culture of over-diagnosis, and over-prescription of Ritalin-type drugs has come to be. Nowadays, one or two children in every classroom across the US are on medication for ADHD, and things are going this way in the UK, too. Indigo believers look at the statistics in another way. They say it is proof of an unprecedented psychic phenomenon. On Friday night I attend a meeting of Indigo children in the basement of a Spiritualist church in the suburbs of Chatham, Kent. The organiser is the medium Nikki Harwood, who also features in the Channel 4 documentary. (Nikki's daughter Heather is Indigo.) Nikki picks me up at Chatham station. "There have been reports of Indigo children trying to commit suicide - they're so ultra-sensitive to feelings," Nikki tells me en route in her people carrier. "Imagine having the thoughts and feelings of everyone around you in your head. One thing I teach them is how to switch off, so they can have a childhood." Nikki pauses, and adds: "In an ideal world, Indigo children would be schooled separately." We pull up outside the church. Hoodies slouch around on nearby street corners. Inside, 11 Indigo children sit in a circle. "One kid here," Nikki whispers to me, "his dad is a social worker." The youngest here is seven. The oldest is 18. His name is Shane. He's about to join the army. "That doesn't sound very Indigo," I say. "Oh it is," Nikki replies. "Indigos need structure." And then the evening begins, with 15 minutes of boring meditation. "Allow your angel wings to open," Nikki tells them, etc, and I think: "I came all the way for this? Meditation?" But then it gets a lot more interesting. "I was with a baby the other day," Nikki informs the class. "I said 'Hello sweetheart' with my thoughts. The baby looked at me shocked as if to say, 'How did you know we communicate with each other using our thoughts?'" The Indigo kids smile and nod. Indigo organisers like Nikki and Dr Munchie believe we're all born with these powers. The difference is that the Indigo children don't forget how to use them. Then Nikki produces a number of blindfolds. She puts them over the eyes of half the children, and instructs them to walk from one end of the room to the other. The idea is for the un-blindfolded kids to telepathically communicate to the blindfolded ones where the tables and chairs and pillars are. Nikki says this is half an exercise in telepathy and half an exercise in eradicating fear. "Part of the reason why you are here," she tells the children - and by "here" she means put on this planet as part of a super-evolved Indigo species - "is to teach the grown-ups not to feel fear." The children nod. And the exercise in telepathy begins. And it gives me no pleasure to say this, but blindfolded children immediately start walking into chairs, into pillars, into tables. "You're not listening, Zoe!" shouts Nikki at one point, just after Zoe has collided with a chair. "We were [telepathically] saying 'Stop!'" "I can't hear!" says Zoe. Still, these children are having far more fun learning about their religion than most children do. I wander down to the front of the hall. Children's drawings are tacked up on a notice board - drawings of past lives. "I had people that waited on me," one girl has written next to her drawing of a princess. "I was kind but strict. Very rich, such as royalty." "There's one girl here," Nikki points out a little girl called Emily, "who had a real fear of being starved to death." Lianne, Emily's mother, comes over to join us. "She used to hide food all over the house," Lianne says. "Anyway," Nikki says, "we regressed her, and in the past life she'd been locked in a room by her mum and starved to death." "Emily is much better now," Lianne says, "since she started coming here." Lianne says - like many parents of Indigo children - she wasn't in the least bit new age before the family began attending Indigo meetings. She was perfectly ordinary and sceptical. She heard about the Indigo movement through word of mouth. It seemed to answer the questions she had about her daughter's behaviour. And she's very glad she came. Nikki says Emily happens to be "the most Indigo person here, apart from my own daughter. Emily will go into the bathroom and see dead people. She sees them walking around the house. It used to terrify her. Will I introduce you to her?" Emily is 13. She seems like a sweet, ordinary teenage girl. She offers to do a tarot reading for me. "Something is holding you back," she says. "Tying you down. You don't look very happy." "I'm fine," I think. "You're a little goldfish," says Emily. "Your dream is to turn into a big rainbow fish. It'll be a bumpy ride, but you'll get there. Just don't be scared. You're Paula Radcliffe. You just don't think you are." Earlier this year, the Dallas Observer ran an article about Indigo children. One eight-year-old was asked if he was Indigo. The boy replied: "I'm an avatar. I can recognise the four elements of earth, wind, water and fire." The journalist was impressed. After the article ran, several readers wrote in to inform the newspaper of the Nickelodeon show Avatar: the Last Airbender. In the cartoon, Avatar has the power to bend earth, wind, water and fire. The Dallas Observer later admitted it felt embarrassed about the mistake. When the Indigo meeting is over, Nikki gives me a lift back to the station. "Does it freak the children out to be told they're super-evolved chosen ones?" I ask her. "They were feeling it anyway," Nikki replies. We drive on in silence for a moment. "I've been police-checked," Nikki says, suddenly. "Another medium called the police on me. I've been accused of emotionally damaging the children." "And what did the police do when they came?" I ask. "They laughed," Nikki says. Then she pauses, and adds: "They told me they wanted to bring their own children here." Maybe - I think - they were just saying that to be polite. Or maybe they really meant it. · Cutting Edge: My Kid's Psychic is on Monday at 9pm on Channel 4 Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=nomo@rigorousintuition>nomo</A> at: 8/8/06 3:52 pm

by **bamabecky** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 7:32 pm

I would be very careful. The NWO types are on the hunt for kids like these. They could go missing and you will never know what happened to them, so be very careful about online activity or any other "group" activity. But then that's just me, and based on my reading. Research it, I recommend it. Bama Be the Media! Write a personal essay to your friends and family, telling them what's going on and tell them how and where to find more info.

by **biaothanatoi** » Tue Aug 08, 2006 7:56 pm

Secret bunkers full of children with ADHD. "Go, my pretties ... annoy ... ANNOY!"

by **HMKGrey** » Wed Aug 09, 2006 12:51 am

I've read a lot of Jon Ronson and I think he's basically very sound. His book 'Them' has an excellent piece on Bohemian Grove where he actually turns from nay-sayer and skeptic that it even really goes on in to a bewildered, followed and harrassed witness. I think that when he says it gives him no pleasure to report that the kids were hopeless at the blindfold psychic game, he really means it. I think, in general, he'd like to be astonished and amazed by things. Based on what I'm reading here, this sounds like hokum to me. If I'm a parent caught between a choice of ADHD and The Chosen Ones... Hmmmm... I know which way I'd jump.

by **bvonahsen** » Wed Aug 09, 2006 2:20 am

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>"Does your child have difficulty with discipline and authority?" Yes. "Does your child refuse to do certain things they are told to do?" Yes, he bloody well does.<hr></blockquote> Ummmm, hello? every parent faces this. This article belongs right next to the Madrassas American style thread. What these parents are doing is not that different.

by **yathrib** » Wed Aug 09, 2006 5:45 pm

Check out his "Men who Stare at Goats" if you *really* want to be unnerved.

by **Joe Hillshoist** » Wed Aug 09, 2006 8:24 pm

Last year, australian ... culture jammer (yeah right how about bullshit artiste and smartarse.) John Safran had an Indigo Child, tho she was in her 20s, speaking the star language that Indigos are supposed to all know. Safran is a classic. He's jewish and a St kilda supporter, and he was in an abc show called "Race around the World". He went to Israel, when St Kilda were having a shit season and put a bit of paper in the wailing wall, parying they would win. they did. hey then video taped himself streaking through Old Jerusalem wearing only a St kilda scarf. THEN he wewnt to the border between Lebannon and Israel, and started kicking his footy around. kicked it into the no mans land area, over a fence then went up and hassled the IDF guards to let him go get it. I swear it was some of the best tv I have ever seen. So anyway john safran had this show called John Safran vs God and another one that he did with a melbourne Catholic Priest - father Bob (macguire of Sth Melb parish) late lst year. They got this indigo child in to speak in her language. It sounded like gibberish to me. But it had a weird vibrato or something to it. like an audio aura..<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/laugh.gif ALT=":lol"> But the missus got it. She gave a rough translation. Thn the next week the Indigo Girl (not from the band), gave the translation. It was all this love and light greeting from the 12 plane of new age marketing bullshit, but the context was exactly the same as what my wife saiud. I asked her about all the flowery stuff and why she didn't translate it. She said: "As if I'm gonna say all that shit it sounds ridiculous." None the less she new exactly what it was. The next week when the chick was saying all that stuff, (they repeated her Starlanguage burst) my wife actually looked a bit embarassed. I just asked her then. What do you think of that Indigo child stuff? "It depends if its got enough internal strength to getfrom the subjective to the objective." Hah wtf "Everything's real it just depends on whether people can get it together to translate it into reality." I dunno it sounds like hippy shit to me. "You're just a nihilist. This is anti nihilistic. And you can't prove it wrong."Except the only time she has ever referred to it is when I ask her. She certainly doesn't mention it to anyone hat I know about ever. We are having a pretty tripped out conversation about it now. "We are all mutants in electromagniticity." <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/roll.gif ALT=":rollin"> <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/roll.gif ALT=":rollin"> <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/roll.gif ALT=":rollin"> <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/alien.gif ALT="0]"> <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/laugh.gif ALT=":lol"> <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/roll.gif ALT=":rollin"> <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/pimp.gif ALT=":hat">

by **professorpan** » Thu Aug 10, 2006 12:43 pm

I'm skeptical of the "indigo child" phenomenon, which seems like a new age strategy to portray high-functioning and problematic kids as advanced superbeings. After all, don't most parents think their children are special? I also worry about the effects it can have on the kids. What happens to a child who is convinced by his parents that he is different from the "normals"? What happens when he or she discovers that he/she is just a normal kid after all? I can't see how any kids can meet behavioral standards in the U.S. educational system in the post-No Child Left Behind era of relentless standardized tests, vanishing art and music classes, and dwindling physical education opportunities. It's no wonder so many of them fail to adhere to the behavioral norms -- grinding away at rote test-prep is a recipe for inattention, lack of interest in school, and misbehavior.

by **LilyPatToo** » Thu Aug 10, 2006 2:12 pm

Don't anyone faint, but profpan and I are in at least partial agreement. Another board where I hang out is full of New Agers and they predictably seized upon the Indigo Child idea and fused it onto the Ascension idea. And to me, the latter is just the latest religious control device/BS from the Controllers--a non-Christian substitute for the Rapture that will keep devotees focused upon it and their chakras as the elite plunders their world, unfettered by the critical attention of the masses. As for the kids themselves, though, while I deplore the nonsensical pseudo-religious trappings of the Indigo Child movement, I DO think that they are receiving approval and positive attention that they otherwise would not get. In the long run, I suspect that many will flourish emotionally instead of being damaged by the inevitable negative attention that their behavioral problems would have garnered for them. And since I grew up extremely psychic (precognitive) in the late 40's and the 50's, I'm here to tell ya that a little acceptance and support for kids who are different that way would have been tremendously welcome. There ARE psychic kids (and adults) among us and they are so abused and ridiculed by teachers and society in general that their abilities generally wither and die or at best are shoved deep inside them and hidden away. And that, to me at least, is a waste of tragic proportions. Humans evolved those abilities over millions of years and they are part of what makes us human. Not everyone has them, just as not everyone is a Mozart or a Rembrandt, but that makes the ones who are gifted a precious resource. I'm not sure that most of those kids are in fact psychics, but at least the ones who are will be praised and encouraged instead of ridiculed and reviled. And that's something. LilyPat

by **professorpan** » Thu Aug 10, 2006 2:34 pm

<blockquote>Quote:<hr>Don't anyone faint, but profpan and I are in at least partial agreement.<hr></blockquote> I can't recall an example where we disagreed...? And I agree with you that kids with special abilities (psychic or otherwise) should be made to feel safe and loved. My concern is with the concept of "indigo" children, which seems broad and nebulous. All kids should be treated as the magical, gifted beings they are.

by **LilyPatToo** » Thu Aug 10, 2006 4:38 pm

Perhaps I left my disagreements with you unposted, prof....But that's SO unlike me...?!<img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/wink.gif ALT=";)"> I suspect that the Indigo Kids fad is just another manifestation of New Age-iness, which, while promoting spirituality and psy awareness, has been co-opted as a control mechanism by TPTB and a source of enrichment by shucksters. The kernals of truth upon which it is based are buried in tons of BS and wishful thinking...just MHO, YMMV. And I suspect that a lot of ADHD and/or autistic kids are being born right now due to food additives, vaccines and pollution, not so that they can rescue us. Ronson is interesting and his book is on my list to get and read, but his message board tended when I was posting there to be polarized against mind control's reality, believe it or not. I was finally so exasperated by one of the naysayers that I just left after a very brief time there. That might be partly due to my posting just to a "wavie" thread that was being pulverized. (I posted mainly to support a survivor of electronic MC who I liked and had met on the MC boards, which are about 99% wavie--and no disrespect intended by the nickname...they just don't have any other brief way to refer to their oppression) LilyPat

Jon Ronson meets the Indigo kids

Jon Ronson meets the Indigo kids

If I were the parent of an Indigo

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