Autumn Sage Hands, age eight, paints and writes with the depth of a 50-year old. One painting, "full of blasts of color and crosses, displays a forlorn woman standing naked and alone, one tear rolling down her cheek."

Autumn describes her painting: "I let it just be what it was." Since age five, she has also been a writer. "Many peepl yel for the love of ther life,” she once wrote. "Do many people cry for the lost of ther life.

Staring into a campfire at age three, she calmly told her mother, "Our dreams are alive in our hearts."

Autumn and countless other children have been refered to as Indigo Children, "children of the new earth," children or now young adults mostly under 20 who are especially spiritually attuned. Said to radiate indigo auras, these young people, it is said, have come to help advance human consciousness toward peace and understanding."

"New Age bunk! Woo woo stuff!" cries professional crabby magician James "The Amazing" Randi. Randi has made a name for himself not as a stage magician but as a debunker of mystical claims of the supernatural and paranormal.

He calls the whole Indigo phenonena nothing more than a mystical rip-off which plays to every parent's desire to see their children as extraordinary.

"They don’t know the difference between fantasy and reality," Randi said of the parents. "This is woo woo stuff. People just love it."

"These kids are leaders,” said Amy Jin Schmelzer, 27, a lecturer from Dubuque, Iowa. “They show us our potential in human form.”

Nancy Ann Tappe, a San Deigo parapsychologist, first described the Indigo phenomena , according to the book The Indigo Children. Tappe claimed to be able to see auras, those glowing lights or emanations from the body. The color of the aura is said to describe or define the nature of the person.

In the late 1970s Tappe says she noticed a new color surrounding a growing number of children — indigo, the color of enlightenment, had “entered the Earth plane.”

In Indigo Children, Carroll and Tober offer a checklist of attributes that Indigos share. Among them:

• They feel like royalty and they deserve to be here.
• They are full of self worth.
• They have difficulty with absolute authority.
• They will not respond to “guilt” discipline.
• They find ritualized systems frustrating and uncreative.
• Absent the company of like-minded people, they turn inward and can seem anti-social.
• They often have a stubborn sense of mission.
• They often are smart, intuitive, restless, creative and rebellious.
• Some Indigo children have been said to see spirits or auras and possess psychic abilities.

[Mary is leaning over my shoulder as I write this, and just said, "That sounds just like you, Mr. Indigo! But you're a bit older than 20!"]

Some people claim that the phenomenal increase in the number of children with ADD and ADHD is a result of this influx of enlightened Indigo children, and that drugging the over-activity out of them is wrong.

“It’s all a bunch of hand-waving,” said critic and Dallas physician Timothy Gorski of the National Council Against Health Fraud. Not only can the list of Indigo “traits” fit virtually every child on the planet, he said, but believing the hype could keep children with ADD or ADHD from getting needed help.

"Who cares if scientists protest? Belief is belief," Autumns mother said. “A long time ago, the Earth was also flat, according to a lot of people.”


Indigo Children | New Age | Auras

Idea and quotes from Kansas City Star