'I was an Indigo Child'

Plus: a great new study finds worryingly-high levels of psychedelic abuse

Before we begin - come to this online conversation about psychedelics and Christianity with Elizabeth Oldfield, author of Fully Alive and host of the Sacred Podcast, on Tuesday October 8th. Paid subscribers to this Substack or Liz’s Substack get a free ticket - details below.

Arturo was born in Mexico in the 1990s. His parents moved to Texas after his mother was mugged at a grocery store and his father decided the country was too dangerous. The family moved to San Antonio, where his mother tried to fit in with the expat Mexican community. Arturo recalls:

She got caught up in this rat-race, Desperate Housewives situation – who has the best Louis Vuitton handbag, that sort of thing. She was always trying to fit in and somehow always falling out with her friends. Eventually, she got into New Age spirituality.

Arturo and his younger sister were sent to a private Catholic school, ‘the sort where they teach evolution but say ‘this is just a theory’.’ One day, when Arturo was 13, his class were set a project – they each had to present on an emerging scientific phenomenon.

My mother said to me, ‘I have the perfect topic for you’. She had recently gone down this rabbit hole about ‘Indigo Children’. She gave me all this information about it. I was 13, into comic books, and it sounded cool to me, sort of like X-Men or Harry Potter. So I did a presentation on Indigo Children in my school, under the impression it was scientific fact. I told my class how there were these children appearing around the world with psychic powers, how they were the next stage in evolution and they were here to heal the world.

The presentation didn’t go down well.

My teacher stared at me, like ‘what are you talking about? Sit down.’ He thought I was trolling them. My friends thought it was funny. I really believed it. I still thought my mother was a reliable gatekeeper of information.

Arturo’s foray into Indigo culture didn’t end there. He did very well at school, often with very little effort, and he was enrolled in various programmes for talented children. He then dropped out of school and was homeschooled while living with his mother (his parents had separated by that point).

She was more and more into New Age culture and at some point she decided I was an Indigo child, and I needed special education. She introduced me to this woman who she said could be my homeschool tutor. This woman was full-on woo-woo. She told me, ‘I’ve met with many Indigo children and you’re the most special. You’re going to be my star pupil. It’s super-important we cultivate you and don’t waste this opportunity’. She had plans for this whole Indigo Academy. It sounded like Jedi training or Professor Xavier’s X-Men Academy.

Arturo felt uncomfortable about the pitch.

It felt like a hype session and made me really uncomfortable. She said ‘you could be president’, and I was like ‘I’m not even an American citizen yet’. And she and my mother were really dismissive of my younger sister in the meeting. My sister had stayed at school while I was homeschooled, and she worked really hard while I sort of breezed through tests. My sister asked the teacher ‘what about me?’. The Indigo teacher said something like ‘you’ll be a really good employee’ – a sheep, basically, that was the implication.

The idea of Indigo Children was introduced in the 1970s by psychic Nancy Ann Tappe, and then turned into a cultural phenomenon by a 1988 book by self-help teachers Lee Carroll and Jan Tober, called The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived.

As Jon Ronson has explored, the trend of indigo children exploded in the Nineties and Noughties, partly as a reaction to the rise of ADHD as a child diagnosis, and the increasing prescription of Ritalin as a medication for restless young children. Parents drawn more to wellness / spirituality / natural healing could come up with their own diagnosis – my special child doesn’t have ADHD, they’re an Indigo Child and they’re going to heal the world.

Ronson visited a special school for Indigo Children where they walked around the room blindfolded to develop their psychic powers. ‘It gives me no pleasure to say this’, Ronson writes, but blindfolded children immediately start walking into chairs, into pillars, into tables’.

The theory that a higher species of human is evolving with psychic powers is a staple of evolutionary spirituality, going back to Theosophy, Bucke’s Cosmic Consciousness, HG Wells’ Star Children, Aleister Crowley’s Moon Child, Dune, Arthur C Clarke’s Childhood’s End and so on. You even find it in Silicon Valley transhumanism today, with the idea that through reproductive technology you can engineer a superbaby, call them Titan or X Æ A-12, then watch as they conquer the universe.

A book about highly evolved ‘Star Children’, from a Waldorf school educator

As I’ve written before, evolutionary spirituality can have a tendency to spiritual narcissism – we the special ones are more evolved than the sheep-like masses. With Indigo Children, the spiritual narcissism of the parent is projected onto their hapless children – our child is spiritually gifted and will probably save the world. The New Age parent doesn’t seem to consider what it’s like for the child to have this narcissistic vision projected onto them – the expectation you’re a World-Saving Avatar.

New Age parenting and the risk of spiritual projection

Arturo didn’t join Jedi school and didn’t believe he was an Indigo child. Instead, he says:

That was the moment I realized my mother was not a normal person. I came to feel I was actually taking care of her. She was kind of a borderline narcissist, prone to making stuff up and then believing it. Kind of like Trump.

Ultimately, Arturo’s mother joined a sort of multi-level marketing coaching organisation based in Sedona.

It was kind of a cult, but a relatively benign one, run by two ‘gurus’, both of whom had been part of Osho’s movement. She spent a lot of money on their courses and rose up the pyramid scheme. And she became somebody in that organisation. It was like she found what she was looking for – acceptance, community recognition and a feeling of being special.

Arturo says the long-term impact of the Indigo episode wasn’t on him, so much as on his sister.

I think being written off as ‘you’re just an employee or worker drone’ really impacted her. It made her work even harder at school, to prove that lady wrong. Since being homeschooled I have stumbled my way through various creative gigs, meanwhile, she won all these scholarships to train as a lawyer, and she’s now an incredible litigator working on immigration.

What’s the moral of the story? Don’t tell your kid they’re a highly-evolved, world-saving avatar?

After the paywall, a fascinating new study (n=2600)  finds one in four people report adverse events during or after psychedelics, including 13% who say someone tried to sexually assault them when they were tripping. Plus a new documentary pulls back the curtain on widespread child sex abuse in the Osho cult.