With the sound of their new school bell, the fifth graders at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School here closed their eyes and focused on their breathing, as they tried to imagine “loving kindness” on the playground.1—New York Times
By Berit Kjos
During a flight delay in Chicago in the late nineties, I spent my time browsing the airport bookstore near my terminal. When a young woman next to me picked up a copy of Conversations With God, the first book in the popular series by Neale Donald Walsch, I had to ask, “Are you familiar with that book?”
“A friend told me I should read it,” she answered. She then told me she was a Christian.
“But it’s not about Christianity,” I warned her. “It may sound good and use a lot of Christian words, but its message turns God’s truth upside down.”
She thanked me and put the book back. My thoughts drifted back to a Christian conference some years earlier where several publishing house editors had concluded that the “New Age movement had peaked.” No need for more books on that topic, they said, for the faddish seductions of the “beautiful” side of evil would soon fade away.2
They couldn’t have been further from the truth. While those early blooms of occult enticements might have peaked in interest among Christians, the seeds of deception sown during the 1960s and 1970s had already taken root in well-cultivated soil across America. Since then, the poisonous fruit disseminated through The Beatles, Napoleon Hill, Shirley MacLaine, Marianne Williamson, Hindu gurus, goddess worshippers, and countless other spiritual advocates of New Age spirituality has sprouted everywhere—in schools, churches, movie theaters, television, books, the news media, and the Internet. Syncretism, mysticism, and a subjective self-focused spirituality have become the norm.
So it was no surprise to learn in January of 2003 that the award-winning movie Indigo would be released at select theaters and churches in all fifty states and forty countries. Starring the famed New Ager, Neale Donald Walsch, who scripted his occult Conversations with God into the public stream of consciousness, it would surely accelerate America’s paradigm shift toward a global “new” spirituality incompatible with the one true God and His Word.
Wondering whether to see the movie or not, I searched the Internet. I discovered that the Indigo child concept was first popularized by the book, The Indigo Child, written by husband and wife team Lee Carroll and Jan Tober. “Carroll also portrays himself as a channeler for ‘Kryon,’” says one reviewer, “a spiritual entity [demon] who predicted the coming of the Indigo Children.”3
I found this description of the movie:
INDIGO is a film about loneliness, redemption, and the healing powers and grace of the new generation of Indigo (psychic and gifted) children being born into the world.4
The Metagifted Education Resource Organization (MERO) website gave an interesting description of the Indigo personality:
Being Indigo is not a disorder! It’s a Spiritual Evolution that manifests physically and appears to be a Cultural Revolution. This is the new Aquarian energy. . . .
Indigo Children . . . The name itself indicates the Life Color they carry in their auras and is indicative of the Third Eye Chakra, which represents intuition and psychic ability. These are the children who are often rebellious to authority, nonconformist, extremely emotional and sometimes physically sensitive or fragile, highly talented or academically gifted and often metaphysically gifted as well, usually intuitive, very often labeled ADD, either very empathic and compassionate OR very cold and callous, and are wise beyond their years. . . .
Their nonconformity to systems and to discipline . . . will help them accomplish big goals such as changing the educational system. . . . The Indigo Children are the ones who have come to raise the vibration of our planet! These are the primary ones who will bring us the enlightenment to ascend. . . .
About 85% or higher of children born in ‘92 or later, 90% born in ‘94 or after and 95% or more born now are Indigo Children!5
Even two weeks before the opening date, theaters in my state were sold out, but seats were still available in alternative “churches” such as Unity, Unitarian, Congregational, and Christian Science. After much prayer, I bought a ticket from a local Unity “church” and went to the movie.
The Indigo child in the film was the granddaughter of Ray, the character played by Neale Donald Walsch. Arrogant and self-confident, the precocious Grace followed her feelings and conversed with the invisible spirit world that both filled and surrounded her. Mental telepathy, divination, necromancy (communication with the dead), and the “healing touch” came naturally to this Indigo child, for she had intuitively tapped into a “universal force”—a seductive reservoir of occult wisdom, strength, and “prophetic” voices.
According to the movie script and to the promotional message from the producers, all who were touched by Grace’s life—including her grandfather—were transformed:
The dramatic core of the film is the relationship that develops between a man whose life and family have dissolved due to a fateful mistake and his 10-year-old granddaughter with whom he goes on the run to protect her from a would-be kidnapper. Along the way, he discovers the power of his granddaughter’s gifts which forever alter the lives of everyone she encounters.6
Grace was aloof, willful, sassy, and disrespectful. The list sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The profile is typical of television-trained children from today’s permissive homes. But in the context of this fictional movie, those contentious attitudes made Grace a valuable change agent within her dysfunctional family. And since the script was written to affirm her condescending ways, I was not surprised by the laughter and cheers from the audience. The fact that contemporary children share many of Grace’s characteristics only strengthens its metaphysical message: “Send the energy” to everyone.
Free from the traditional disciplines and boundaries, Indigo Children claim self-determination as their right and follow no authorities but their own inner voice. In light of the supposed interconnectedness between human spirits and the universal force, it all fits together. As the Indigo movie and its producers (James Twyman, Neale Donald Walsch, and Stephen Simon) claim, this god is guiding the “evolution of humanity”7 toward world peace and universal oneness under a socialist/spiritual system.
This is the world today’s children have been born into—a world where every child is at risk of being drawn in, influenced, and transformed by the “prince of the power of the air.”
Children and New Age Mindfulness Meditation
Unbeknownst to most parents, America’s public schools are teaching their children to use mindfulness meditation (Eastern-style meditation or TM). In a New York Times article titled “In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind,” elementary children in an Oakland, California school are promised peace and loving-kindness if they will learn to meditate. An eleven-year-old explains, “I was losing at baseball, and I was about to throw a bat . . . The mindfulness really helped.”8 While that may sound like a great thing to a lot of teachers, the article acknowledges where this comes from:
As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment. This is what is known as mindfulness training, in which stress-reducing techniques drawn from Buddhist meditation are wedged between reading and spelling tests.9 (emphasis added)
A whole new generation of children is being drawn into New Age/New Spirituality, and it is happening right under their parents’ noses. While some of us grieve the real-world consequences of this cultural revolution, a rising chorus of voices are now demanding acceptance of today’s paradigm shift. Their positive spin inspires visions of an evolved humanity that is bursting out of the old shackles of Christian morality, traditional guidelines, and parental restraints. This new civilization reminds me of Isaiah’s ancient warning:
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour: the child shall behave himself proudly [insolently] against the ancient [the elder], and the base against the honourable. (Isaiah 3:5)
The promise from the New Age is world peace, but it’s not God’s kind of peace; thus, it is not a true and lasting peace! As enticing counterfeits develop, they will surely widen divisions among those who call themselves by the name of Christ. While the world calls for unity at any cost (a whatever it takes approach), His people can’t conform to its ways, visions, hopes, or dreams. “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword” (Matthew 10:34).
On the other hand, our Lord has promised peace, strength, and eternal hope to all who know, trust, and follow Him:
Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you: not as the world giveth, give I unto you. Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid. (John 14:27)
But those who heed counterfeit promises and seek spiritual favors from occult sources become blind to His grace. Deceptions will multiply, and sadly, children are deception’s biggest targets. In this precarious situation in which we find ourselves, we should remember the Bible’s warnings:
Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. (Colossians 2:8)
I want to draw your attention to the Armor of God—God’s special refuge for His children—which the Bible tells us to “put on” (Ephesians 6:10-18). Now, perhaps more than ever, our children need its daily protection against the world’s deceptive lies and enticing lures.
(Berit Kjos is the author of How to Protect Your Child from the New Age and Spiritual Deception, a handbook for parents and grandparents to equip their children on how to remain in the Christian faith and not become spiritually deceived.)
Endnotes:
1. Patricia Leigh Brown, “In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind” (The New York Times, June 16, 2007).
2. This conclusion was shared at a Christian Writers Conference, which I attended in the early nineties, soon after my books Your Child and the New Age (now published by Lighthouse Trails under the title, How to Protect Your Child from the New Age and Spiritual Deception) and Under the Spell of Mother Earth had been published. Both books were selling briskly, but others who shared my concerns would have little opportunity to share their messages through Christian publishers. Apparently they found little interest among Christians for such warnings. Robin Evans, “Spiritual awakenings: “Young Children Learn the Rituals of Their Parents’ Religions (San Jose Mercury, February 2, 2005).
3. Lori Anderson, “Indigo: The Color of Money” (http://selectsmart.com/twyman.html).
4. Amazon’s IMDB movie site: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379322.
5. Wendy H. Chapman, “What’s an Indigo Child?” (Metagifted, http://www.metagifted.org/topics/metagifted/indigo).
6. “Independent film, ‘Indigo’ premieres in two local screenings,” (Bozeman Daily Chronicle, January 27, 2005). Excerpt: “More than 90,000 people will view ‘Indigo’ during the two-day event. For the 60 million Americans who consider themselves ‘spiritual’ but not necessarily ‘religious,’ a new genre of film is rapidly emerging—films with heart and soul—called ‘spiritual cinema.’”
7. Sharon Jayson, “Does the Science Fly?” (USA Today, May 31, 2005).
8. Patricia Leigh Brown, “In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind,” op. cit.
9. Ibid.
