You Won't Fool the Children of the Revolution
(and that's part of the problem . . .)
By K.B.

If you could channel anyone - anyone at all - who would it be? I'd choose Groucho Marx. Or maybe, just for surrealism's sake, Harpo Marx.

Hi. I'm an indigo child; actually an indigo adult, because I'm from one of the early batches, 1972.

When I took up the offer to write an article about an indigo's experience I knew I would be writing about something in which I only partially believe. Reason and faith, sober sense and wild wishes make different arguments. I stand somewhere between them.

I know that I fit the indigo description, but I only half believe the metaphysical explanation that we are old souls come here to teach. My rational side is inclined to think that kids like me, unusual kids born in the sixties and later, were simply the predictable result of post-war social change: the children of the revolution.

It's ironic, but if there's one thing that makes me think I really might be an old soul, it's that I can't imagine teaching people how to boil an egg, let alone how to live. I want to sit out on a sunny porch with some friends and some old dogs. Who listens to old people anyway? They're not going to tell you the secrets of the universe. They're going to tell you about their piles.

But there's one thing I like very much about the idea of being indigo: system busting. Which is why I would channel a comedian. Imagine if everyone in the world, everywhere, wore a fake funny nose and glasses for one day? Or did Monty Python silly walks, or sang Gilbert and Sullivan?

I wonder, how seriously could we take our conflicts after that day?

Even though I don't have firm beliefs about what an indigo is, I can spot 'em. The younger ones have a brightness about them. Some are ethereal, some are harder and sharper, some seem manic; but they're all vivid. The older ones tend to be intelligent, cynical, and a bit tired. When I believe in us, I think of us as slightly seedy old spies, lurking on hotel terraces in places like Tangier and Marseilles, getting pickled in gin and perhaps waiting for that last bullet to come.

When I was a little girl I sometimes looked up at the stars and wondered, in a wistful way, which one was mine. I used to say things like, 'I want to go home,' and, a stranger thing, 'I want to go back to sleep.'

For there were times when I felt I was not human. I felt that I had been left here on earth by aliens, and that if only I could get the attention of the people in the stars they would come and take me home; or that somehow I could go home in my sleep, that these aliens travelled not only in spaceships but in the land of dreams. Yet I knew I couldn't really go back. I was on a secret mission, like James Bond. I was going to do some great things and have a lot of fun; I just had to get through this annoying, impotent stage called childhood first.

As I got older I stopped believing this. Reading literature of all kinds, I learned that to feel this inexplicable sense of exile is profoundly human. The expulsion from paradise is one of our oldest stories. Psychology can explain it in terms of the complicated human mind, with its inner dialogues and self-debate. We have externalised these inner separations into a sense of being separated from something external, an undivided peace for which we yearn. Surely, I thought, I had simply conceptualised that embracing peace as a spaceship, a space-age version of God and Paradise.

During my teens, I sought this peace through art, yoga, meditation and various kinds of personal development. And I succeeded quite well, achieving a conventional sort of tranquillity.

Then I had a dream. I was in a classroom, and a tall blue lady was teaching us about some sort of grid. I woke up with the dream in my head. I drew the grid, and started adding the dots together and doing all kinds of strange additions. I discovered patterns in the numbers and their digital roots. I didn't know what it was all about.

But then came the New Age, the ideas of the 11:11, Lightworkers, Melchizedek ambassadors, angels, greys, reptoids and all the rest. Including the planetary grid.

Was that what my dream had been about?

Bizarre coincidences started happening in my life. Perhaps this sounds familiar? People told me things I didn't want to hear. I heard that I was an angel, a fairy, a witch, an ET, an old soul from Sumeria, Atlantis, a galaxy far, far away. The reincarnation of Jesus Christ's twin brother. God. Couldn't they make up their minds? Personally, I fancy being a bodhisattva, but no one has ever suggested that I am one. Maybe I don't have enough arms. Anyway, bang went my tranquillity, and I didn't get it back until I distanced myself from most things esoteric.

But odd things still happen. Even my dentist recently said to me, out of the blue, 'You know, I reckon you and your husband could really set the world on fire.' See, I don't get overlighting archangels in my life. I get oracular dentists. Not that I'd have it any other way.

Perhaps some of you are wondering, "Why does she only half believe? How much evidence does she need? What a blockhead!" Indeed, I can be something of a blockhead. But perhaps I can explain why an older indigo might not believe something even when it's staring her in the face. Absurdity has been a big theme in my life. There has been good absurdity and bad absurdity.

Starting at the beginning, my mother suffered from depression and a violent personality disorder. (She got better, but that's a whole other, wonderful but long story). As well as being abusive at times, she needed to have special routines and systems to make her feel secure. The one I remember particularly was to do with clothes. She divided her clothes, and mine, into summer, winter and in-between weights, and insisted that we wear them according to the calendar seasons. We would change into summer clothes on the first of December (we live in Australia) and into winter clothes on the first of June, no matter what the weather. This was so obviously daft that even a very young child could see it.

My father was a very calm, rational man, agnostic but deeply ethical, and always able to give a logical reason for every request or decision he made. From him, I learned to be a rational skeptic at a young age. This stood me in good stead in arguments with my long-suffering mother. It also worked at school. I remember being about eight, in Christian education class. The teacher was giving the old spiel about an all-loving god who sends people to everlasting hell. I walked out. I couldn't understand why anyone would believe such a flawed premise, and I was furious at having my time wasted.

Looking back, I can see a string of easy lessons in system-busting. I couldn't have arranged for better basic training. As I got older, I began to appreciate that there are more subtle, insidious systems. My mother was afraid of her family. My father spent too much time on his work and not enough time with his wife and child. Teenage peer-group pressure was hell, but even while I hated the bullies I could see that they too were under pressure from forces that did them no favours.

Now for the good absurdity: I saw that people took such stupid things seriously! And I was just as prone to doing this (still am). But when we laughed, we were free. When we watched funny shows, when we laughed so much we fell off our seats, we were as free as birds. We moved into a kind of state of comedic grace, where we could see, in Monty Python's words, that 'It's all very silly!'

Sometimes my father was spontaneously silly in public. On one occasion he and my mother and I were walking down the main shopping street in town, in our good clothes, and my mother was scolding him about something. In reply, he stuck his false teeth out, slouched so that his knuckles dragged, and loped along the street like that!

My father, the maths professor, capered around like a monkey in the street, and nothing had any power to stop him. It was an enlightening moment.

So to laugh, to be detached, to see the ironies and absurdities, to be skeptical of all dogmas, became my number one strategy. And therein lies a splendid irony, a joke which has fallen on me: what self-respecting skeptic is really going to believe that she is an ancient being on a mission to help usher in a new age? It is funny, isn't it?

The jaws of rationality and humour which I developed for biting through dogma and convention have grown big enough to bite me on the bum. To half of me, it seems obvious that I am one of the Family of Light (probably a hillbilly cousin), and that I have been here for many lifetimes gathering information, revelling in Earth's beauty and mystery, and putting up with the occasional discomforts of living on such a wild frontier. But the other half of me can't believe it. It seems too crazy, and honestly too good to be true. Me? An intergalactic secret agent? Isn't it so very human to want to be special? So very human to want to be a god - even a god in training?

I do not know which is the truth and which is the illusion. Ask your heart, you might say. But I can't distinguish my heart's knowledge from my heart's desire. I suspect - though I have no evidence, let alone proof - that many older indigos might have come to this point of feeling that we are different, but not really able to embrace the idea that we are that different. If we are souls who have lived on Earth for a long time, maybe we've gone native. Yet I live a joyful life. The uncertainty of it all doesn't bother me. And if I close my eyes, perhaps it's because secret agents often prefer the cover of darkness.

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K.B. is a writer and artist who lives in Australia with her soulmate. When she was a baby she used to stare at apparently empty spaces and burst out laughing. She still does this. K.B. enjoys reading, nature documentaries, good conversations, keeping fit, and visiting exotic places. If she could have any lifestyle she would live on a boat, cruising around the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. She has what may be a past life memory of being a person with a lion-like head, and another of being a woolly mammoth called Big Loud Doug.

K.B. thinks it is worth incarnating on Earth just for the breathtaking scenery, the arts and the food.