A VIBRATION OF LOVE
Interview with Sandie Sedgbeer
On Children: Kahlil Gibran, from The Prophet That's what we asked Sandra Sedgbeer, managing editor and publisher of Children of the New Earth, a glossy magazine devoted exclusively to the care and feeding of these extraordinary "new" kids. In reading this interview, you will be touched and moved by their open, loving hearts, formidable psychic powers and bold determination to bring all of us into the world of our dreams. Judith: Sandie, will you start us out with a general description of the attributes of these Indigo and Crystal children? Sandie: The characteristics that many, many people are finding--including mainstream parents who know nothing about Indigos, Crystals or even spirituality--is that these children seem to have incredible gifts. They seem to be more gifted and in many ways more confident than previous generations. They also seem to have more challenges, in terms of health and educational needs. It's my view that what's going on is a general evolutionary leap in our biology. These kids are very aware of who they are, and they're not the old sit-still-and-be-quiet children that we were trained to be. They seem to be very connected spiritually, and they have a highly developed social consciousness. J: Yes, and all of that aligns with the characteristics of the highly creative person, especially the highly creative child. In the mid-1980s, I wrote an in-depth series of articles on creativity, and if I may, I would like to trace these characteristics to see if you find the same correlations. S: Yes, go ahead. J: Highly creative people draw on both hemispheres of the brain, but especially enjoy the creative, intuitive and visuo-spatial right brain. Problem-solvers by nature, they seek patterns, challenge assumptions and question everything—especially rules, rituals and boundaries. They are known as “system busters.” Creative children raised by open-minded, tolerant parents are self-accepting, confident, observant, independent and bold. In relationships with like-minded people, they are sociable and easygoing, empathetic and intuitive enough to be aware of other people’s unconscious motives. When with people of unlike consciousness, they feel misunderstood so turn inward and seem antisocial. The ordinary school setting is very difficult for creative children, who like to move around and find the classroom’s forced uniformity insulting to their imaginations, freedom and autonomy. I know these traits must be sound familiar to you, Sandie, and might strike a chord in our readers too. These are not the characteristics of our modern, techno-literate kids rising to high parental expectations. Rather, highly creative people are by nature extra-ordinary; by definition, they are the avante garde, the advance guard that moves us to the evolutionary edge. So am I describing here some of the key traits you're seeing in these new children? S: Absolutely. You've got a complete description. I think they are here to teach us how to change. They are here to shake us up, out of our apathy and the old system. We kind of get into a groove and keep going in the groove, because it's easier to do what we've done before than to change. And I think we desperately need the change. J: Is that why they are cropping up right now in such unprecedented numbers? S: Personally, I think it's all part of the grand plan; that this was always destined to happen, provided we did certain things along the way and made the conditions right. And what better way to change society than through our children? The interesting thing I’m finding is the number of calls I get every day from people--parents, teachers, healers, therapists, grandparents--who want to talk about these kids, because they've never come across them before. They're new, they're excited by them, but they're also a little bit scared of the changes they see and the changes these kids are forcing them into. Now you might not want or seek change because you like the way things feel or the way things work. But if you have a child or a grandchild who is different, who is forcing you to think and look outside the box, your love will be so great that you will do anything to make sure the child is safe, that all its needs are taken care of, that everything adapts to what works for this child. It's absolutely perfect on a spiritual level, because we will all move forward for the sake of a child. Whenever I give talks on this subject, I always start off by saying, "There's a revolution going on and it's happening in your home, and it's being led by your children." In the 1960s it was the teenagers and the twenty-somethings who led the revolution, who took us out of the old ways of the '30s, '40s and '50s. Now the grandchildren of those revolutionaries of the '60s are leading this decade. J: You're saying that they are our teachers. S: Absolutely. It just makes me laugh when people think they can teach these children. We may teach them the ways of this world, but on every other level, they're teaching us. Every level. J: I agree. I was struck by the numbers mentioned in Nancy Ann Tappe's article--Nancy being the intuitive who saw the indigo colors in the children's auras. She says that 90 percent of the children under age 10 are Indigos. She doesn't know when these kids started coming in, but she noticed the indigo color around 1982. If so, this puts quite an onus upon us to educate these kids differently, by steering away from authoritative discipline and one-answer-fits-all classrooms, because this is really antithetical, isn't it, to these kids and will squelch their abilities—the very abilities we need to solve the problems of the world. S: Yes. Lee Carroll, who wrote the first Indigo book and is great friends with Nancy, believes that the main crop started arriving in 1972, while “advance parties” of small numbers of Indigo “scouts” actually have been arriving for as long as 50 years, to test the waters, so to speak. Those people had a really hard time. We receive letters from people in their 60s and 70s who have struggled their whole lives, and understandably so, because when there's only a handful, society is going to try to force anyone who is different to fit into its prescribed modus operandi. It's not until we're looking at this on a much bigger scale that we begin to think there’s something else happening and we need to address it. My own daughter was born in 1974 and I didn't know until two years ago that she was an Indigo child. Steve Rother first identified it for us. Steve is the first person to bring in the information about the next crop of kids called the Crystal children. When he said that Gemma was an Indigo, it resonated so deeply within me and explained so much about her, because she had a really hard time growing up: at school, with friends, a very hard time. She didn't begin to find herself until she was about 25 or 26. I found out recently that these kids don't really settle into their skins until about that age. J: That's interesting to me, too, because in reading your magazines last night, I realized that both my daughters fit the Indigo description. I didn't have the label, but I knew this back in the 1980s while doing my research on creativity. They were different from other kids and suffered terribly for it. My youngest daughter, in particular, is a psychic empath who picks up and experiences other people's emotions very easily, especially fear. She is able to spend hours and hours, as you mentioned in the magazine, working with art or whatever other creative occupation she's enjoying at the moment and never look up. Yet despite these enormous powers of concentration, when she's in a room with disruptive or angry people, she disintegrates mentally and emotionally. S: How old is she? J: 24. She was born in 1980. S: Well, you know there can also be a blending of characteristics. People say, "Oh, if they fit this, they're Indigo. If they fit that, they're Crystals." But I think what happens is there are blendings going on, with gradual transitions from one type to another. There are a lot of Crystal scouts here. The qualities you're describing, this thing about fear, feeling fear and getting unsettled by fear, is very much a Crystal characteristic. I personally don't like the labels. We don’t really like to categorize children, or to exclude any of them, or mark others out as being “special,” because all children are special in their own unique way. To some degree, all children have these qualities. Some are recognized, some aren't. I think that eventually we’re not going to have any labels. We’re just going to call them children. It is for this reason that we designed the magazine to appeal to mainstream parents, as well as those who have some interest in and knowledge of spirituality and the way society is heading. J: I noticed your inclusivity and how thoroughly the magazine addresses the educational, medical, nutritional and spiritual needs of these children. CNE’s well-researched articles must fascinate progressive parents and teachers, since you cover topics ignored by mainstream publications, like children's yoga, near-death experiences, metaphysical movies, information on chemicals and drugs like aspertame and ritalin, the relationship of nutrition on dyslexia, dyspraxia and ADHD. You are reporting on street kids, autism, spiritual parenting and even include a nationwide directory of progressive schools and website resources. It is a valuable resource for anyone, parent or not. I really appreciate your careful attention to educational alternatives for these children, because it's going to be incumbent on us, isn't it, to nurture their very different traits and capabilities. I rarely see anything about Waldorf schools, but you have an article about these in one issue and a resource guide listing progressive and alternative schools for children, by state. S: That resource is also online, by the way, and we update it as often as we can. It's not just in the U.S., but it's international, since we now have subscribers in about 10 countries. Which shows that this is truly a worldwide phenomenon. J: In another issue you have an article on how parents can positively guide and discipline these children. That's the tough thing, isn't it? You want to give them their head, but at the same time they need your elder knowledge. S: Yes. It's very important that we look at every single aspect of the children. We have to look at their biology, their health, and what's going on at the cellular level, because these children do have problems with pollution and they have a lot more allergies. Celiac disease, food intolerances, learning difficulties stemming from the way their brains seem to be wired differently, etc. Their systems are a lot more finely tuned than ours are. In fact, Steve Rother said something very interesting about the Crystal children, as so many of them seem to be displaying autistic symptoms. I think current statistics suggest that as many as one in 500 children today is being diagnosed with some degree of autism, which is ridiculously high. Steve said a lot of people blame vaccinations, and it’s not that the vaccinations aren’t good. They worked perfectly well for our generation, but these children's systems are different and they can't tolerate the vaccinations. J: This is conjecture, but I'm wondering if the fact that they're so vibrationally sensitive isn't related to what we hear from so many different sources right now--that our Earth is actually speeding up in terms of its resonant frequencies. S: That and the fact that--and there's no way of proving this--they have more strands of DNA connected. It’s been said that we actually have 12 strands to our DNA and as we raise our vibrational rate, we are connecting more of those strands. I think those children come in with more of them already connected. And I think they have far more neural pathways, and they grow them much quicker. It's a known scientific fact that when you're learning things all the time, you grow new neural pathways at an amazing rate. Technology is changing so fast that today’s children have to be able to react far more quickly than did previous generations. And the more neural pathways one has, the greater access one has to parts of the brain that the rest of us are not using. J: This goes back to the idea of the Indigos being an evolutionary milestone, doesn’t it? S: Yes. People have been expecting all kinds of things to happen in the new millennium. Some anticipated spaceships coming down to whisk us all off to nirvana, or other fantastic scenarios. Regardless of what people expect, we’re not going to see the Earth suddenly shift on its axis, moving us all to a higher plane. The shift, or evolutionary leap, will happen in a practical way—through the biological evolution of our children. J: Exactly. So you’re saying that right-brain creativity is just the beginning of what these kids are about and who they're here to be. It's not just about genetic evolution--whether nature or nurture--but that they are attuned to a higher reality. I know from brain wave biofeedback science that the awakened mind of mental clarity, creativity, empathy, compassion and spiritual connection opens to the heightened intuition of the higher self, or soul, and that is also what we're seeing in these kids. To me, this is the most exciting thing of all, because it's the direct result of a meditation practice: your intuitive abilities increase exponentially. Only these kids aren't meditating; they're operating in the everyday world, and this is the quality of the master teacher. I found this dynamic in a number of stories in your first issue, especially in an article titled "The New Children: Are We Witnessing Greater Consciousness?" One little girl not quite four years old remembered what it was like to be in her mommy's tummy. She said it was like dancing to a wonderful song: "They were telling me that I would have wonderful parents" and had waited a long time for just those parents. S: And that is not unusual. Some of us might say, "Well, that's one in a million children." But I hear these stories all the time. I could spend the entire day on the telephone just talking to parents and grandparents about the amazing qualities of these kids. J: Another child, at age 4, got his teacher to organize a toy and food drive for people devastated by an Ohio flood, and a little girl at age two and a half brought her piggy bank to her mother, with tears in her eyes, and asked for her money to be sent to earthquake victims in Russia. So we're seeing not only higher creativity and sharper intuition. We're seeing the unfolding of higher consciousness. S: Yes, it's a vibration of love. When you are truly open-hearted, all you want to do is give. You don't want to take. These children say to their parents they don't want Christmas presents. They don't need them. They have enough: "Please give them to other children who don't have any." How many kids did we know, when we were children, who would have said that? There are millions of these children who are saying the same things. P.M.H. Atwater, one of the foremost authorities on children's near-death experiences, says we're seeing in these children what happens when people have near-death experiences. It's almost like a connecting, an opening-up of the neural pathways, with more expanded consciousness. These children have it naturally. J: That really gets into some interesting things, like the evolution of human consciousness beyond the material world. It's what most people can only suspect and know through the reports of other people, unless we're highly intuitive ourselves. These Indigo and Crystal children are talking to angels, in at least one report in the magazine, and that's what James Twyman's psychic children seem to be doing. That's really amazing and exciting, as with the near-death experiences of children, because you can trust the children. They don't have an agenda, do they? S: No. They'd laugh at that. And they wouldn't understand anybody who does. J: This goes back to seeing them as a wonderful gift and what you were saying about a spiritual plan. S: What we see in them is what Jean Houston calls The Possible Human. When I hear stories about these kids, when I meet some of these kids, I'm just brought to a place where everything that is material within us, everything that is ambitious or self-aggrandizing, just falls away. You are forced to be in that still, small place where you understand what is real, what is love, what it's really all about. And that's the gift they bring to us. Yet we mustn't forget that while they're bringing us this gift, many of them are suffering terribly. And I mean really suffering. Sharyl Jackson, our associate editor who edits and answers the Letters in that column, listed the attributes of the Crystal children in a recent issue. She said that 2,000 years ago there was another Crystal child. He was called the Christ, and we murdered him. He suffered tremendously. I know some of these children who are so in-tune with the angels and can talk to animals, can do the most incredible feats of healing, and yet find it excruciating to live in this world. They have such severe autistic symptoms. It is physically painful. It's emotionally painful. Their parents go through hell, even as they love them, and do everything they can to get them help. So we need to think about what these children are suffering in order to give us this gift. That is another demonstration of what love is all about. J: Two things come into my mind as you say this. One is the laboratory experiments done by Spindrift, which Dr. Larry Dossey reported on some years ago. Those experiments showed that the greatest amount of divine help and healing comes to those in the greatest need of it. So I wonder if these children are coming now, as we hover on the brink of self-destruction, because we need them so very much. S: I think we've asked for them. Without even realizing it, we've asked for them by changing our own consciousness. We sent out the call. I do believe that much of this is part of “the grand plan” for the human race. Just by aligning ourselves in a certain direction, we have clicked into place something that would send out that clarion call, and here they come. J: So by changing our own consciousness--to include the desire to be one world united by our commonalities--we raised our vibration to be an attractant to and conduit for the consciousness of these children? S: Yes, and think what's happening in the world right now: Europe is moving towards becoming one nation. It can’t be avoided. It's going to become one nation, and I think that's where we're moving globally. There are moves afoot in the U.S. trying to stop this progression towards total unity, and there are many countries and people who don’t want it because they fear losing their national identities. Nobody's thinking about what we may be gaining. But every time we look up, we see the evidence in front of us. It is happening. And that's why the children are here. J: What an interesting thought. And yet, now you put me in mind of the difficulties involved here, in particular for the children who are autistic. I have a dear friend who has seen spirits since age 5 and does so by being very peaceful and still. Indigos have to learn to walk between two worlds, also, don't they? How do they do that? How can you help parents help them do that? Because it's really an expansion of consciousness that allows them to be here and be there (in higher realms of consciousness) at the same time. S: I don't think we need to help them do it. I think we need to get out of their way. We don't know how to do it! What causes them problems is us, saying they shouldn't be staring into space, or behaving in whatever way they may do when they are walking between the worlds. If we would just get out of their way and allow them to be, things will happen as they should. J: Nice perspective. So we're really talking about freedom, aren't we? S: Yes. I don't know that I personally need to do a lot to educate the children. My job is to educate the parents so they can make sure they give the children the freedom they need to do what they need to do. J: What about in the case of the autistic children? Do we just allow them to be autistic, or do we bring them into the world so that they are better able to communicate with us? S: Now there's a difficult question. Probably they would prefer to be allowed to be. But the fact is, they're here and they have to learn to function in this world. And therefore, if it's painful and causes them problems, then we have to make that as easy as possible for them. You know, you can't do whatever it is you do, if you're not comfortable. And I believe that when we come here, we come for a reason. J: Yes, and some of them seem to be guiding us on how to be with these children! I'm thinking of a child named Gregory Smith, in your magazine, who began speaking out at age 5 to protect the rights of children. Which is pretty amazing. And he also spends time in old folks' homes, picks up trash on beaches and in the fall of 2000 got the U.S. House and Senate to declare January 1 Oneday, a holiday of hope, peace and generosity. S: He's been on Oprah several times. I don't know too much about his family, but presumably, he just started speaking out and forced his family to help him do this. Other kids, as we’ve discussed, say, "Mommy, I want to collect teddy bears for the children who don't have any." J: So maybe this is the answer to the quandary of the autistic children. Maybe, built into them are the answers not just for us and our civilization, but the answers as to how to deal with them. Because some of the children are communicating telepathically, like those who don't bother to start talking until they speak in full sentences at age 3 or 5. I wonder if the challenge with these autistic children would be solved if we learned to communicate with them telepathically. S: Yes, absolutely. In fact, there are many parents who do so. A number of women I've heard of who, while they were pregnant, were getting telepathic communication with their babies. Nobody was more shocked than they were. J: So maybe this is a call for the parents to learn to communicate telepathically. S: It's all a call for the parents. Every single bit of it. J: And to become more emotionally empathetic, not just telepathic. Because these would be inroads to the open-heartedness we are called to at this time. S: Yes. J: I have a grandson who is extremely intuitive and who sometimes, in humorous ways, calls my attention to things I seem to be too busy at the moment to notice for myself. A psychic told me just after his birth--he was born within an intense blue light--that he came to be a light in the world. S: Isn't it amazing how these children call us to be present. All children do this, because they are so immersed in the "now time." We adults are so easily distracted from being fully present, but watching a child engrossed in making a daisy chain or a painting is so great, because they are totally in the now moment. J: Yes, and I feel that is something I want to protect. This is part of being a grandmother, I'm sure, but there's more, in that I want to make sure this child continues to be a light to a world and to be all that he can be. He's such an interesting child, but also, like your Indigo kids, is hypersensitive to sugar and chocolate. It's just horrid to watch. S: Their whole systems react immediately, and many of them are coming in as natural vegetarians. They're choosing immediately not to eat meat. J: So this keeps going back to the concept of their being of a higher vibration, and that vibration, as we know from meditation, is supersensitive. You don't want to be startled, to be pressured. This is an enormous responsibility for us as a civilization. Do you think we're up to it, Sandie? S: I think we are. I think they wouldn't be here if we weren't, not in such great numbers. It's going to be difficult, because we're not yet at the point where we are all open-hearted. It's always going to be a struggle, but struggle also is a natural part of growth. J: It sounds like the answer is built into the question. The children come, and they are the answer, and they evoke the answer within us. S: Yes. You're absolutely right. We think that we are the people who organize everything and manage everything. And to a degree we do. We manage and organize our societal systems and we are not responsible for establishing society’s current mores. But I think, ultimately, the children are the big managers. By being as they are, they are making us reevaluate how we do things and ways in which we could change. Most teachers are parents. No matter how dedicated they are, they may not be motivated to militate for changes in the classroom. But when it’s their child in that class, you can bet your life they’re going to be there, wanting change and doing whatever they can to make it happen. J: Yes, and hopefully others who are not parents will see the good sense in nurturing these evolved children. We've always said that children are the hope of the future, but these children of the new earth are showing us what the future can be. S: Yes, they're showing us the potential human, the potential world. And it's perfect, because even people who aren't parents are neighbors to or have good friends with children. There isn't a single person in the world who doesn't have some relationship, somewhere, with a child. J: Isn't it interesting how everything we need is already here, all the answers are built right into the questions, all the people necessary to bring about this evolution and expand it into higher consciousness--you, the children themselves, the parents who were ready for the children, the people who had called for the help--that all of it is right there and in place, and when that is the case, all of the doors are just flung wide open for a project like CNE? And there's your proof. S: Absolutely. This is exactly how it's worked in my life. I started off with Planetlightworker (the most popular online monthly metaphysical magazine on the Internet) because I wanted to see if I could do it. I wanted to translate my magazine and publishing background into the Internet and quickly learned that everything I knew about magazines had to be thrown away. This magazine wanted to produce itself. I was simply its puppet. It really felt to me that the right articles were given to me for whatever was required that month. I quickly became aware that I was not the driving force. I was just the hand at the end of someone else's arm, doing the grunt work and getting this together, and that there was spiritual involvement in this because it was touching so many people's lives. I was breaking all the rules in producing normal print magazines. I'd have three articles on the same subject, and they were all coming at the right time. I'd get letters from people saying, "That's exactly what I needed to hear." So I very quickly learned that this was definitely something Spirit was driving. With "Children of the New Earth," it's exactly the same. But what I've learned is that it's not about me or what I can take from these things. There are two things in my life that are non-negotiable, and that's keeping these two publications on the path that they're on. Because they're exactly where they're going to be and need to be. I really do believe that Spirit decides what’s needed and what needs to be happening. How it all needs to look. I'm just the person making sure it all happens that way. Both publications are helping a lot of people who are waking up to the spiritual path. There's a little bit of the woo-woo element in CNE, but it's very grounded, like I am, so it provides something that people can latch onto. "Children of the New Earth" is about helping the parents and teachers, helping society understand that something important is happening here and it isn't going to go away. This is who we are going to be and we'd better start looking at it now.
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Writer, editor
and publisher Sandra Sedgbeer spent her own formative years
in a children’s home in England, a stark, loveless place
completely unlike what she seeks for the new children of today.
After graduating from secondary school, Sandie defied the
odds and climbed the publishing ladder. She started out as
a secretary with England's leading satirical magazine, stepped
into the editorial room of another magazine, and reached the
top rung by writing six sizzling books, three of them best-sellers
in the U.K.