Lost at Sea: The Jon Ronson Mysteries

by Jon Ronson

  Does your child have difficulty with discipline and authority?

  Yes.

  Does your child refuse to do certain things they [sic] are told to do?

  Yes.

  Does your child get frustrated with systems that don’t require creative thought [such as spelling and times tables]?

  Yes.

  Is your child very talented (may be identified as gifted)?

  Of course!

  Does your child have very old, deep, wise-looking eyes?

  No.

  “If you have more than fifteen yes answers,” it says at the bottom, “your child is almost definitely Indigo.”

  Joel has sixteen yes answers.

  “Realize that if you are the parent of one of these spirits you have been given a wonderful, marvelous gift! Feel honoured that they have chosen you and help them develop to their fullest Indigo potential.”

  I decide not to tell Joel that I’m honored he’s chosen me. It might turn him into a nightmare.

  • • •

  I TRACK DOWN DR. MUNCHIE. She lives in Derbyshire. I call her. She sounds very nice. She says it was the American authors Lee Carroll and Jan Tober who first identified the Indigos in their 1999 book The Indigo Children: The New Kids Have Arrived. The book sold 250,000 copies. Word spread, to Ipswich among other places, where Dr. Munchie was working as a GP within the government’s Sure Start program.

  “Sure Start is designed to give underprivileged children the best start in life,” Dr. Munchie explains. “One mum came in talking about it. And I immediately saw how important it was.”

  Even though Dr. Munchie is a GP—that most pragmatic of professions—she’s always been secretly spiritual, ever since she had a “kundalini experience” whilst doing yoga during her medical school years. And that’s how she became an Indigo organizer. But, she says, I happen to be looking at the movement during a somewhat rocky period for them.

  “There have been lots of reports of parents saying to teachers, ‘You can’t discipline my child. She’s an Indigo,’” Dr. Munchie says. “So it’s all a bit controversial at the moment.”

  “Do you sometimes think, ‘What have I helped to unleash?’” I ask her.

  She replies that in fact she sees herself as a moderate force in the movement: “For instance, lots of people think all children who have ADHD are Indigo children. I just think some are.”

  My guess is that the weird success of the Indigo movement is a result of a growing public dissatisfaction with the pharmaceutical industry. It’s certainly true in the case of Simone, Oliver’s mum. Simone told me that all the doctors ever really wanted to do with Oliver was dope him up with Ritalin.

  “Ritalin didn’t help him,” Simone told me. Then she added sharply: “All it did was keep him quiet.”

  Novartis, the drug company that manufactures Ritalin, says that in 2002, there were 208,000 doses of Ritalin prescribed in the UK. That’s up from 158,000 in 1999, which was up from 127,000 in 1998, which was up from just 92,000 in 1997.

  I call Martin Westwell, deputy director of the Oxford University think tank the Institute for the Future of the Mind. I tell him about these statistics.

  “You’ve got two kids in a class,” he says. “One has ADHD. For that kid, Ritalin is absolutely appropriate. It turns their life around. The other kid is showing a bit of hyperactivity. That kid’s parents see the drug working on the other kid. So they go to their GP . . .” Martin pauses. “In some ways there’s a benefit to being diagnosed with ADHD,” he says. “You get a statement of special needs. You get extra help in class. . . .”

  And this, he says, is how the culture of overdiagnosis, and overprescription of Ritalin-type drugs, has come to be. Nowadays, one or two children in every classroom across the U.S. are on medication for ADHD, and things are going this way in the UK too.

  Indigo believers look at the statistics in another way. They say it is proof of an unprecedented psychic phenomenon.

  • • •

  ON FRIDAY NIGHT I ATTEND a meeting of Indigo children in the basement of a spiritualist church in the suburbs of Chatham, Kent. The organizer is medium Nikki Harwood, who also features in the documentary My Kid’s Psychic. (Nikki’s daughter Heather is Indigo.) Nikki picks me up at Chatham station.

  “There have been reports of Indigo children trying to commit suicide—they’re so ultrasensitive to feelings,” Nikki tells me en route in her minivan. “Imagine having the thoughts and feelings of everyone around you in your head. One thing I teach them is how to switch off, so they can have a childhood.” Nikki pauses, and adds: “In an ideal world, Indigo children would be schooled separately.”

  Inside the church eleven Indigo children sit in a circle.

  “One kid here,” Nikki whispers to me, “his dad is a social worker.” The youngest here is seven. The oldest is eighteen. His name is Shane. He’s about to join the army.

  “That doesn’t sound very Indigo,” I say.

  “Oh, it is,” Nikki replies. “Indigos need structure.”

  And then the evening begins, with fifteen minutes of meditation. “Allow your angel wings to open,” Nikki tells them, and I think: “I came all the way for this? Meditation?”

  “I was with a baby the other day,” Nikki informs the class. “I said, ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ with my thoughts. The baby looked at me shocked, as if to say, ‘How did you know we communicate with each other using our thoughts?’”

  The Indigo kids nod. Indigo organizers like Nikki and Dr. Munchie believe we’re all born with these powers. The difference is that the Indigo children don’t forget how to use them.

  Then Nikki produces a number of blindfolds. She puts them over the eyes of half the children and instructs them to walk from one end of the room to the other.

  The idea is for the unblindfolded kids to telepathically communicate to the blindfolded ones where the tables and chairs and pillars are. Nikki says this is half an exercise in telepathy and half an exercise in eradicating fear.

  “Part of the reason why you’re here,” she tells the children—and by “here” she means on this planet as part of a super-evolved Indigo species—“is to teach the grown-ups not to feel fear.”

  The exercise in telepathy begins. And it gives me no pleasure to say this, but blindfolded children immediately start walking into chairs, into pillars, into tables.

  “You’re not listening, Zoe!” shouts Nikki, just after Zoe has collided with a chair. “We were [telepathically] saying ‘Stop!’”

  “I can’t hear!” says Zoe.

  Still, these children are having far more fun learning about their religion than most children do.

  I wander down to the front of the hall. Children’s drawings are tacked up on a notice board—drawings of past lives.

  “I had people that waited on me,” one girl has written next to her drawing of a princess. “I was kind but strict. Very rich, such as royalty.”

  “There’s one girl here”—Nikki points out a little girl called Emily—“who had a real fear of being starved to death.”

  Lianne, Emily’s mother, comes over to join us.

  “She used to hide food all over the house,” Lianne says.

  “Anyway,” Nikki says, “we regressed her, and in the past life she’d been locked in a room by her mum and starved to death.”

  “Emily is much better now,” Lianne says, “since she started coming here.”

  Lianne says that, like many parents of Indigo children, she wasn’t in the least bit New Age before the family began attending Indigo meetings. She was perfectly ordinary and skeptical. She heard about the Indigo movement through word of mouth. It seemed to answer the questions she had about her daughter’s behavior. And she’s very glad she came.

  Nikki says Emily happens to be “the most Indigo person here, apart from my own daughter. Emily will go into the bathroom and see dead people. She sees them walking around the house. It used to terrify her. Will I introduce you to her?”

  Emi
ly is thirteen. She seems like a sweet, ordinary teenage girl. She offers to do a tarot reading for me. “Something is holding you back,” she says. “Tying you down. You don’t look very happy. You’re a little goldfish. Your dream is to turn into a big rainbow fish. It’ll be a bumpy ride, but you’ll get there. Just don’t be scared. You’re Paula Radcliffe. You just don’t think you are.”

  Earlier this year, the Dallas Observer ran an article about Indigo children.

  One eight-year-old was asked if he was Indigo. The boy nodded, and replied: “I’m an avatar. I can recognize the four elements of earth, wind, water, and fire.”

  The journalist was impressed.

  After the article ran, several readers wrote in to inform the newspaper of the Nickelodeon show Avatar: The Last Airbender. In the cartoon, Avatar has the power to bend earth, wind, water, and fire. The Dallas Observer later admitted it felt embarrassed about the mistake.

  When the Indigo meeting is over, Nikki gives me a lift back to the station. “Does it freak the children out to be told they’re super-evolved chosen ones?” I ask her.

  “They were feeling it anyway,” Nikki replies.

  We drive on in silence for a moment.

  “I’ve been police-checked,” Nikki says suddenly. “Another medium called the police on me. I’ve been accused of emotionally damaging the children.”

  “And what did the police do when they came?” I ask.

  “They laughed,” Nikki says. Then she pauses and adds: “They told me they wanted to bring their own children here.”

  Maybe they were just saying that to be polite. Or maybe they meant it.

  A Message from God

  It’s a Wednesday evening in early summer, and you’d think some high-society soirée was taking place in Knightsbridge, West London, on beautiful lawns set back from the Brompton Road. Porsches and Aston Martins are parked up and down the street, and attractive young people, some famous, in casual wear and summer dresses are wandering up a tree-lined drive. But this is no soirée.

  We are agnostics. We are entering a church—the Holy Trinity Brompton (HTB)—to sign up for the Alpha Course, led by Nicky Gumbel. He is over there, welcoming agnostics; he’s good-looking, tall and slim. It sounds impossible, but apparently Gumbel’s course, consisting of ten Wednesday evenings, routinely transforms hardened unbelievers, the entrenched faithless, into confirmed Christians. There will be after-dinner talks from Gumbel, and then we will split into small groups to discuss the meaning of life, etc. There will be a weekend away in Kidderminster. And that’s it. Salvation will occur within these parameters. I cannot imagine how it can work.

  But many thousands of agnostics have found God through Nicky Gumbel. To name one: Jonathan Aitken, the former Conservative cabinet minister imprisoned for seven months in 1999 for perjury against the Guardian newspaper. “I am a man of unclean lips,” he told the Catholic newspaper the Tablet, “but I went on an Alpha Course at Holy Trinity Brompton, and found great inspiration from its fellowship and the teachings on the Holy Spirit.” The Tablet added, “He has done Alpha not once but three times, graduating from a humble student to a helper who pours coffee.”

  Nicky Gumbel’s supporters say that within Church of England circles he is now more influential than the Archbishop of Canterbury; they claim that Gumbel is saving the Church. Other people say some quite horrifying things about him. I was told it is almost impossible to get an interview with him. His diary was full for three years. His people were apologetic. They said that the only way to really get to know Nicky, to understand how he does it, was to enroll in Alpha.

  “Hi!” says a woman wearing a name tag. “You’re . . . ?”

  “Jon Ronson.”

  “Jon. Let’s see. Great!” She ticks off my name and laughs. “I know it feels strange on the first night, but don’t be nervous—in a couple of weeks’ time, this’ll feel like home.”

  I drift into the church. There are agnostics everywhere, eating shepherd’s pie from paper plates on their laps. Michael Alison, onetime parliamentary private secretary to Mrs. Thatcher, is here. So is an ex–England cricket captain. I spot the manager of a big British pop group. The famous former topless model Samantha Fox found God through Nicky Gumbel, as did Geri Halliwell. I wonder whether Jonathan Aitken will pour the coffee, but I can’t see him. And now Nicky Gumbel is onstage, leaning against the podium, smiling hesitantly. He reminds me of Tony Blair.

  “A very warm welcome to you all. Now some of you may be thinking, ‘Help! What have I got myself into?’” A laugh. “Don’t worry,” he says. “We’re not going to pressurize you into doing anything. Perhaps some of you are sitting there sneering. If you are, please don’t think that I’m looking down at you. I spent half my life as an atheist. I used to go to talks like this and I would sneer.”

  Nicky is being disingenuous. We know there are no talks like this—Alpha is uniquely successful, and branching out abroad, so far to 112 countries, where they play Nicky’s videos and the pastor acts the part of Nicky. “This just may be the wrong time for you,” says Nicky to the sneerers. “If you don’t want to come along next week, that’s fine. Nobody will phone you up! I’d like you to meet Pippa, my wife.”

  We applaud. “Hi!” says Pippa. “We’ve got three children. Henry is twenty, there’s Jonathan, and Rebecca is fifteen.”

  Nicky assures us that we are not abnormal for being here. The Bible is the world’s most popular book, he says. This is normal. “Forget the modern British novelists and the TV tie-ins,” he says. “Forty-four million Bibles are sold each year.” He says the New Testament was written when they say it was. “We know this very accurately,” he explains, “through a science called textual criticism.” He says Jesus existed. This is historically verifiable. He quotes the Jewish historian Josephus, born AD 37: “Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works . . . the tribe of Christians so named after him are not extinct to this day.” I am with Nicky so far. But the agnostics here—it soon becomes clear that Nicky can read our minds—are thinking, “But none of this proves that Jesus was anything more than a human teacher.”

  Nicky tells an anecdote: He says that he once failed to recognize that his squash partner was Paul Ackford, the England rugby union international. Similarly, Jesus’s disciples, in the region of Caesarea Philippi, failed to recognize that their master was the Son of God.

  I could live without the squash anecdote.

  Nicky says that Jesus could not have been just a great human teacher. When he was asked at his trial whether he was “the Christ, the Son of the Living God, he replied: ‘I am.’” Nicky’s point is this: A great human teacher would not claim to be the Son of God.

  “You must make your choice—either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else he’s a lunatic or, worse, the Devil of Hell. But don’t let us come up with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great moral teacher. He hasn’t left that open to us. He didn’t intend to.”

  This final logic (a quote from one of Nicky’s heroes, C. S. Lewis) is impressive to me. It remains in my mind.

  Then it’s on to the small groups. I am in Nicky’s group: As is typical, it consists of around ten agnostics, some from the City, one a professional sports person, strangers gathered together in a small room in the basement. We sit in a circle. I wonder what will happen to us in the weeks ahead. For now, we gang up on Nicky and his helpers: his wife, Pippa, an investment banker called James, and his doctor wife, Julia, all ex-agnostics who found Christ on Alpha. We ask them antagonistic questions. “If there’s a God, why is there so much suffering?” And: “What about those people who have never heard of Jesus? Are you saying that all other religions are damned?”

  Nicky just smiles and says, “What do the other people here think?”

  At the end of the night, Nicky hands out some pamphlets he’s written called (such is the predictability of agnostics) Why Does God Allow Suffering? (answer: Nobody really knows) and What About O
ther Religions? (answer: They will, unfortunately, be denied entrance to the Kingdom of Heaven. This includes me—I am a Jew).

  I am enjoying myself enormously. I drive away thinking about the things Nicky said. I play them over in my mind. But by the time I arrive home and then watch ER, my mini-epiphany has all drained away, and I go back to normal. I cannot imagine how any of my fellow agnostics will possibly be converted by the end of the course.

  As the weeks progress, the timetable becomes routine. Dinner, a talk from Nicky, coffee and digestives, the small groups. But the hostile questions have now become slightly less combative. One agnostic, Alice, who is the financial manager of an Internet company and rides her horse every weekend in Somerset, admits to taking Nicky’s pamphlets away with her on business trips. She says she reads them on the plane and finds them comforting. We talk about the excuses we give our friends for our weekly Wednesday night absences. Some say they’re learning French. Others say they’re on a business course. There is laughter and blushing. I miss Week Three because I am reporting on wife-swapping parties in Paris. On Week Four, Nicky suggests I tell the group all about wife-swapping. The group asks me lots of questions. When I fill in the details, Nicky shakes his head mournfully. “What about the children?” he sighs. “So many people getting hurt.” He’s right. Nicky ends the night by saying to me: “I think it’s important that you saw something awful like that midway through Alpha.”

  Week Five, and Nicky is onstage talking about answered prayers and how coincidences can sometimes be messages from God. He says he keeps a prayer diary and ticks them off when they are answered. As Nicky says these things, I think about how my wife and I were told we couldn’t have a baby. We went through fertility treatment for four years. Every month was like a funeral without a corpse. And then we did have a baby, and when Joel was born I thought of him as a gift from God.