Little Boy Blue

Virtue says she doesn't make money off of indigos, although her angel-therapy conferences, which often sell out hotel ballrooms, always include discussion of the indigo phenomenon. "I don't sell tickets to talk about indigos. I don't make money off it at all." But she didn't see anything wrong with people who do. "It's like anything else: If you provide a service you should be paid for it. So far, I haven't heard any parents complain, and if they did, I'm sure James [Twyman] would give them their money back."

As for Twyman, he insists everything he has made from movies, books and other indigo-related merchandise or events has gone back into the Beloved Community, an assertion shared by at least one person who knows him well.

"Believe me, there isn't a lot of extra money," says Sharon Williams, the woman who gave away her house to follow Twyman in 2000. "We've been on a paper-clip budget the last several months." Twyman is far from perfect, Williams says, but she doesn't question his motives. "I stay as long as I feel he is in integrity and it is a path that helps people. So far, the Spirit tells me to stay."

Twyman has addressed questions about his credibility head-on. At conferences, he sometimes stands up before audiences as big as 300 and tearfully apologizes for exaggerating portions of Emissary of Light. "We all make mistakes," says one of his followers.

It's easy to dismiss the indigo theory as wishful thinking and to be skeptical of those who are profiting from it. Yet to those who do believe, the phenomenon is very real. In Dallas, indigo believers include a university administrator, a personal trainer and a former sales executive with Coca-Cola. Sherylynn Boyd of McKinney, who says she raised two indigo boys, wishes she would have known about the phenomenon sooner. Both boys struggled to finish high school (one dropped out), even though they had been recognized as gifted and talented at their Richardson-area elementary school. "Back then, in the early '80s, there wasn't an explanation for it. You had this wave of kids who were exhibiting signs, and they were all diagnosed with ADD."

Dean Burress, a 28-year-old massage therapist from Houston, says he was one of those kids. It wasn't until last year that he recognized he was indigo. "I started to see myself clearly in the symptoms. I was always very intuitive, able to see and discern energies very quickly in people," he says. Burress and his girlfriend, who is also indigo, now work with indigo children and adults in the Dallas area. "As this becomes more mainstream knowledge, I think a lot of people in their 20s are going to look back on their lives and say, 'Oh my gosh, this makes so much sense. Now I understand what I was going through in high school,'" says Burress' partner, Jennifer Parigi.

Parigi and Burress sometimes work with Mike Connor, the man who gave Conrad a business card at the Indigo Evolution premiere. Conrad eventually called, and Connor picked up some clients because of the movie. He is working with four sets of parents raising indigos in Dallas. He thinks indigos are everywhere and that their influence is growing.

"I think it's absolutely wonderful, because when a higher percentage of the kids in the classroom are indigo and their teachers are from an indigo heritage, the balance of power will shift. They'll say, 'Man, let's stop the insanity. You can't keep pumping this crap into the dirt, into the water, into the air and killing each other for somebody else's god. Let's stop this. Let's think about peace.'

"It's a hard thing for a lot of people to grasp, because they're operating on a lower level of consciousness. These kids, they have achieved a higher stage of evolution. It's like they've up-leveled a bit. They were born with the software already built in."

Connor is now working on an audio documentary about the indigo phenomenon in Dallas and making plans to start a clinic for indigos.

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On a recent Thursday afternoon, Conrad took a break from work to talk about his son's progress. He was sitting in the meditation room at Evolution salon. The walls were gold, the rug beneath his feet was as thick as a horse blanket and on the sky-blue ceiling hung a Native American dream catcher made of feathers.

Conrad was accompanied by Karla Bass, who has become one of Dusk's spiritual mentors. She was dressed in black and carried with her a sheet of paper that listed the spiritual services she was now performing. A half-hour holographic repatterning session, for example, cost $100. She said her seminary work through the Beloved Community was going well, and she didn't see anything wrong with charging for the services she was learning. "If someone goes to counseling, they pay for it. It's the same thing," she said.

As she lit two candles, Conrad opened a book he had been holding on his lap. Inside were several colored-pencil drawings of human figures. One was a man surrounded by a blue aura. Another was surrounded by a rainbow aura.