"The Sun-Eyed Children of a Marvellous Dawn"

"The sun-eyed children of a mavellous dawn" is how Sri Aurobindo characterises the children who are born with their psychic being formed and in front, ready to take on the challenges of the external world including the external being they are inhabiting, in his epic poem Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol.

In the West during the 1970's and 1980's various people popularized the term "Indigo children" to characterise what they saw to be young children born with high intelligence, strong wills and a powerful intuitive capability.

It is also clear that very young children frequently exhibit a type of innocence, natural freedom and sense of joy, trust, kindness, goodwill and sensitivity to feelings of others that show psychic traits, which in many cases get covered over through the process of education and pressure exerted by the external life and the social setting.

A disciple inquires: "Can a child become conscious of this inner truth like an adult?"

The Mother responds:"For a child this is very clear, for it is a perception without any complications of word or thought -- there is that which puts him at ease and that which makes him uneasy (it is not necessarily joy or sorrow which come only when the thing is very intense). And all this is much clearer in the child than in an adult, for the latter has always a mind which works and clouds his perception of the truth."

"To give a child theories is absolutely useless, for as soon as his mind awakes he will find a thousand reasons for contradicting your theories, and he will be right."

"This little true thing in the child is the divine Presence in the psychic -- it is also there in plants and animals. In plants it is not conscious, in animals it begins to be conscious, and in children it is very conscious. I have known children who were much more conscious of their psychic being at the age of five than at fourteen, and at fourteen than at twenty-five; and above all, from the moment they go to school where they undergo that kind of intensive mental training which draws their attention to the intellectual part of their being, they lose almost always and almost completely this contact with their psychic being."

If only you were an experienced observer, if you could tell what goes on in a person, simply by looking into his eyes!... It is said the eyes are the mirror of the soul; that is a popular way of speaking but if the eyes do not express to you the psychic, it is because it is very far behind, veiled by many things. Look carefully, then, into the eyes of little children, and you will a kind of light -- some describe it as frank -- but so true, so true, which looks at the world with wonder. Well, this sense of wonder, it is the wonder of the psychic which sees the truth but does not understand much about the world, for it is too far from it. Children have this but as they learn more, become more intelligent, more educated, this is effaced, and you see all sorts of things in their eyes: thoughts, desires, passions, wickedness -- but this kind of little flame, so pure, is no longer there. And you may be sure it is the mind that has got in there, and the psychic has gone very far behind."

"Even a child who does not have a sufficiently developed brain to understand, if you simply pass on to him a vibration of protection or affection or solicitude or consolation, you will see that he responds. But if you take a boy of fourteen, for example, who is at school, who has ordinary parents and has been ill-treated, his mind is very much in the forefront; there is something hard in him, the psychic being has gone behind. Such boys do not respond to the vibration. One would say they are made of wood or plaster."

reference: Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, The Psychic Being — Soul: Its Nature, Mission and Evolution, Section 6 More Lights on the Psychic Being, pp. 170-172