Activating The Light Inside

Allison Paradise on the gifts from raising the new generation.

I have a seven year old boy and a four year old girl. I have no idea what college will teach, or cost, by the time they are eighteen. But I am relatively certain that, whatever A.I. is capable of by then, their intuitive capacities are going to be radically more important. This is because the primarily left-hemispheric educational system that emphasizes analysis and memorization is already obsolete.

But there’s much more at stake for ourselves, our families, and society, than just our tuition costs.

Leading Edge member Allison Paradise holds degrees in neuroscience from Brown and Harvard. Based in Los Angeles, she’s the founder of The Epicenter. They work with children aged 7-22 on the cultivation and recovery of their intuitive capabilities. She’s a dear friend, and one of the most remarkable people I’ve ever met, something I think comes across in our conversation. [You can listen to our conversation on Spotify and Apple Podcasts]

The Telepathy Tapes has brought global attention to the possibility of our children having capabilities that far exceed the current materialist understanding of consciousness. From as early as she can remember, Allison was also having anomalous experiences. As she tells me, these included seeing and speaking with people who had passed and having a telepathic relationship with her father. Her mother, meanwhile, dismissed these experiences as hallucinations caused by allergies to medications.

When Allison was three her sister was born. She has a very distinct memory of the baby coming home from the hospital glowing with the most beautiful light. She saw the same light dulled in the older children and adults around her. At that moment she received a very clear message that she was meant to work with kids. She told her parents she wanted to be a teacher, but in her family the only two acceptable options were doctor or lawyer. So off she went to study neuroscience at Brown and Harvard instead. While she was there she experienced an outright dismissal and disinterest in anomalous experiences of consciousness. She increasingly repressed them in herself and then dove into a deeply unfulfilling career in consulting.

Years later, she was driving on Highway 280 in California when everything suddenly came back to her. She says she doesn’t have words for it. It was as if the universe was fed up with her. It had been trying to tell her since she was three that she had something to do, and she had been ignoring it.

In many spiritual traditions the siddhis, psychic abilities, are accepted as real, but also sometimes regarded as distractions. This is because the true prize from a stronger intuitive connection to yourself is authenticity, integrity and a clear sense of your own life path. It was this calling that Allison had repressed, and now she helps other children nurture in themselves.

Flash forward a few years and Allison’s classes now help kids understand the difference between externally imposed labels and who they actually want to be. They ask open-ended questions together about where the stories and labels they apply to themselves come from. They do an exercise where the kids literally stick labels on themselves or a mannequin to examine where they come from and if they accept them. There are no right or wrong answers, only lies are unacceptable.

We are all familiar with the famous Einstein quote: “everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” Many of our children are now swimming in waters most of us cannot even sense. A combination of civilizational urgency and material abundance has provided a platform for the opening of their senses to subtle evolutionary pulls. This scene from the movie I Origins beautifully explains the entire concept in less than three minutes.

While still largely invisible, from Marvel and X-Men, to Harry Potter, to Stranger Things, this idea of magical, mutant children has unconsciously seeped into the waters of popular culture. This more expansive evolutionary drive frees our children to consider life paths more suitable to their unique gifts and interests. I increasingly wonder how much of modern neurodiversity and mental illness derives from repressing this intuitive guidance and instead asking children and adults to focus on life paths that aren’t suitable for them.

Towards the end of her classes, Allison and her colleagues talk about what the children are here to give. They even ask the younger kids, “what are the gifts that you have to share with the world?” She prompts them to move beyond abstract concepts like kindness and love, and instead name what their unique thing is that they get to share with the world. She said that, with the little kids, they give them gift boxes. They are asked to write what their unique gifts are, and then decorate the gift box. Only if they then want, they can give the box to someone else and practice the action of sharing those gifts.

She said that with the older kids they talk more explicitly, using the word “purpose.” But she very specifically doesn’t allow them to define it in terms of a profession; “my purpose is marketing.” No, it's probably not.

One of the closing activities with older students involves writing or drawing one’s purpose on a piece of paper alongside something in nature that the students resonate with. Students are then asked to stand in a circle with their nature drawings facing outward. They then identify the ways in which their drawings connect to each other – trees are connected to the sun which is connected to the birds which are connected to the ocean, etc. As each connection is made, students also make a physical connection to each other using twine. By the time everyone has shared their nature drawing, all the students are interconnected. They are then asked to share their purpose, while still being connected through the twine. Once everyone has shared, students are then asked what happens if the sun decides it’s not going to shine, or the tree decides it’s going to be a bunny or if the birds decide they’d much rather be fish. What happens if things in nature don’t show up as they are? If the sun doesn’t shine, for example, whatever is connected to the sun can’t thrive. The same is true for our purpose.

Starting with a single student they then enact what happens when their part of nature and their true nature decide to not show up: they sit down. The twine between whatever is connected to them is cut, and anyone holding that cut twine has to sit down. This starts a cascade, with more twine being cut and more students sitting down until the entire circle is sitting. This provides a powerful demonstration of what happens when one person decides to obscure themselves and to live away from their purpose. It affects everyone and everything around them. It not only shows the kids that they can show up as who we are, but also how important it is to support others in doing the same.

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Positive Sum Parenting

Work like Allison’s can often have a profoundly positive effect on the parents. This is something I’ve witnessed and personally experienced recently as well.

One of our Leading Edge members works in finance and he has a highly creative, neurodivergent teenage son. Out of nowhere, he recently told his father he sees energy fields, auras, feels frequencies in a room and has had out of body experiences. Since then, his son has been working with another one of our members, an intuitive and reiki healer. As a result of their work together, he says his relationship with his son has changed unrecognizably for the better. And, just as interestingly, he now believes in a new way of perceiving the world because it’s his own son telling him.

Over the last few years of reading about psi and emergent features of consciousness I’ve obviously been encouraging my kids to talk about their intuitions and experiences. I’d be lying to you if I hadn’t secretly hoped one was telepathic or had past life memories of being a Japanese samurai. But it was all pretty normal until my son turned to me recently and said matter-of-factly “daddy, sometimes I get chills.” I asked him if he meant when he was cold. He replied “yes, but also when people are lying. When they tell the truth I go hot and when they lie I go cold.”

I was recently informed by a channeler (yes, I know) that I am also “clairsentient”; I have strong embodied intuition. But a rightwards shoulder corkscrew in my body has prevented me from feeling it properly. Since then, I have been seeing rapid, visible progress from Egoscue, a kind of physical therapy. I haven’t had any crazy intuitive pings yet. But I am getting goosebumps more frequently when I sense truth and tears come to my eyes when I say it. As I told Allison in our conversation, I had my own precognitive vision in 2017 about what felt I was going to become. I was going to be a node in a network that would spread truth. But I wasn’t going to be the person generating the truth. I wasn’t the center of the network, I was just allowing truth to flow through me. During my intense awakening experience I could feel anyone’s emotional state if they walked within a few feet of me. Whenever I said something that wasn’t true, I felt a sharp pain in my heart center. Up until very recently I assumed that that’s what happens to everyone when they’re in that kind of altered state. But, if this is something that my son also has, is it a little more unique to us both?

In Portugal last year, I learned that the “Holy Grail” might actually refer to initiatory resonance chambers. They can elicit altered states that shift our perspectives in important ways. In December, a small group of us visited the King’s Chamber inside the Great Pyramid in Egypt. My primary desire going in was to be a better father. Since I’ve been back, I’ve made a real effort spend quality time with my four year old daughter. She imagines A.I. prompts, then we generate the pictures in black-and-white and then color them in together. Before our visit to Egypt, one of my companions generated a picture to represent the Holy Grail. Obviously my daughter never saw it. One day she dropped a painting from school on my desk as a present for me.

The AI grail (left), my daughter’s painting (right).

I asked her what her painting was of, and she replied that she had no idea.

In the grail legend, the prize is to become who you truly are. This is what Allison’s work tries to cultivate in children, but also what we might recover in ourselves if we are willing to give them our presence. Leading Edge recently met with Dr. Chris Bache. His decades of cosmic exploration led him to believe that perhaps the highest leverage action we can do right now is support our children. Initiatives like Allison’s Epicenter can be a global movement, if we are willing to commit our attention and financial resources to it.

[You can learn more about The Epicenter, and support their work, here. Listen to our conversation on Spotify and Apple Podcasts for more of Allison’s insights on parenting and education].