Gifted Children and Psychic Experiences

     I was reading a fascinating article in the May issue of The Sun, a wonderful magazine for people interested in good writing and story telling.  (An aside:  Years ago, I sent the editors of The Sun what I thought was a funny article about relationships, and learned that they don't do funny.  They do thought-provoking, they do insightful, they do heart-wrenching, they do beautiful writing, but they don't do funny.  Lesson learned).  The article, entitled "Beyond Their Years," is an interview with Linda Kreger Silverman, who has spent her career studying and testing gifted children.  Toward the end of the article, she mentioned how some gifted children have talked about their past life experiences.  One boy spoke of how he used to make mats while living in his past life in Egypt.  Other children have shown psychic sensitivities and gifts.  Some seem to be telepathic, others have otherworldly knowledge. 

     This brings to mind several questions.  First, does being gifted mean that one has had enough past life experiences that one comes in to this life already ahead of the learning curve?  I remember Plato mentioning that in Meno, one of his dialogues with Socrates.  Socrates was demonstrating his Socratic method of teaching, where the teacher leads the student through a series of questions which build on each other and eventually gets the student to realize the answer.  In one example, Socrates was questioning Meno's slave about how to arrive at the answer to the area of a square made of four square halves, and at the end, when the slave boy came to the answer, Socrates deduced that the boy already knew the answer from a previous life.  His questioning only awakened the knowledge in the boy.  Are gifted children, then, older souls with more past life knowledge?

     Or is it possible that gifted children were incarnated in a more finely-tuned body in order to learn lessons specific to that circumstance?  A body more capable of subtle thinking, faster processing, and increased sensitivity would enable the soul to enjoy experiences that would put them in the minority of human abilities -- in the gifted range. 

     It's a puzzle.  But it is interesting to think about.

(photo courtesy of pixabay.com)