Q: Could you share with us a little bit about your own interests starting, let's say, when first born, and how old are you now?
ELAN: Most early on in my own life, I was involved very actively in what you would call swimming. That was one of my joys, one of my discoveries, as well as art and music. This was, shall we say, the concentration of what you would call my earlier life.
It was somewhat recently, approximately 30 to 50 of your years ago, again, this is arbitrary within our time frame, that I became, shall we say, interested in the idea of communicating with other species, other civilizations, and space travel. So therefore, then attracted myself to particular individuals, one of them, the individual that you have designated as ‘Bashar’, and thereby enabled by that particular interaction to begin to learn, shall we say, the ins and outs of communicating in this way.
My particular age, by your years of counting, not to confuse the matters, would be approximately 133 of your years.
Q2: Elan, we have heard from you and Bashar that on your planet, Essassani, your civilization, that the average lifespan might be about 300 years.
ELAN: Approximately, according to your timeline.
Q2: When someone is born in your civilization, to what extent do they need [to be] educated, and how is that accomplished in schools or what?
ELAN: It is accomplished in the doing of life. It is accomplished in the synchronistic understanding that you always attract what you need and what will enable you, perhaps you can say, the need enables you to do what it is you need to do in that moment. Now, by age three in our society, individuals generally have mostly all that they will need to begin to do the exciting things and allow themselves to generate it in this way. But it is life's experience that is the classroom, perhaps you can say.
Q2: There are no formal schools.
ELAN: No. Nor is there the herding, so to speak, of children away from the adult population. Though children will very often choose to interact with each other, there is no hesitation upon the part of any adult that finds themselves attracted into an area or atmosphere with any particular child, there is no hesitation for that adult to interact with that child as an equal.
Q2: So all adults are teachers or professors, if you will, of the younger…
ELAN:Yes, but we also always, always, always understand that we are all always teachers and learners, and we do not minimize the fact that as we are able to perhaps teach, in a way, call it 'teach', particular ideas, that we are also in interacting with that individual and watching them then do these things, also learning as well.
So everyone is a teacher, everyone is a learner. The parents, in that sense, are the parents of all. The children are the children of all. That is the overall effect.
Q2: Let's say one particular young person decides to follow their excitement in a particular direction, whether it has to do with space travel...
ELAN: Then he will invariably attract himself to individuals who are already doing that.
They will not then learn by any cognitive process, but they will simply begin immediately to participate on whatever level they are able, and then they learn, again, through the actual having of the experience — on the job training.
Q2: Okay. If I could open this up and allow and give the opportunity to Kate and her friend, if they wanted to ask anything about learning or schools or degrees in his civilization, do they have Ph.D.'s or…?
ELAN: No, no. I have never attended what you would label a class, but I have always attracted myself to whatever individuals that would enable me, so to speak, even this is an analogy and does not exist as precisely as we are saying it, but an apprenticeship, so to speak.
Q2: But if you live 300 years, is it typical to change directions during those 300 years and follow one excitement and then switch over to another excitement?
ELAN: Most common, but it will again depend on the definition of the explorations and the time spans necessary to complete those explorations. Certain explorations may take tens, twenties to hundreds of years, others just a few. So it will depend on the specifics.
There is a general overall interest from most members of our society in the idea of space travel and exploration, but there are even individuals who are less inclined toward this and more, shall we say, literally grounded.