Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[hiroshi-okazaki]

In the way a five-year-old kid understands

There was a movie entitled �Philadelphia� around 10 years ago, which stared Tom Hanks. A proficient lawyer, Andrew played by Tom Hanks
is a gay and has AIDS. He is fired by the law firm he�s been working for short time after he was promoted. He files a law suit against the law firm. The lawyer he chose to represent himself is Joe Miller played by Denzel Washington. Miller , though he has a kind of biased feeling about gays at first, gradually develops deep friendship with Andrew and they eventually win the case. It was an excellent motion picture with the song of Bruce Springsteen giving us a different impression of the streets of Philadelphia from that of NYC or LA. Joe Miller often begins his questions with his favorite phrases, which have now come to be my own favorite phrases. He says � Please explain it to me like you explain it to a five-year-old kid.� or �Please tell me about it like you are trying to convince a 6-year-old kid.�

Lawyers are the experts of law. They are required to possess the wide and deep knowledge about the details of complicated laws as well as the eloquence to win the debate at trials. This is something that even Japanese people can take it for granted , who live in a different culture from the Western ones , which put a great importance on verbal self-assertions. A person equipped with such expertise says �Please explain it to me as if you were trying to explain it to a 5-year-old kid.� Is it possible to explain something that can be possibly explained with the use of a number of difficult jargons to a five-year-old kid? What is it that a five-year-old kid understands?

I think that what a 5-year-old kid understands is not something that you understand with the accumulated knowledge through studies and experiences but something that you understand only with the wisdom you are innately gifted with in the depth of your heart. I believe knowledge is different from wisdom. Everyone can be a knowledgeable intellectual easily, because the only thing you have to do is to study and learn. To deepen wisdom is, on the other hand not easy at all. It�s because I believe that wisdom is a spiritual intuition which can be cultivated only by the effort to elevate our soul(spirituality). Knowledge can explain �facts� but wisdom discerns �truth�. �Facts� are not �Truths�. �Facts� are such cold things that don�t pay any attention to people�s true wills, feelings, wishes, happiness, unhappiness, etc. They are like a painting of beautiful flowers on a paper, which has no element that makes us feel �life� of the flowers such as smell, dispersed pollen, insects playing in them, etc. �Truths� , on the other hand, have to be something that directly works on the spiritual instinct of people with their wish to be �happy� at the core of their mind. Something that a 5-year-old kid understands should not be the list of facts but the truth coming from the sincerity to try to touch the bare heart of people.

Suppose the basic premise for modern science that �people�s mental activities are totally reliant on the activities of brains� is true. Their most outer surface, the cerebral cortex is said to administer such mental activities making people be people as logical thinking, intelligence, ability to use languages ,etc. Such biologically crucial activities as metabolism, autonomic nerves, the secretions of hormones, etc. are based on the activities of the interbrain. And it is said that the most primitive instinctive activities or forces to try to protect him or herself and their own species are the working of the brain-stem or reptile brain. The condition of man�s being physically and mentally healthy is said to be that these three kinds of activities of the brain are in harmonious equilibrium upheld by the smooth interactions among them. The brains of modern people are almost critically imbalanced in which the activities of cerebral cortex have been excessively developed while their animal instinct or the activities of the interbrain and of brain stem are almost no different from those of primitive ages. This imbalance, I hear, may bring about a great crisis to the existence of human species in not far-away future. The brutal incidents that are taking place day after day in this highly sophisticated information society characterized by its abundance and excessive materialism may be the warning about the dangerous society filled with people with the imbalanced activities of their brains.

The harmonious balance of the activities of brain; I vaguely believe that it is possible to be created only by developing such source of sustaining the fundamental instinct for our species to survive as the interbrain and the reptile brain not being overwhelmed by the activities of cortex which has been almost completely conditioned by such variety of limitations as knowledge, logic, societies, though I don�t know how. It may, however, be not so difficult a thing. If we clearly know that what we have in the entity of our existence is the desire for happiness, then we will also clearly know that others have the exactly same entity seeking for happiness. I believe the word told by those who clearly know that is not just a fact but the truth. Something that a five-year-old kid easily understands may be something that 60-year-old people can no longer understand.

[Corey]

I believe the phrase was used to mean "please explain it to me in simple terms" and should not be taken literally.

Good luck,

Corey
_________________
Niagara Summer Programs