Chapter 4
“The More You Resist”
Franchise: The Original Series AND The Next Generation
Season 3 (TOS), episode 12: “The Empath”
Season 7 (TNG), episode 4: “Gambit, Part 2”
We’re going to take scenes, from two different episodes in the two different series, to illustrate one idea: That it is often possible to defeat our obstacles by not resisting them at all. It is in these calm, non-combative moments when we discover that what we thought was holding us back is not only not holding us back … maybe it wasn’t there at all.
In “The Empath,” Kirk and crew are dispatched to evacuate a planet in the path of a coming supernova before the planet becomes uninhabitable.
When they arrive, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are captured by the Vaians, a race populating one of the endangered planets. They also encounter a beautiful, silent woman from a race of mutes, who lives on another of the planets.
They soon discover that she is also an “empath” - in this case, the term meaning a being capable of connecting to and taking on the emotional and physiological responses of another. She demonstrates this by, in one instance, healing a head injury suffered by Captain Kirk; and in another, by taking onto herself the results of catastrophic, life-threatening experimental tortures inflicted on “Bones” McCoy by the Vaians.
The Vaians are seeking to determine whether Gem’s (as Bones has come to call her) race are “worthy” of rescue from the planetary disaster about to befall them. To their minds, she can only do this by demonstrating the same compassion and courage for self-sacrifice shown by the three Starfleet officers, who each offer themselves to submit to horrible medical torture in order to protect the others.
When Gem passes their “test,” the Vaiains release Kirk and his officers and disappear. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy return to the Enterprise, and they remark upon the awesome power of the character they have witnessed in Gem.
The episode is interesting for several reasons; however, for me the key principle is illustrated in two separate scenes that I’ve not yet even mentioned … they all have to do with force fields. Let’s look at them in a bit more detail.
On the first of these three occasions, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are seized and held captive in a Vaian-manufactured force field. Kirk struggles to free himself, barely able to stand. Dr. McCoy advises against it:
McCOY: Don’t fight the force field - there’s something about it that upsets the body metabolism.
One of the Vaians clarifies:
LAL: Not quite, Doctor. The field draws its energy FROM your bodies. The more you resist, the stronger the force field becomes.
Do you see it yet?
In another “force field” moment, Kirk and Spock are held in a force field, which Kirk again attempts to push through:
SPOCK: Captain, the intensity of emotion is draining us, and building up the force field. … it draws its energy from us, Captain. In spite of what we see, all emotion must be suppressed. That might weaken the field …
And Spock, employing his renowned Vulcan mental discipline, clears his mind of all emotional response – and almost instantly, he lifts his hand … and the force field simply vanishes.
Kirk requires an additional moment, but his power over his own mind is formidable as well, and he also escapes. Actually, he not so much escapes as he simply releases his struggle … and for him, the force field also falls away.
Seeing the principle NOW?
It is simply this: When Kirk and Spock ceased to struggle against what they thought was a field blocking their path, the block – which was generated by their own bodies and emotions in the first place – disappeared almost as if by magic.
The same “art of fighting without fighting” is illustrated in the Next Generation episode cited here, “Gambit.”
U.S.S. Enterprise Captain Jean-Luc Picard, thought by his crew to be dead, is in reality engaged in an undercover mission to recover a dangerous Vulcan weapon called a “psionic resonator.”
The word psionic is defined by Webster as “relating to or denoting the practical use of psychic powers or paranormal phenomena.” You can probably predict its interest to a group of violent Vulcan isolationists – it could be used to amplify aggressive emotions, and to turn them back to destroy the aggressor.
As the search for the resonator progresses, it develops that the old device has three glyphs, or sets of markings, carved into it: one depicts the ancient Vulcan goddess of War, one the god of Death. But because the resonator’s assembly is not yet complete, the third glyph is missing.
When the isolationist leader, a Vulcan woman named T’Lera, recovers the missing piece and completes the weapon, using it to kill two of her former co-conspirators, Picard makes a momentous discovery:
PICARD: I can see the symbol on the third artifact – and it is the Vulcan symbol for Peace, standing between the symbols for War and Death.
It’s a warning that the power of the resonator can be overcome by peace.
T’Lera attempts to use the resonator on Picard and his crew; however, having divined the device’s operating dynamics, Picard and his crew empty their minds in that moment of all violent thoughts and make no aggressive movements, and we watch as the terrible shock waves emanating from the resonator pass harmlessly over their bodies.
The weapon is retrieved and destroyed; and order and peace are maintained on Vulcan, one of the founding worlds of the United Federation of Planets.
And there it is AGAIN: that release of resistance, that cease from struggle against INTERNAL conflict, that causes the seemingly irresistible external force to simply pass out of existence.
Now, this is by no means intended to suggest that all we have to do is “relax” and success will just show up.
We’ve still got to do our part – set our goal, formulate a plan to reach it, and then execute that plan consistently and in the full confidence that our efforts will eventually bear fruit.
What it DOES mean is that, though we may still need to fight through many challenges as we work to achieve what we want, we can save ourselves time, extra effort, and wasted mental energy by not fighting ourselves as well.
Lesson You Can Use
The toughest battle you will wage is inside yourself.
Find your inner calm, your own place of “non-resistance.” Practice meditation, prayer, or other mindfulness exercises.
Once you have dropped your own “force field,” the forces of others can no longer stand in your way.