Pain Relief

Most people know what a Vulcan mind meld is, don't they? In Star Trek: The Original Series, Mr. Spock, like other Vulcans, has the ability to tap into someone else's consciousness, usually by placing his fingers on their head (or the appropriate parts of a Horta).

In the 1989 Star Trek movie The Final Frontier (the one that comes after the whales), Mr. Spock's long-lost half brother Sybok has a weird twist on the mind meld: he uses his telepathic abilities to draw out an individual's most deep-seated painful experiences, and help them experience a kind of catharsis or purification from that pain. Each person who experienced this was immediately so grateful to Sybok that they would put aside all other loyalties and do whatever he asked. Captain Kirk is one of the only holdouts to Sybok's brain-meddling; he tells Sybok that he doesn't want his pain taken away, it's part of who he is. (Those who have read Brave New World will see some parallels there.)

Is Sybok the antagonist of the story? The actor who played Sybok, Laurence Luckinbill, recalls how he thought of the character while playing him:

...his impulse is good, is really good. He is not a villain. He is someone who has made mistakes. You and I might make those mistakes. And in terms of trying to change your family or hold the community better, or something like that, you might get nuts and say, ‘No, you will do it this way.’ But the impulse [is] to make things better, and really, at its heart, is let me take your pain away. Let me make life better for you. So, that was what that is. That is my take on it. And I resisted the idea of being the villain. And I told Bill [Shatner] that. I said he's not a villain. He's a heroic guy. And he's just, he's just in the way of the legal stuff, you know. That's what I would say.

Sybok, according to the actor who, we might say, knows him best, is not villainous, but well-meaning. However, this well-meaningness nearly causes untold destruction, and, on a smaller, moral scale, he's going where no man has gone before and really shouldn't. 

Charlotte Mason knew about this too. In Parents and Children, she wrote:

...our feelings are educable, and that in educating the feelings we modify the character. A pressing danger our day is that the delicate task of educating shall be exchanged for the much simpler one of blunting the feelings. (p. 199)

She then goes on to speak, as she has in other places, about the great amount of standing back that parents and teachers must do, especially as young people must learn to choose their own actions. Luckinbill calls Sybok "heroic," but Charlotte would certainly not use that word to describe someone so manipulative, even if (as Luckinbill says) the character's desire is to make everyone's life better. And, as Kirk says, we don't need our pain to disappear completely.  It may be something that has helped shape our character, something that is there inside us but which we have mastered. Having developed the strength to keep fighting that thing may be what helps us deal with other struggles. The characters who had all their traumas blotted out by Sybok seemed floppy, without any will. They were cheerful and co-operative, but they were not choosing to submit, they were unable to do anything else.

The mother may do a good deal to avert serious mishaps by accustoming the younger children to small feats of leaping and climbing, so that they learn, at the same time, courage and caution from their own experiences, and are less likely to follow the lead of too-daring playmates. Later, the mother had best make up her mind to share the feelings of the hen that hatched a brood of ducklings, remembering that a little scream and sudden 'Come down instantly!' 'Tommy, you'll break your neck!' gives the child a nervous shock, and is likely to cause the fall it was meant to hinder by startling Tommy out of all presence of mind. (Home Education, p. 84)

We don't want to see our children suffer. Our natural urge is to protect them wherever we can. But lest we find our good intentions taking us "just in the way of the legal stuff," by which I think Luckinbill means stepping over moral lines, we need to become less--and therefore more--heroic, by stepping back.

A baby falls, gets a bad bump, and cries piteously. The experienced nurse does not "kiss the place to make it well," or show any pity for the child's trouble––that would make matters worse; the more she pities, the more he sobs. She hastens to 'change his thoughts,' so she says; she carries him to the window to see the horses, gives him his pet picture-book, his dearest toy, and the child pulls himself up in the middle of a sob, though he is really badly hurt. Now this, of the knowing nurse, is precisely the part the will plays towards the man. It is by force of will that a man can 'change his thoughts,' transfer his attention from one subject of thought to another, and that, with a shock of mental force of which he is indistinctly conscious. And this is enough to save a man and to make a man, this power of making himself think only of those things which he has beforehand decided that it is good to think upon. (Home Education, p. 324)

And that is the power of the Charlotte Mason mind: un-melded.