As to lack of fear of death, it is a complex subject. I know plenty of teenagers that have no obvious functional fear of death, and I myself was one at points, doing all sorts of things that really risked death without any real sense of the possible consequences of my actions. Work in a Peds ER on any Saturday night and witness the drunken 16 year-olds behaviors: amazing that they survive some of the things they do. I myself used to walk along the very edge of rocky cliffs on the edges of mesas in northern New Mexico, when the slightest slip would mean a long fall to certain death. I used to climb up the dusty walls of stairwells in high school with my hands on one wall and my feet on the other wall, suspending my body between them, climbing to heights over 20 feet above the solid concrete landings, heights that would almost certainly have resulted in my death or severe injury had I slipped, which was actually a likely occurrence. I did this with no fear at all, so these things don't impress me. They are extremely common. I have hung off of the wing of an airplane at 13,500 feet above the ground. I have ridden a motor rickshaw from Varanasi to Mughalsarai: truly an insane and death-defying feat, as will be well-known to those who have done it.
As to other examples of people walking at heights: people who build skyscrapers do this all the time and somehow fail to accumulate fame from it. Photos abound: google "ironworkers on skyscrapers" and see what you get. Would you follow them a some sort of guru for this? It is a strange notion.
Come on down to the South and watch what happens after phrases such as, "Hey, hold my beer, I'm gonna' try somethin..." We joke about this all the time in the emergency department, but only because the phenomena is so common. This is true fearlessness, but is it wisdom? Would you follow these people as some sort of guru?
From another point of view: perhaps he has no parents, no siblings, no children, no friends who really care about him, and no dependents, as well as no aspect of society that benefits from his continued survival and well-being, and so perhaps he cannot be accused of the obvious lack of consideration that risking one's life entails. It may be a calculated risk for him, but that is in some ways a callous calculation. Watch what happens when people die, and particularly when the healthy die young. I have seen a lot of this myself. After 10 years of working in emergency departments I still remember each young healthy person who died. The suffering to those around them is profound and very long-lasting, particularly for the parents. Perhaps you haven't seen this, but there is clearly a certain risk you take with the happiness of those around you when you obviously tempt fate and risk death for show or any other reason for that matter, such as going to war, etc. Talk with the families of fallen heroes: even those who really feel their children died for noble causes still suffer profoundly. He may not care about such things: it is missing something important.
From a health-care point of view: he risks staggering costs to those around him that they will have to pay. He may have already accumulated some of those costs, as it looks like he is routinely rushed to the hospital for emergent care immediately after his stunts, if Wikipedia is accurate. The costs are likely quite high, given what it seems he has done to himself at times. He risks much higher costs as well, so is playing with the money of those around him without their consent. It is a perennial problem in health-care ethics: how much to you charge those who willfully risk huge costs to those around them as part of pooled, cost-sharing systems? If one day his starvation routine shuts down his kidneys and they don't come back on-line when he gets hydrated, as they don't always recover from insults like that, how does everyone feel about the $150,000+ per year to put him on dialysis until he does die of some unfortunate complication of all of that? It shows some lack of consideration for those around him that I don't see discussed here.
People talk about having no fear of death, but most of the time what they should reasonably fear from some functional moral point of view is the period of serious pain, cost and social pain they cause everyone else during the period from injury to death, as that is typically far worse and vastly more costly in so many ways than the actual dying part.
All that said, you clearly have a true hero in David, and heroes are inspiring, so perhaps you should ask him to learn meditation, as that would at least be skillful, as opposed to asking me to risk my life for your inspirational needs, as that seems to be missing some understanding that seems clear from this side. Perhaps it would inspire you to practice well.
I have a reasonably large number of dependents who rely on me for food and shelter. There are people who care for me and would morn my loss. I owe a large dept to society for paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to train me to care for the sick and injured among them and so society would lose out if I just tossed my life away on some prank or gaudy spectacle, as a thoughtless teenager might.
In short, in some amazingly naive vacuum of context and wider consideration, I can see how someone might appreciate his dramatic displays, as you clearly do. I also appreciate spectacle, having gone to Cirque du Soleil performances, but at least they take very large numbers of precautions to help insure their survival, whereas he clearly pushes things way into the realm of possible severe harm.
Plenty of people display all sorts of heroic feats all the time, but which of them inspired people to meditate as the Buddha did?
I have a friend and fellow physician who has pictures of his younger self having stacks of concrete blocks being smashed in half with a sledge-hammer as they sat resting on his bare chest as he lay on a bed of nails. He is an impressive guy and that was clearly an impressive feat requiring profound control of many bodily and mental factors.
What is relevant here is that he actually did this as part of a traveling circus-like show promoting Protestant Christianity, saying that God and Jesus protected them from harm during these extreme acts and so people should believe and convert, though plenty of non-Christians can do similar feats. Does God protect them also and the just not know it? It would be hard to prove one way or the other. If I showed you photos of my friend doing this, would you suddenly convert to Christianity? I can easily obtain a copy of one of those photos if this would help you in your spiritual journey. He is a truly impressive person in very many ways, so perhaps he would inspire you to follow a similar path. He has another photo of him smashing a concrete block with each foot simultaneously in an amazing flying kick, as the blocks were held in the hands of two people who each are sitting on someone else's shoulders, meaning that the blocks are each about 6 feet off of the ground and about 3-4 feet apart. There was no trampoline. Wild stuff. Does it make you a true believer? One way or the other, very, very impressive mental control there along with world-class physical athletics.
As to the point that if I could so something that promoted a lack of the pain of dualistic perception more widely then I should do so: please, I am all ears in this regard. That I reject the notion that I should, say, freeze myself in a block of ice for 2 days or go without anything but water for 45 days in a tank over a river is not any blanket rejection of the notion that skillful promotion of wisdom shouldn't be a high priority, just a personal rejection of that scheme for doing so. If someone has better suggestions for how to do this that don't involve so many obvious ethical problems, I truly would like input on that.
I submit the following:
The 11th Army of MaraAnything that helps fight this 11th Army skillfully I am all for. It is not like I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about this in the 18 or so years I have been in some position to really ponder it. Creating the DhO and writing my book have been the best ways I have found so far, and they have reached a reasonable number of those who can be reached by those methods, and other than a bit of shoulder soreness from mouse-overuse I have remained in good health, which I and my family and patients appreciate. What reasonable methods would you advocate for, and, if you know them to work, why haven't you applied them yourselves?
As to pain being distractible and variable in its effects, this is not profound either. An iPhone video will distract some children enough to do all sorts of painful things to them in the ED without them being nearly as aware of it, and others it won't work on at all. Adrenaline sometimes allows people to not notice profound amounts of what would otherwise have been pain. Everyone knows this. I am not sure how this ties into wisdom. You must remember, pain is my business and I am very aware of the pathways and the literature, as well as having seen 10's of thousands of patients with various amounts of pain, as pain is the most common complaint people come to an emergency department with.
People also relate profoundly differently to pain just at some sort of baseline and apparently intrinsic trait, though clearly handling pain is a learnable skill also. I see people who the smallest stick with a small needle has them crying in pain, and some people who can handle profound amounts of pain with a strange amount of ease.
I myself have had about 12 kidney stones so far, each of which caused various degrees of pain. Most of my stones have been on the moderately large side: about 3-5mm, but not large enough to require surgical or procedural intervention yet.
Kidney stones are routinely ranked as one of the most painful things you can experience. If you see someone screaming in pain in the ED, the first thing you think is "kidney stone", as basically nobody looks worse off than them pain-wise, and I can verify that the pain is truly amazing in its raw intensity. I have taken care of probably a thousand people with kidney stones over the 10 years I have done this, so I have good experience with what they can do to people.
Women who I know who have had both natural labor without pain medications and also kidney stones are routinely equivocal in which is worse, and plenty will say that they would prefer natural labor. I have taken a total of 3 500mg Tylenols and one shot of 30mg of IV Toradol (a fancy non-narcotic NSAID sort of like IV ibuprofen: works pretty well for kidney stones) for my 12 kidney stones. One was 5x10mm and took 2.5 months to pass. I have worked numerous shifts while passing them and nobody could tell. Only one of them has literally brought me to my knees and made me nearly pass out the pain was to intense: I write about it another post somewhere. What was interesting is my vitals stayed totally normal during that stone: heart rate 60-70, blood pressure about 110/70. This is extremely unusual in people not taking medications that blunt sympathetic tone. Should this be hauled out as some testament to my wisdom? I think not.
My first kidney stone hit while at the start of a two-hour live performance of a band that I played bass for. I kept playing, just thinking I had extremely intense gas cramps, as we had eaten Mexican food before the show and I had plenty of refried beans. Nobody could tell that I was in serious pain. My playing was just fine. This was before I learned meditation. Does this make me some paragon of wisdom or inspiring person, or can I just handle really bad pain well? As I had this ability before I started meditating, I think I just handle pain well, and this is something I think I was born with to some degree, and high pain tolerance is not that rare.
This last Christmas Eve I started passing a kidney stone (later turned out to be 5mm: about as big as one can reasonably pass without surgery) just before my night shift in the ER. As I came on the pain was starting to peak and I was starting to sweat and get nauseated. I walked calmly up to my medical director, who was coming off of the evening shift, and told him that if the pain got worse I might have to take a quick break to sign in an get some Toradol. He was amazed, as I demonstrated no obvious external signs of pain he could see. It this worthy of some sort of fame on its own? I hardly think so. How would David Blaine have handled similar pain? I have no idea, and we have no way to compare them.
One of the more impressive feats of handling pain I have seen happened a few years ago. I remember seeing a woman in her 50's who was ex-military and extremely stoic. Her ankle had been torn open in some injury whose mechanism I can't remember, and her foot was hanging angled inward and backward and was fully dislocated with the distal lower leg bones both sticking out through the large tear in her skin to the outside of her ankle, meaning there was profound disruption of all of the tendons that connected her foot to her ankle.
These are painful injuries, but she had no obvious signs of pain. I began discussing sedating her to relocate her foot and ankle, but she said, "On, just do it now and get it done. I don't mind at all." I was totally surprised but she let me do it without a flinch right then without any pain medications or sedation at all. I've gotta say: that's my idea of truly tough. Is that more or less impressive than David Blaine's' feats? This may be a hard comparison to make, as it would depend on one's criteria for impressive, which are likely subjective. Would you follow her as some guru? Would the public do so? How does this relate to promoting non-dual perception?
I saw a teenage female in labor for the first time. She presented to the ER crowning with strong, regular contractions. She was also in total, and I mean total, denial of her pregnancy. She said she wasn't pregnant, had never had sex, and even when presented with the baby after the delivery said it wasn't her baby. Her grandmother brought her in when her water broke and she suddenly realized that her granddaughter was pregnant. She didn't even look particularly pregnant, but she delivered a normal-weight baby.
I have seen plenty of labor and delivered plenty of babies. Nobody ever looked like her. She walked calmly into the room asking what all the fuss was about with the baby crowning. She didn't sweat. Her heart rate never elevated. She was talking about light and casual topics in a calm and matter-of-fact voice all through the thing. She never showed any obvious sign of pain at all. In short, she was totally dissociated. Would you go following her as your spiritual guru for this impressive feat, and I can tell you, plenty of women would consider that totally impressive, about as impressive as it gets. Somehow this doesn't strike me as wisdom. In fact, it is one of the more disturbing things I have seen, and I have seen plenty of disturbing things. Would you give the baby into the custody of a woman who didn't think the baby she just delivered was her baby? Would you think she would be likely to care for that baby as she should? The analogy is apt, I feel, depending on the source of David's mental aspects, whatever they may be. Does David dissociate? I have no idea and neither should anyone else, it would be very hard to verify one way or the other.
Regardless, dissociation is not the same as wisdom. Fearlessness can come from many sources, not all of which are skillful, so be careful about confusing these in blinding glow of the limelights and hype. Tolerance for profound pain is just something some people have and others clearly can learn. Plenty of people endure all sorts of horrible things all the time. As to the point about people subjecting themselves to horrible things, how does that somehow make it better?
Interesting example for those a bit older: G Gordon Liddy (who helped to orchestrate the Watergate Burglaries) was a man who trained himself to withstand stronger and stronger levels of pain by burning his fingers in flames until he could scorch his finger without showing the slightest expression at all. This was not a person who I consider some profound source of kindness and wisdom, nor an example to live by, but he clearly could endure pain very, very well. Would you follow him in his spiritual path?