"You can get the benefit of both his voice and his writing if you listen to [this audiobook]." - Sam Harris

"Just on the phenomenon of being humiliated and differentiating it from embarrassment and other similar emotions." - Sam Harris

"He said a few crazy things, as many gurus do. But if you stick to what he was claiming about the nature of experience, I think you’re on firm ground." - Sam Harris

"Good." - Sam Harris

"'Reason and imagination and all mental chatter died down. I forgot my name, my humanness, my thingness, all that could be called me or mine. Past and future dropped away. Lighter than air, clearer than glass, altogether released from myself, I was nowhere around.' Thus Douglas Harding describes his first experience of headlessness, or no self. First published in 1961, this is a classic work which conveys the experience that mystics of all times have tried to put words to"--Publisher marketing.

"You can get the benefit of both his voice and his writing if you listen to [this audiobook]." - Sam Harris

"If you want to see what it’s like when things go about as wrong as they can go, read [this book]." - Sam Harris

William Miller embarks on an alluring journey into the world of disgust, showing how it brings order and meaning to our lives even as it horrifies and revolts us. Our notion of the self, intimately dependent as it is on our response to the excretions and secretions of our bodies, depends on it. Cultural identities have frequent recourse to its boundary-policing powers. Love depends on overcoming it, while the pleasure of sex comes in large measure from the titillating violation of disgust prohibitions. Imagine aesthetics without disgust for tastelessness and vulgarity; imagine morality without disgust for evil, hypocrisy, stupidity, and cruelty. Miller details our anxious relation to basic life processes: eating, excreting, fornicating, decaying, and dying. But disgust pushes beyond the flesh to vivify the larger social order with the idiom it commandeers from the sights, smells, tastes, feels, and sounds of fleshly physicality. Disgust and contempt, Miller argues, play crucial political roles in creating and maintaining social hierarchy. Democracy depends less on respect for persons than on an equal distribution of contempt. Disgust, however, signals dangerous division. The high's belief that the low actually smell bad, or are sources of pollution, seriously threatens democracy. Miller argues that disgust is deeply grounded in our ambivalence to life: it distresses us that the fair is so fragile, so easily reduced to foulness, and that the foul may seem more than passing fair in certain slants of light. When we are disgusted, we are attempting to set bounds, to keep chaos at bay. Of course we fail. But, as Miller points out, our failure is hardly an occasion for despair, for disgust also helps to animate the world, and to make it a dangerous, magical, and exciting place.

"If you just want to forget about the future and lose yourself in the book that forever changed how narrative nonfiction is written, read [this book]." - Sam Harris

"A good book which I recommend." - Sam Harris

Sam Harris picked this as the first book in his Book Club.

"Especially beautiful and wise." - Sam Harris

"I highly recommend. It really is the most accessible discussion of brain science you will find." - Sam Harris