At the End of the Tunnel

By Michael L Taylor

About the Book
This novel will cause you to walk away with a more positive attitude and a better outlook on life.

About the Author
Michael is wrapped around his family, (Matthew, Shelly, and his wife Gerry). His desire is to help others have a better outlook on life. And no matter where you start in life, there is always light at the end of the tunnel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Mar 31, 2023
• ISBN: 9781685378127

Book preview

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The contents of this work, including, but not limited to, the accuracy of events, people, and places depicted; opinions expressed; permission to use previously published materials included; and any advice given or actions advocated are solely the responsibility of the author, who assumes all liability for said work and indemnifies the publisher against any claims stemming from publication of the work.

All Rights Reserved

Copyright © 2023 by Michael L Taylor

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted, downloaded, distributed, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without permission in writing from the publisher.

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The Greatest Secret, Rhonda Byrne

We seek happiness in experience after experience, relationship after relationship, therapy after therapy, workshop after workshop even ‘spiritual’ ones, which sound so promising but never address the root cause of suffering, ignorance of our true nature.

Mooji from White Fire, second edition

The truth is you’re not a person who has no control over what happens to you and your life. You’re not a person who has to slave at a job you don’t like, only to die at the end of it all, you’re not a person who has to struggle from paycheck to paycheck, you’re not a person who needs to prove yourself or who needs anybody else’s approval. The truth is you are not really a person at all. You are most certainly having the experience of being a person, but in the bigger picture it’s not who you are. Every action we take every decision we make, is because we think we will be happier from it. It’s not a coincidence that we’re all looking for happiness in our search for happiness we are actually looking for ourselves without realizing it. It’s not possible to find lasting happiness through material things. Every material thing appears and eventually disappears, so if you vest your happiness in a material thing your happiness will disappear when the material thing disappears, there’s nothing wrong with material things (They are wonderful and you deserve to have what ever you want in life) but it’s a major breakthrough when you realize that you’ll never find lasting happiness in them. If material things brought us happiness then when we receive something that we really wanted the happiness would never leave us. But it’s not the case instead we experience a fleeting happiness, and within a very short amount of time we’re back to where we started from—a state of wanting more thing in an effort to feel happy again. There’s growing evidence that humans are optimistic by nature, but that doesn’t mean. It’s all sunshine all the time. Experts say the key to living your best life is finding the right balance between being positive and pragmatic. To make a progress, we need to be able to imagine alternative realities - better ones - and we need to believe that we can achieve them. William James wrote the greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.  Keeping a positive outlook doesn’t always come naturally. But optimism is like a muscle you have to train it, according to Tchiki Dhuis. We can choose to wake up and grumble all day and be bitter and angry and judge others and find satisfaction in others doing bad instead of good. Or we can wake with optimism and love and say, ‘Just what is this beautiful day going to bring me.’"

Margaret Trudeau: Strong relationships begin with the connection we have to ourselves honesty, reliability and courage are the trademarks of a thriving relationship.

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence. Helen Keller

One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn’t pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore the faith in your self. Lucille Ball

Optimist must enjoy challenges, appreciate possibilities and possess a deep belief in your ability to master a situation. Hope for the future a must, and confidence in that hope a strong plus. If your motto is ‘try try again’ and your glass is always half full, you’re perfectly set to make the most of this - or any - opportunity. The Artist’s Way by Julie Cameron.

Kitchen Table Wisdom, Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

When we haven’t the time to listen to each other’s stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live, because we spend less time at the kitchen table. Because we have stopped listening to each other we may even have forgotten how to listen, stopped learning how to recognize meaning and fill ourselves from the ordinary events of our lives. We have become solitary readers and watchers rather than sharers and participants. The more we listen, the clearer that story becomes, our true identity, who we are, why we are here, what sustains as, is in this story, the stories at every kitchen table are about the same things, stories of owning, having and losing, stories of sex, of power, of pain, of wounding, of courage, hope, and healing, of loneliness and the end of the loneliness, stories about God. In telling them, we are telling each other the human story, stories that touch us in this place of common humanness awaken us and weave us together as a family once again sometimes when I ask people to tell me their story, they tell me about their achievements, what they have acquired or built over a lifetime. So many of us do not know our own story. A story about who we are, not what we have done, about what we have faced to build what we have built, what we have drawn upon and risked to do it, what we have felt, thought, feared, and discovered the events of our lives. The real story that belong to us along all stories are full of bias and uniqueness they mix fact with meaning. This is the root of their power. Stories allow us to see something familiar through new eyes we become in that moment a guest in someone else’s life and together with them sit at the feet of the teacher. The meaning we may draw from someone’s story may be different from the meaning they themselves have drawn, n o matter facts bring us to knowledge but stories lead to wisdom. Knowing your own story requires having a personal response to life, an inner experience of life. I have recognized the connection between my anger and my will to live. My anger was my will to live turned inside out, my life force was just as intense, just as powerful as my anger, but for the first time I could experience it as different and feel it directly in that moment of surprise, I had a glimpse of something fundamental about who I am; that at the core of things I have an intense love of life, a wish to fully participate fully in life and to help other to do the same.

Aryuvedic Medicine

Aryuveda suggest that there is a difference between energy and energy pattern or energy form, the container through which a person’s life energy is flowing at any given moment. The shape of their energy, as it were. The energy form is anger or sorrow or joy or disappointment, but the energy itself is the Chi, or the life force. In Chinese, the words for becoming angry, shenqi, mean generating the Chi, or increasing the life force. Few of us are able to love ourselves as we are; what we need to do to survive may be very different from what you need to live. Reclaiming ourselves usually means coming to recognize and accept that we have in us both sides of everything. We are in relationship with our expectations and not life itself; without judgment many things can be made holy. Those who don’t love themselves as they are rarely love life as it is either. Some people have come to prefer certain life experiences and deny and reject others, unaware of the value of the hidden things that may come wrapped in plain or even ugly paper. Beyond comfort lie grace, mystery, and adventure. We are all here for a single purpose: to grow in wisdom and to learn to love better. If we fear loss enough, in the end the things we possess will come to possess us.

A human life has seasons much as the earth has seasons, each time with its own particular beauty, and power, and gift; by focusing on springtime and summer, we have turned the natural process of life into a process of loss rather than a process of celebration and appreciation. Life is neither linear nor is it stagnant; it is a movement from mystery to mystery, just as a year includes autumn and winter, life includes death, not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made. The denial of death of the most common way we edit life we usually look outside of ourselves for heroes and teachers. It has not occurred to most people that they may already be the role model they seek. The wholeness they are looking for may be trapped within themselves by beliefs, attitudes, and self-doubt. But our wholeness exists in us now, trapped through it maybe, it can be called upon for guidance, direction and most fundamentally, comfort. It can be remembered; eventually we may come to live by it. Anger is just a demand for change, a passionate wish for things to be different.

What we need to survive is often different from what we may need to do to live to get off the treadmill of survival, and to refocus our lives. How much have we put off living today in order to do or say what was expedient? To get what I thought I needed. Could survival be a habit? Was it possible to live so defensively that we never live at all even than your experiences, our beliefs become our prisons. Perhaps the heart is not just a sort of Valentine, more than a way of loving, the heart may be a way of experiencing life, the capacity to know a fundamental connection to others as a whole the opening of the heart seems to go far beyond love to an experience of belonging which heals our most profound wounds when people look at others in this way, the connection they experience makes it simpler to give, to have compassion, to serve, and to love. I though people listened only because they were too timid to speak or did not know the answer. A loving silence often has far more powerful to heal, and to connect than the most well intentioned words. Joy seems to be a function of the willingness to accept the whole and to show up to meet with whatever is there. Commitment is a conscious choice to align ourselves with our most genius values and our sense of purpose. Everyone alive has suffered. It is the wisdom gained from our wounds and from our wounds and from our own experiences of suffering that makes us able to heal. Each of us is unfinished, a work in progress. We are, in a certain way, defined as much by our potential as by its expression. Sometimes we can best help other people by remembering that what we believe above them may be reflected back to them in our presence and may affect them in ways we do not fully understand. Dying people when we pray, we don’t change the world, we change ourselves. We change our consciousness, we move from individual, isolated making things happen kind of consciousness to a connection on the deepest level with the largest possible reality. How do we know who we are? Arnold M. Ludwig

Dying people have the (power) to heal the rest of us in unusual ways. Years afterwards, many people can remember what a dying person has said to them and carry it with them through their lives. Perhaps dying people give a sort of dashan to the rest of us in the same way that spiritual teachers do. The sayings and perspectives of a dying person are often carried in this way, woven into our fabric changing us from then on, helping us to live better.

Since childhood, for example, you’ve learned to identify yourself by the face you see. Staring back at you in the mirror. That’s how you see yourself in your mind’s eye and imagine how others see you and decide if you’re worth knowing or not. Despite the correspondence of your mirror image with your physical body, many factors influence whether you subjectively identify your reflection as you. Standing before a mirror and you ask the image staring back at you - who are you - and then repeated over and over again I am who I am. This may be the answer to human existence. Then again it may not, you can’t be other than what you are, unless of course, you believe that you can reinvent yourself or that yourself is an illusion you can conceive of a self, and analog I that can move about vicariously in your imagination, doing things that you actually aren’t doing or of a metaphor me that can look out from within your imagined self at the imagined people and the imagined scenes.

This self exists in consciousness, makes choices and acts as in a story. There is a self only in as much as you believe there is a self. Basically we hold ourselves together day by day by not dwelling on it but by having some image of ourselves. We create our own images. We are all created largely by the law, custom, and society, we pretty much sleep at the same time, eat at the same time, and do all the same things we put that altogether with our own act, and we’ve got a lot to juggle, just to keep all that going is a full time job.

Changing nature of personal identity over a succession of life stages or the striving for self-realization through the process of self-actualization.

These notions are all based on the assumption that you need to remove the impediments to self knowledge to experience the progressive unfolding of yourself and become who you are meant to be.

So powerful influences shape the nature and direction of your life, inducing you to inhabit standard life stories that have a beginning, middle, and end and that mostly confirm to certain culturally acceptable themes. Depending on your perspective, you can make a case for living your life prospectively, interpreting your experiences as this result of prior causes or personal choices. You act as though you can modify your fate, while the chorus of the voices in the background proclaims what you must do. Because our thoughts usually precede or accompany our actions and we often accomplish what we set out to do, we assume that we’re causing our own behavior not bothering to wonder what biological or environmental forces may have been influenced our thoughts, as long as we can experience ourselves as the source of our actions, we’re apt to believe that we have substantial control over our lives.

Other aspects of our mental functioning fortify this belief with every act, every thought, every feeling moment by moment; we’re presumably in the process of affirming the existence of ourselves and our ability to influence events. We need to believe that what we do is important and matters or why we do it? Meaning conveys a scene of preciousness to our experiences. It helps us construct rather than deconstruct our lives. To retain a sense of purpose, we must believe in our specialness; this specialness may refer to our physical attributes, our talents, our family background, our acquisitions, our accomplishments, our personality, our children, our affiliation, our outlook, or our secret longings and thoughts. By loving others, we deny the potential meaningless of existence and add meaning to our own life. Every person we deeply care about increases our commitment to living and makes the prospects of our dying even more difficult. To contemplate continuity. This is why people usually prefer to cling to the continuity also lets your life story move forward in time with the past preceding the present and the present preceding the future. When we think about ourselves we turn the world into a meaningless desert. But when we think about the welfare of others, we fulfill our true self and give meaning to our existence you give up whatever freedom you possess by ignoring the reality of necessity swept along by a powerful current; you’re least free to maneuver about in life when you futilely try to head upstream, and most free when your plans and actions are consistent with the flow of necessity. The difficult dilemma you face then is how to maintain your sense of personal freedom while realizing that a myriad of unknown forces are controlling you. If you embraced the myth of free will, believing that you can be whatever you choose to be, you live your life oblivious to the many influences shaping your decision. If you see yourself as the inevitable product of biological, psychological and cultural forces, completely lacking in choice, you deny your personal experience. Neither free nor necessity fully captures the sense of who you are. When you realize better where you are heading, you become more able to anticipate obstacles and weigh options for adopting an alternative course.

You CAN Negotiate Anything by Herb Cohen

Negotiation is a field of knowledge and endeavor that focuses on gaining the favor of people from whom we want things. It’s as simple as that. Negotiation is the use of information and power to offend behavior within a ‘web of tension.’ Power is a mind-blowing entity. It’s the capacity or ability to get things done to exercise control over people, events, situations and oneself. However power is based on perception. Got it and then if you think you’ve got it, then you’ve got it. If you thin you don’t have it, even if you have it, even if you have it, then you don’t have it.

In short you have more power if you believe you have power to view your life’s encounters as negotiations.

What we do not understand we cannot control, Charles Reich.

If you think you can or you can’t you’re always right, Henry Ford. Believe firmly that you have the power, and you’ll convey that self-confident perception to others. It is you who determines how they see, believe, and react to you. Printed words, documents, and signs carry authority; most people tend not to question them. Use your head and tap in on the power of risk taking as well.

Risk taking involves mixing courage with common sense. Speak to the other person’s needs, hopes, dreams, and aspirations; approach each person on a human level with the hope that you can help them solve their problems. Persistence is to power what carbon is to steel. By gnawing through ad kike long enough even a rat can drown a nation. The elimination of the potential problem is very simple. All that has to be done is the substitution of the word I instead of you in all your messages. By making use of I or me you can express your personal feelings, reactions and needs without sitting judgment. Most needs can be fulfilled by the way we act and behave. Effective listening requires more than hearing the words transmitted. It demands that you find meaning and understanding in what is being said. After all, meanings are not words, but in people. Obviously, you can’t listen intelligently while you are talking, so be a sensitive to your own listen versus talk ration.

Most Influential Books Ever Written, Martin Seymour-Smith

The superior man is not superior in the usual sense he is simply superior to his circumstances because he possess wisdom. Thus, while we cannot control our fates, we can decide how we should live. We can choose to go along with the prevailing cosmic conditions as a modern Indian philosophers has put it. True self knowledge is attained by philosophical reflection supported by greedless performance of social duties he could have added too supported by the type of sexual activity that is also greed less and centered in the beloved. The real is what remains the same through change and cannot be thought away (Fear and constraint arise from a second, therefore to understand that the self alone is real without a second is to be fearless and Free) then we can be free. It is never pretended that the process is an easy one, or that life does not have to be lived through. Some people may yearn for riches, not for money’s sake but in order to send their man should never cast his sound reason behind him, for the eyes are in front and not in the back." Always he relied on the plaines meaning obtainable. What do you see when you look in the Mirror? Thomas F. Cash, Ph.D

Many behavioral scientists who have studied physical appearance have researched what I call the outside view. This perspective considerers how our actual appearance—our height, weight, hair color, or other physical attributes—influences our lives. It poses questions about whether people’s physical characteristics affect how others think about them and treat them. Most often studied have been the influences or physical attractiveness defined simply as how good-looking people are judged to be on a scale from 1 to 10. Although beauty is partly in the eye of the beholder, there is still considerable social consensus about how physically attraction people are; after all, every culture conveys strong messages about the criteria of good looks, and we judge appearances through our common cultural lens. Given a modicum of provocation from the powers that be, people with poor self-esteem will generalize their discontent to their looks, moving mentally from the inner me to the outer me

Human beings (and other primates) focus their attention in two directions —an outward focus on events in the environment and an inward focus on aspects of the self. The latter focus of consciousness may be directed toward private experiences, such as thoughts, feelings, and sensations our actions and one’s physical appearance. Erich Fromm for The Love of Life. It is a tragedy, Fromm writes, that most of us die before we have begun to love. To be alive means to be reborn over and over again. His talent for letting the heart speak along with the mind is a quality that used to go under the name of wisdom.

I believe a human being is fully himself only when he expresses himself, when he makes use of the powers within him. If he cannot do that, if his life consists only of possessing and using rather than being, then he degenerates; he becomes a thing; his life becomes pointless. It becomes a form of suffering. Real joy comes with real activity and real activity involves the utilization and cultivation of human powers. We should not forget that exerting our minds encourages the growth of brain cells. I do want to mention that there is a humanistic conscience that stands in direct opposition to the authoritarian one. A humanistic conscience is rooted in the individual himself and communicates to him what is good and beneficial for him, for his development, for his growth. That voice often speaks very softly, and we are good at ignoring it. But in the realm of physiology as well as in that of psychology researchers have found signs of what we might call a health conscience, a sense of what is good for us, and if people listen to that voice inside them, they will not obey the voice of some authority. Our own internal voices guide us in directions that are compatible with physical and psychic potential of our particular organisms. Those voices tell us; you’re on the right track here; you’re on the wrong one there. Activity is understood as something that brings the