In this episode, D. Neil Elliott shares his personal story of how he expanded his consciousness and transformed his life. At age 57, to any outsider, he was highly educated, had a successful consulting business, and had an amazing family. His life was going well, but things were not all they seemed. He found himself anxious and fearful and sinking into a world of depression and planning his suicide. Then, something changed. He remembered a manuscript that he received. He then put aside the suicide note, began reading, and embarked on a process over the next year to transform his life. 

In this interview, Neil describes his upbringing, patterns of thinking, behavior, and beliefs, and how these influenced his view of the world. Next, he expands on concepts of personal consciousness and the mechanisms of how each of us is unknowingly impacting our individual and collective lives, creating our current turbulent reality. Finally, he discusses the 7-step process that became the blueprint that transformed his life. He's now making it accessible for others to achieve the best possible outcomes for their life in his book, A Higher Road: Cleanse Your Consciousness to Transcend the Ego and Ascend Spiritually.  

Neil is an author, speaker, and Professional Engineer with an MBA and has worked in the Electric Utility industry for over 30 years.  He lives in a peaceful historic village on the West Coast of British Columbia with his wife and a house full of art, books, and plants. Neil refers to himself as a  science-based thinker that looks at things from an engineering perspective. This background facilitated the 7-step process he used to blend science and spirituality.  

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A Higher Road: Cleanse Your Consciousness to Transcend the Ego and Ascend Spiritually, by D. Neil Elliott

Available on Amazon, eBook, and other major retailers.

A Free Chapter of the book is available upon request – on his website DNeilElliott.

You can find references to the book topics he mentions (on Mind and Meaning, Mind and Biology, Neuroplasticity, and Near-Death Experiences) in his book, A Higher Road: Cleanse Your Consciousness to Transcend the Ego and Ascend Spiritually.

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(Carol Chapman) Thank you for tuning your heart's in for another episode of the Hearts rise up podcast. I'm carol chapman, your host along with my co-host Ann Serrie and Concetta Antonelli. We share our own personal experiences, tips and strategies along with powerful stories and compelling insights from guest interviews. We're here to inspire and empower your conscious evolution. Help you tap into your inner wisdom and rise to your heart centered higher self. Together we can rise to a higher level of consciousness, an elevated state of being and experience more love, joy and freedom. Thank you. Mm hmm. Welcome back. Heart centered listeners. Thank you for joining us again for another fantastic episode of the Hearts Rise up podcast where you will always find inspiring heart centered wisdom for your conscious evolution.

 

(Carol Chapman) I have a very special guest today. D Neil Elliott to any outsider Neal was highly educated, owned a profitable consulting firm, a successful career and an amazing wife and family. But things were not all they seemed to be. and at age 57 Neil was depressed, anxious and fearful and ready to commit suicide in a phrase. He was in a very, very dark place quite by accident. He discovered a higher road as he traveled that road, he found the key to transforming his life. In fact, he wrote a book on it entitled a higher road, cleanse your consciousness to transcend the ego and ascend spiritually Neal lives in a peaceful historic village on the west coast of British Columbia with his wife and a house full of art, books and plants. He names all of his plants. His favorite is a tall and lean yucca called row helio.

 

(Carol Chapman) Did I get that? Right, okay, good. He has three Children and five grandchildren, all of whom of course are all brilliant. He loves all wildlife and domestic pets too. Furthermore. In his 20s, Neil raised a variety of parrots and Labrador dogs. He has a passion for motorcycling and loves to travel particularly in Europe to visit museums, churches and art galleries. He likes to visit cities and enjoy all that they have to offer, but prefers a peaceful country life close to water forests and plenty of wildlife Neil. Welcome to the show. 

 

(D. Neil Elliott) Oh, thank you carol. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm very much looking forward to our conversation today. 

 

(Carol Chapman) Well, me too, you know, we have had a couple of conversations, but our first one was a pretty long conversation and that was a few weeks ago and when we came together, we had a very heartwarming conversation and then as you were sharing a little bit more about who you are in your story.

 

(Carol Chapman) You know, there was some very heart wrenching things when I started to think about it. It's not really uncommon because a lot of us go through so many different things in our lives. But what is uncommon is how you approached your challenges in life that led you to a dramatic turnaround and I would love for you to share your personal journey and the crucial moments in your life, what was happening, how you turn things around. And also I want to talk a little bit about the work that you're doing today. Your mission, the book process that you are putting out there to help others, that process that helped you and that you stumbled upon. I would love for you to share as much as you can about that as well. Go ahead dive right in

 

(D. Neil Elliott) Alright, probably the best place to start is when I was a child and kind of just give everybody a little bit of window into my childhood, youngest of six and my father passed away when I was five years old.

 

(D. Neil Elliott) It was in 1965. So I was born in 1960. So in 1965, my mother found herself without a job, six kids and essentially buried my father and then went to summer school, she had a university degree, so she went to summer school to begin a process again in her teacher's certificate and got a job to start that September as a teacher. Consequently, you know, growing up it was, You know, I didn't have a lot of parental influence and we're left to our own devices and in the 60s, that's way different than today. You know, I walked myself to school and those kinds of things, but you know, essentially as I was growing up as everybody does. You know, we come into this world as a little child and our brains don't get to the point where they can make conscious decisions for themselves until they're about five years old, so that's the kind of normal development of a brain. And so when you're a baby, and if you've been fortunate enough to be born into this world with a parents of means that can look after you and support you and feed you and you know, shower you with love your this little embodiment of joy and really what you are is you're a sponge, you're just soaking up everything that's in your environment, your parents, emotions, your parents thinking and, you know, your siblings and anybody that you become exposed to, essentially what you're doing is you're shaping your beliefs and your shaping your future experiences and as we grow from, and then at age five, we start to make our own conscious choices that have already been influenced by what we've kind of absorbed up to that date, then your environment that you're in, in your circumstance, you're in.

 

(D. Neil Elliott) You take that information and start to respond in a way which affects your learning and affects how you view the world, and we reinforce those patterns of thinking and behavior as we grow from babyhood to adulthood. Now, I'm telling you all of this now that I'm at where I'm at, I certainly didn't know this before and I'm still a work in progress, everybody needs to know that. So still a work in progress and anything I say today, that sounds brilliant or amazing if I say anything like that, I know that it doesn't come from me, I am merely the messenger. Anyway, we grow from babyhood to adulthood and we're reinforcing these patterns of thinking, we're learning new things, we're reinforcing additional patterns etcetera. And we bury those deeply in our subconscious mind and then we have these conscious thoughts and choices and we begin to view the world in a particular way we think we're becoming versed in the ways of the world, but what we're really doing is we're shutting our soul off from its connection with the divine, we're shutting our soul off from its source and from the light and I finished high school, you know, I've worked a few jobs driving a tractor trailer, you know, working in a restaurant, those kinds of things, but I went to university and I got an engineering degree and then I got into the working world as a professional engineer in my thirties, I decided that I needed, I wanted to adopt, you know, a more positive attitude from in terms of how I viewed other people's opinions and beliefs and their expression of themselves, so to speak, their ideas and so I took up positive thinking, I picked up, you know, books that we've probably all read Tony Robbins, Napoleon Hill Dr Wayne Dyer, you know, etcetera and they all have good processes and good ideas and good information.

 

(D. Neil Elliott) And so I adopted some of those but it was always this conscious effort to try and change how I was thinking about somebody and I could do that. But in the end the subconscious mind wins, the ego wins. In 2002 I went into consulting and life became about work, you do good job, you deliver and you please your clients, you get repeat work and if you don't kind of things dry up pretty quickly. So I worked hard and you know, I made a lot of money and I spent a lot of money and we made some financial decisions. We lived in this beautiful waterfront home which was very expensive, But over this period from 2000 to 2 2015, what was really happening was still in the mental processes and patterns of thinking that I had and I was just slowly going into this really deep and despondent depression And in 2015 I realized oh this is kind of like I'm really depressed, I'm thinking like what's the point of life?

 

(D. Neil Elliott) I work hard, I'm not getting ahead, I earn lots of money, I'm not getting ahead. I just, I felt like this albatross or this chain around my neck that was just dragging me down and no matter what I was doing, I couldn't, you know, get clear of that and I just kept getting more and more depressed. And so I started to pick up newly issued books, spiritual books, some science books, those kinds of things. All new great information by authors. We know again and all good processes and stuff. So I was trying to change how I thought about life. And I read a book from a woman that experienced in your death experience. And you know, it was a great book and she brought back messages that resonated with me. They were believable but not understandable if that's the right way to say it. And you know, they were just hard to grasp even though I believe them. But what her book did for me was it gave me permission to commit suicide. one of the messages she brought back was we are two of them was we come from love, We return to love.

 

We're not judged after death. And I had this nagging kind of Christian doubt, even though I grew up agnostic had this nagging Christian doubt that if I committed suicide there's a chance I'd go to hell and I didn't want to do that of course, but life was so it was so pointless to me. I was just willing to cash it in. So I was planning my suicide. Some material landed up in my lap. But a week prior to me sitting down at the kitchen table and crafting a suicide note and I thought I have permission now to commit suicide. So I planned out my suicide. Our house had finally sold after seven years on the market, my wife had left to visit family and friends in Toronto Ontario Canada and I sat down in this kitchen table and crafted a suicide note. And I was planning it out because, you know, we're all good actors in our environment, we all put our best foot forward. We can hide all kinds of things. So no one knew I was depressed. No one knew I was feeling like I was feeling and I wanted to ensure that my wife was going to be financially okay when I pulled the trigger and I wanted to say goodbye to my family without them knowing what I was going to do.

 

(D. Neil Elliott) So I crafted this note. I had a plan, but this material, you know, it called to me, so to speak. You know, it promised to liberate me from my thinking if I was willing to be open to it, curious, nonjudgmental and read it. And so I did. I began this process and I thought, okay, well put the suicide away. That was going to be three months away. Anyway. I'll put it away. You know, it's delayed a little bit. That's okay. I can always do that. But I can't come back from doing it. So I thought, okay, I'll embark on reading this material a year later. My depression was totally gone. I was full of inner peace. I was full of joy. I was just, you know, it's just I totally had a new outlook on life and so I've carried on with this process and I wanted to share this with everybody. I could I wanted to stand on the rooftops and showed it to the world and I thought I'd be looked at like an idiot. Of course I didn't do that, but I kept it all to myself.

 

(D. Neil Elliott) No one knew about it, No one knew about this transition. And I decided after a couple of years, the best way for me to do that is to write a book and my goal with my book, of course, is to help people the new knowledge I gained, the logical and rational information that bridges this gap between spirituality and science in a very specific process that's tangible that, you know, I found I could do and it made sense to me, just made all the difference in the world with making this leap and with actually understanding who we really are at the core of our being and what we're here to do and we're meant to do, and at some point each of us will do it. The question is just when and how. So I want to share the process. I went through, I've done that in my book and my goal is to help people that, you know, if it rings true to you and you follow this process, you can totally transform how you think and as we individually change and we become this expression of unconditional love and we understand what we're here to do and why we're here and what this process looks like.

 

(D. Neil Elliott) We will eventually bring this whole world into a new era of love and peace. And so my part is to try and get this out to people so that they can read it and make a decision for themselves. 

 

(Carol Chapman) Well, I have to admit, I've read the book and it's very, very compelling. The steps that you go through. People go through a lot of different changes in their lives and we each have an opportunity to take the time to find what process, what approach, what's going to work for us in terms of really understanding more about ourselves, where we come from, who we are. And I've studied a lot of different things myself, but I've found that what you have presented is something very, very compelling now. It may not work for everyone. I think part of it is our commitment to our own personal development, our own personal spiritual growth. I think that is probably the most important thing, but I would love for you to share your experience as you were going through the process of unfoldment.

 

(Carol Chapman) And the steps that you describe in the book that over the course of a year really helped you just turn things around because it's really all about breaking through the barrier of the ego...