Jordan Hall: From Meta-Crisis to Christianity - A Philosopher's Journey Through Liminal Spaces
Source: Elevating Consciousness Podcast with Artem Zen, Limicon Conference
Date: 2025-08-19
Subject: Jordan Hall's conversion to Christianity after years of exploring Eastern spirituality, psychedelics, and meta-crisis thinking
Core Transformation Insight
The Central Revelation:
"I spent all this time really quite intensely collaborating with lots of smart people and well-intentioned people on what does the response to the metacrisis look like? And I have a really robust theory of what it needs to look like. And so I'm sitting here in this very unassuming simple country church in Swannanoa which is itself a very unassuming town in western North Carolina... And I'm watching these folks do something which has been part of a basic tradition for hundreds of years here and thousands of years in the world. I'm looking around going, 'Holy shit, that's the thing. This is actually the thing in the right order.'"
On Religion vs. Spirituality
The Deeper Stack:
"As you move from a propositional domain and you move into a participatory domain, you're moving from the place where philosophy is very comfortable down into the category that will ultimately be religion... religion is not where you ask the deepest questions. It's where you participate in the deepest life, which is a deeper place than asking questions."
The Unavoidable Religious Nature:
"One ultimately cannot avoid being religious fundamentally. You can either be consciously religious or unconsciously religious cannot avoid being religious."
The Entrepreneurial Foundation for Faith
Cultivating Intuition:
"I learned how to know how to cultivate instincts and how to trust intuitions... You learn how to cultivate good instincts and good intuitions and learn how to navigate on that basis. Which doesn't mean by the way that you don't think about what's going on, but you notice that your thinking is integrated into a larger scheme... intuition and thinking do not sit next to each other. Thinking sits embedded in intuition. Intuition is a bigger thing that includes thinking in it."
The Humility of Discovery
Profound Ignorance Revealed:
"I came out the other end with a deeper level of humility in particular and an awareness of man oh man did I have a lot of basic ideas just wrong like the idea of faith completely wrong the idea of religion wrong... the notion of the trinity wrong... showing up which is interesting. What am I doing thinking I know what faith is and then presuming to reject something on the basis of a completely inadequate effort to even understand."
The Experience of Conviction:
"He says something and I have what I learned from Bonita Roy was a reaction... Some part of me actually hardens against it... And around about my heart, I get this experience and it basically says you didn't like that and that's because you're wrong. Like, oh shit that's and that was like, you know, in half a second. And that I'm wrong somehow was being able to be held in a space of, yeah, yeah, you're right. I was wrong. All right, I'm not doing that anymore."
Christianity's Unique Offering
The Horizontal and Vertical Dimensions:
"The very bread, the very wine of the agapic love that is present in the way of Christ is communion, which is to say communion with your neighbors... your relationships with the people around you are not only important and rich they are woven of the same fabric as the nature of the sacred in general and then the vertical... I am in relationship with the infinite and the infinite's character is agape."
Cultural Context Matters:
"It's really not a real thing to try to be a lone ranger Buddhist in Arizona when you're not immersed in a culture that has fully integrated the implications, consequences, presuppositions, and axiology of Buddhism... I'm in the west. In fact, I'm in western North Carolina in the mountains... I am a Westerner."
The Meta-Crisis as Religious Crisis
The Fundamental Diagnosis:
"Categorically the heart of the metacrisis is in fact a religious crisis. So that's a simple assertion. So it's not that it is part of it or influences it. It is in fact fundamentally at its very you know you keep going down the stack when you get to the bottom of the stack you're like oh that's actually where it is."
The Solution Framework:
"Learn how to listen to God and do what he tells you to do. That is a crazy thing to say, but I'm actually... trying... Notice, by the way, this is a categorical solution to the complexity of the meta crisis... how do I deal with the complexity of the meta crisis? Turns out you need infinity. But infinity is online. He wants to talk to you. You just got to learn to listen."
On Love vs. Love Signaling
The Intimacy Requirement:
"Love by its very nature requires intimacy. If you do not have intimacy, you cannot in fact actually engage in the relationship of love in a meaningful way... What we have done and largely because we live highly alienated, atomized and interesting enough decontextualized lives is we have taken things like sentimentality... we've actually reified that as the thing itself."
The Real Work:
"What does it mean to actually become vulnerable enough to have an intimate relationship with somebody who's capable of having an actual intimate relationship with you and commit to that and get get there, notice the consequences of it, and then let that spiral out from the center."
Divine Guidance in Practice
Supernatural Perception:
"I notice the micro expressions of the teenagers talking with each other. And notice, oh, that's healthy... And then the divine part... certain individuals would pop forward almost like changing the focal length and but also supernaturally in the sense of more information was literally available in my sensory field. Whoa, that person is... glowing. Something's going on there."
Practical Example:
"I just have this very very distinct sense of and I would say God telling me she is unspeakably beautiful and a feeling of oh I need to tell her that... And then she lets me know that she is undergoing a variety of medical treatments and as a consequence... had looked at herself in the morning and had said to herself how ugly she was... I wasn't thinking about that. I was just singing a song... And had this very clear feeling of, hey, do this."
The Church's Failures and Potential
The Critique:
"We do not love well enough. So we do not love well enough. And we who say that we have chosen to follow the way of Christ must love better... we are not humble enough... there's a propositional tyranny that has taken over the church and the form of the church."
The Distinction:
"The church is not the form of the church. The church is the actual lived relationships between and among and with meaning between and among the people and with God."
Key Themes
- Participatory vs. Propositional Truth - Moving from abstract beliefs to lived relationship
- Embodied Spirituality - Integration of body, mind, and spirit rather than Gnostic escape
- Cultural Rootedness - The importance of practicing religion within its native cultural context
- Divine Intimacy - Personal relationship with infinite love that seeks individual flourishing
- Community as Sacred - Horizontal relationships as fundamental to spiritual life
- Humility as Pathway - Recognition of ignorance as doorway to wisdom
- Meta-Crisis Solution - Religious renewal as answer to civilizational challenges
This conversation represents a profound example of intellectual honesty leading to spiritual transformation, showing how deep philosophical inquiry can culminate in traditional religious commitment when approached with genuine openness and humility.