Jim Marion In Dialogue: Putting on the Mind of Christ

Jim Marion

Jim Marion is the founder and Director of the Institute for Spiritual Awareness in Washington, D.C., the author of Putting on the Mind of Christ: The Inner Work of Christian Spirituality, and The Death of the Mythic God, the Rise of Evolutionary Spirituality, studied for the Catholic priesthood, and later undertook divinity studies at the interdenominational Hartford Seminary.

Jim is part of what might be the last American generation to have "grown up Catholic" in its most traditional sense. The church was the center of life in the small, ethnic Irish Pennsylvania mining town of his youth. Between weddings, funerals, and daily Mass, the townsfolk spent a significant amount of time each week in the pews.

Jim went to a Jesuit high school and at age 15, he left home for an extremely traditional monastery nearby. Even at that age, the young monks-in-training rose at 2:00AM to chant the first prayers of the morning, and spent two hours daily in meditation. The method they used was a form of cogitatio or mental prayer taught by St. Ignatius, by which one thinks about a particular topic (e.g. the suffering of Christ) and then draws some sort of formal conclusion from it.

In Jim's experience, this practice amounted to mental gymnastics, quite removed from the living tradition of mystical prayer that infused Christianity for fifteen centuries. Indeed, the Protestant Reformation largely discarded these methods in a classic case of the pre/trans fallacy, by which post-rational mysticism was rejected as pre-rational nonsense. For its part, the Catholic church entrenched in the Counter-Reformation, and the living tradition of prayer became codified, formulated, and largely lifeless. It is due to the tireless work of pioneers like Thomas Merton and Thomas Keating—not to mention Jim himself—that these methods are being rediscovered by the masses in our time.

After a month or so, Jim abandoned mental prayer for a more intuitive seeking of the God "beyond all forms, limitations, and conceptualizations," and allowed the energies from that level come into his body, emotions, and mind. He soon began to experience transpersonal states; meanwhile, he was quickly progressing beyond the amber environment he found himself in. Eventually he left the monastery and attended a highly regarded Protestant seminary teaching a "death of God" theology coming from the orange and green altitudes. Upon graduating, he didn't feel especially drawn to teaching, and so he went on to become a lawyer, working in government in Washington, D.C. for 30 years.

Whereas Jim's outer work involved social programs, he continued his inner practice of mystical Christianity. Like the early church, Jim had long understood Christianity to be a developmental process; St. Clement identified the stages of purification, illumination, dark night, and unification one hundred years after Christ. But it was Ken Wilber's Atman Project that really gave Jim an appreciation of modern psychology and the developmental approach. Soon after reading it, Jim penned Putting on the Mind of Christ. Ken was deeply impressed—"blown away," as he put it—and wrote the foreword for the book. When he formed Integral Spiritual Center, Ken invited Jim to be a founding member and teacher.

Putting on the Mind of Christ is one of the earliest applications of Ken's integral thought to a particular area of inquiry—in this case, Christianity. And, from the Integral altitude, "putting on the Mind of Christ" is perhaps the very best formulation of what Christianity is all about....