Gary ‘Z’ McGee, Staff Writer
Waking Times

“The man who can face vilification and disgrace, who can stand up against the popular current, even against his friends and his country when he know he is right, who can defy those in authority over him, who can take punishment and prison and remain steadfast—that is a man of courage. But do you need much courage just to obey orders, to do as you are told and to fall in line with thousands of others to the tune of general approval and the Star Spangled Banner?” –Alexander Berkman

“It’s a sad and stupid thing to have to proclaim yourself a revolutionary just to be a decent man.” –David Harris

You’ve probably heard of light working, and the light workers who practice loving energy and cultivate sacred spaces for such energy to flourish, but you probably haven’t heard about gray walking and the gray walkers who seek to maintain the tension between opposites and work at bringing opposites back in line with one another. They are the ones successfully getting in touch with their dark sides. It keeps them whole. They are amoral agents par excellence. They realize that the secret of alchemy is found in the intimacy of opposites. They don’t deny their shadow. They don’t shun the shadow for fear of being immoral. They play with it instead. They reconcile with it. They understand that shadow work is ultimately light work. They embrace the wise words of Carl Jung, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

Gray walkers have undeceived themselves precisely because they have made the darkness conscious. They realize that their inner-darkness is where their light needs to shine brightest, because compassionate empathy with the world requires a baptizing of our inner-shadow, lest we demonize the shadows of others. Like Loius G. Herman wrote, “By accepting the inevitability of our shadow, we recognize that we are also what we are not. This humbling recognition restrains us from the madness of trying to eliminate those we hate and fear in the world. Self-mastery, maturity, and wisdom are defined by our ability to hold the tension between opposites.”

The menace of the past was that men became slaves; the menace of the present is that men become automatons to corporations hell-bent on profits at any cost, to include destroying the health of people as well as the health of delicate ecosystems. As it stands, the State led military/corporate industrial complex is the Matrix and we are Neo. The question is: what are we going to do about it? Are we going to flounder around in the pink-goop of denial, or are we going to rise up, unplug ourselves, and really get some work done toward a healthier way of living for human beings?

One answer is to transform the militaristic mindset into a humanistic mindset. And gray-walkers are doing exactly that by blurring the lines between moral and amoral and working between the cracks of black & white, republican & democrat, socialism and capitalism, democracy & plutocracy. They subsume all polarities, mixing it all up in a bag of “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me!” and then pouring it out over the devastation that is the human psyche in order to fill in the cracks with a healthier way of seeing things: with a sense of interdependent humor. They are the ones lighting the beacons of hope towards the end of transforming militaristic mindsets into humanistic ones.

If, as Anais Nin wrote, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage” then the world is constantly expanding for gray walkers, because they are the ones stretching black and white comfort zones, breaking right and wrong mental paradigms, and flattening the rigid box the status quo so desperately tries to think outside of. Gray-walking is the epitome of being the change we wish to see in the world. It is the essence of transforming the fear of change into the courage to embrace change, because everything is a delicious middle-gray anyway. Gray walkers don’t fear change they change fear, because they realize that the only firm law in the universe is that things will always change. They ask: who among us will roll over and play dead under the tyranny of a fascist military-controlled state, and who will rise up with a full heart and courageously declare that our collective military mindset has crippled us into a heartless nation of sycophantic fools hell-bent on allowing the powers-that-be do whatever the hell they feel like in order to keep us “safe” and “secure” from the evil forces of “terrorism”? And they are the ones answering the call to the healthy civil disobedience and the non-violent action required to undermine the unhealthy, unsustainable system that is destroying lives and decimating entire ecosystems.

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