*"Visionaries of a new holistic and ecological paradigm are themselves deemed to be neurotic. They have moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you have got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience - that is the hero’s deed."Joseph Campbell The Power of Myth
Blackness and the Dreaming Soul is an uplifting account of one man's search for identity and meaning: having been forced to confront culturally imposed feelings of inferiority and anger, the author describes his route to personal transformation. As a long-time West Indian in Britain, Grant writes from that liminal space of insider, perceived as perpetual outsider, his story inviting us to look at what is wrong with the prevailing dominant world culture that seeks to impose upon its subjects its dualism, historiography and disregard for the majority of humanity, leading to the current ecological and spiritual crisis that threatens our very survival.
Part memoir, part cultural negotiation, the book attempts not only to make sense of his worlds, but to propose solutions that are deeply founded and attainable to all. Whilst a POW in Germany, he began this bold exploration into realms that Lewis Mumford called ‘the wilderness that Western man has failed to explore; the dark continent of his own soul’. As the title suggests, this process is inevitably bound up with the quest for inner meaning, sadly so often missing from Western culture today.
The book reads as a set of linked essays, each of which builds upon the previous one. It begins with the account of Grant’s early life in British Guiana, his sojourn as an officer in the RAF in WWII and the disintegration of his Lancaster around him in the skies over Holland, leading to his earliest reflections in the German Stalags. He retrained as a barrister after the War but being black, found no work. Turning to singing and acting to survive, brought him to the notice of the wider public especially via BBC television.
As an actor he faced the dilemma of only being cast in ‘black’ roles, that is, roles where race was an issue, or reflected the perceived status of, or the prejudices towards, black people in society. Following Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood” speech in 1968, he came to recognise an institutionalised racism never previously apparent despite earlier setbacks. The Civil Rights Movement spurred on his exploration of identity, the ‘dark journey’ into his soul. As an angry black man, he wrote a collection of short poems, several of which were anthologised. These vividly express the dilemma black people face when using language and prepare the ground for the current analysis into how our emphasis on scientific empiricism has trapped us within the language we use.
In 1974, Grant set up DRUM, the first black arts centre in Britain, ironically derided at the time for its ‘separationist’ approach, and almost entirely unacknowledged today by successors which share its fruits.
His last ‘black’ gesture was performing and touring a stage version of Aime Cesaire’s Negritude Movement poem Return to my Native Land. Known for its passionate deconstruction of colonialism, the poem calls for a re-engagement with nature and the emergence of a new man.
The CONCORD festivals, born out of the racial tension of the early 80s, typify Grant’s aim to celebrate cultural diversity in Britain at a time when attempts at social reconciliation were largely ignored. They anticipate his current emphasis on ‘unity in diversity’, a subject he first wrote about in Ring of Steel, the story of the Trinidad steelpan, describing the alchemical transmutation of waste metal into harmonic sound.
As the biographical detail unfolds, the author’s inner journey gradually comes into focus. Much as the alchemical oil-drum becomes ‘pan’, so the surface detail of his life becomes meaning for all. For instance, his lengthy piece on Carnival captures the emphasis on cultural identity, celebration in adversity and the reconciliation of ‘great house’ with ‘the folk’ that comprise the social fabric of West Indians. Columbus’ voyages; the rush towards Genetic engineering; religion and spirituality; issues that are almost never discussed within a holistic framework are reassessed and shown to be vital for understanding our world.
Taoism has long been a major influence on Grant’s thinking and he has broadcast for the BBC on the subject. Tao, the primal energy that permeates the Universe, brings all things into being and reconciles all opposites, contrary to the Western tendency to fragment all knowledge into its constituent parts. Grant subscribes to a holographic Universe, in which everything is embedded in an ‘implicate order of wholeness’ as described by physicist David Bohm; a Universe that is always getting to know itself; that integrates science and spirituality. Grant’s description of the New Physics gives previously unfathomable ideas both a new context and relevance. His straightforward analysis of complex issues renders them available to everyone.
The events of ‘9-11’ were a defining moment in history, polarising our world further. In suggesting ways of rediscovering and developing ancient worldviews, the author challenges us to cut across conventional categories and realise the potential for unity in diversity. He believes that the true direction of the evolution of our species lies not in the survival of the fittest but in the diversity that is the imprint of Creation- we need to develop a reverence for all life. Indeed, recent discoveries confirm that human beings, plants and animals all share the same DNA. He stresses the ‘ultimate connectedness of the inner and the outer… the DNA of a single living cell retains the imprint of the whole person which parallels the smallest atom as a microcosm of the Cosmos’, and ‘being aware of this allows us to re-envisage our true place in the Universe.’
Cy Grant’s story transcends the specialist categories of the conventional bookshelf, opting instead for a reconstruction of the way in which we make our reality. Instead of adopting the mono-culture of globalisation in which duality is enshrined, he seeks to develop a vision of unity in diversity in which all things are connected; man and nature, earth and cosmos. In seeking to recover the ancient worldview, the author believes we will have to acknowledge our history of exploitation and our present rush toward world domination. His book offers us a believable route toward this goal.
The book is now available on
Amazon.co.uk and
Amazon.com
Blackness & the Dreaming Soul by Cy Grant
ISBN: 978 1 905565 08 5 £14.99
Written without bitterness and recrimination,
Blackness & the Dreaming Soul is neither pure biography nor philosophical manifesto, but grows out of the author's childhood as the great grandson of a slave in British Guiana. The book chronicles his career during a long sojourn in Britain, as a World War II RAF officer (two years spent as a prisoner of war in Nazi Germany), qualifying as a barrister at law, to a career in show business spanning stage, film, radio and TV. In the late 50s, Cy's was the first black face to appear regularly on television, singing the news in calypso.
In the 1970s, Cy Grant was chairman and co-founder of DRUM, the first black arts centre in Britain. In the 80s, he was Director of CONCORD multicultural Festivals, celebrating British cultural diversity when the idea of multiculturalism was not so popular. Cy is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Roehampton, a member of the Scientific & Medical Network and author of Ring of Steel, pan sound & symbol, the story of the evolution of the Trinidad Steelpan.
"Blackness & the Dreaming Soul" does not pull its punches - it has its finger smack on the pulse of what is eating away at the very heart of civil society in Britain. Professor Gus John
A Review of Blackness & the Dreaming Soul, by Cy Grant.
by Theodore D. Hall, Ph.D.
“We are not separate, and when we know we are not separate, a new era will be born.”
--Cy Grant
“Blackness & the Dreaming Soul" is a masterful and compassionate assessment of the Western paradigm written by a man who has been burned in the fires of cultural deracination. It is one of the top cultural studies of this decade.
Author Cy Grant, born in Guyana the son of a distinguished Moravian minister, enlisted in the RAF in 1941 after it had lifted its ban on the recruited of “men of colour”. He was commissioned as an officer and flew as a navigator of a Lancaster bomber. After his bomber went down in flames (1943), he became a prisoner of the Nazis for two years.
After the war, Grant learned that although people of color were welcome to fight and die for the Mother Country, they were not welcome to seek a seat at the high table of the military establishment. No Othellos allowed! Subsequently, in the hope of doing something about racial discrimination through politics, Grant studied hard and became a barrister. But here again he found the door to opportunity barred. It began to dawn on the war hero that he was a prisoner still—the prisoner of a paradigm….
“Trapped as I am within a white culture, I believe that I write from that liminal space of ‘insider, perceived as perpetual outsider’, and I invite us all to look at what I believe to be wrong with the prevailing paradigm of the dominant world culture: the inherently catastrophic construct of Western materialistic dialectics.”
Evolution is not merely “descent with modification,” as the Darwinists maintain. Rather, it is, essentially, the process of increasing organismal intelligence. The proof of this assertion is set forth in the work of Dr. Bruce H. Lipton, author of the much-acclaimed Biology of Belief.
In his critique of Western culture, Grant makes the same point, in his own terms of course: “Above all, I believe that our personal experience of being of sound mind, to use (or extend) our minds to the full, is intrinsically linked to what we consider good for all mankind. Western culture has failed to bring that whole new body of possibilities into existence. It has failed to achieve a fair and just experience for human society. It has imposed its values and historiography on the rest of the world, leading to globalization, racism and the current ecological and spiritual crisis threatening our very survival.”
In short: The mark of “fitness” for survival, in the case of the individual or the society, is ever-expanding non-exclusionary intelligence. The “imperial consciousness” is, by definition, exclusionary. Thus it is that empires are relatively short-lived. Witness the slippage of the United States during the Bush administration from its exclusionary “super power” status.
In time, Cy Grant found a field in which he could flourish—the arts. In the seventies, he was co-founder and chairman of DRUM, the first black arts centre in Britain; in the eighties, he was director of the pioneering CONCORD multicultural festivals.
“Any interpretation of multiculturalism is fraught with difficulties. I have pleaded on behalf of diversity, on behalf of globalisation of spirit above matter, that any concept of multiculturalism worth its salt can only be understood within a holographic, non-dual paradigm…. Each culture would maintain its own intrinsic value and at the same time be expected to contribute to the benefit of society as a whole in some way ….”
During the same period, Grant acted, on stage and in film, sang the news in calypso on the BBC, wrote some very fine poetry and an important book on the alchemical evolution of the Trinidad steel-pan—Ring of Steel.
Personally, I find Grant’s portrayal of the arts world in Britain during the seventies and eighties interesting in a number of ways, worth a movie in fact. If the “spurious superiority” of the British was shaken up a bit during this period, some of the credit belongs to Grant.
In the nineties, Grant underwent yet another transformation. His golden years became truly golden. The mask of song & dance man fell away, and lo, there stood a someone reminiscent of the ancient Chinese master Lau Tzu. That is simply a poetic way of saying Grant became, at long last, frequency specific with the consciousness of Lau Tzu.
The path of the great masters leads ultimately to the understanding that “all are one,” or, as Grant puts it, “We are not separate.” Each of us is a variation on the One theme. And what is the One theme? Consider Grant’s paraphrase of the Tao Te Ching on this matter:
“Something mysteriously formed
Existing before heaven and earth
Silent and void, it stands alone
Unchanging … pervading all.
Is this the Mother of all things
I do not know its name
I shall call it Tao
For lack of a better word,
I call it great”
The conclusion of Blackness & the Dreaming Soul is devoted to discussion of the ideational seeds of the West’s (and world’s) renewal, i.e., the new physics, especially the holographic theory of universe.
Currently, this theory is being given a huge boost by the evolutionary theory of Dr. Lipton, who is frequently cited in Grant’s book. In private conversation, Lipton has said to me, “Everything is fractal!”. If the universe is indeed holographic, we would expect its structure (and evolutionary process) to be fractal. Such appears to be the case.
I have called Blackness a “masterwork.” It is just that, a work of a great master in the making. Read it, and learn, as I did.
Copyright 2007 TDHall
www.biofractalevolution.com
Theodore D. Hall, Ph.D., author of "Over the Bones of the Dead: Evolutionary Science--Past, Present & Future."
