Phil Cousineau In Search of the Soul of the World
Your new show broadcast through PBS, “Global Spirit” is a a cross-cultural and transnational television series that focuses on the “internal travel.” What are some of the avenues or paths you will be taking your viewers on? What makes this show different from other interview shows? The show that I host and co-write on PBS, called Global Spirit, has been called the world’s first “internal travel series,” for the reason that each week we invite two or three guests from other cultures around the world to speak a single theme — the spiritual quest, the search for ecstasy, the mystical life, sacred music — for a solid hour. This is what makes our show unique – one theme, one hour, a glimpse into the thinking and practices of people from other traditions around the world. I have been fortunate to interview a shaman from Greenland, an artist from Tibet, a monk from Austria, a singer from the Onondaga reservation, a theologian from England, and many, many more. It is a dream come true. Together with Stephen Olsson, the originator and now director and producer of the show, I am able to combine many of my passions, ranging from cross-cultural studies to spirituality, art, and political activism.
Out of all your studies and travels, what spiritual school of thought or idea have you found yourself most fascinated by? I was raised Roman Catholic in French Canadian Detroit, and although I rejected its traditional aspects many years ago (after listening to Alan Watts on the radio and reading Joseph Campbell), I have learned to be grateful for the numinous gifts of ritual and ceremony that it provided for me. Since then I have learned to admire Celtic Spirituality, from my many travels to Ireland and France, Zen Buddhism for its deep attention to meditation, and American Indian practices, which I learned while working on six documentaries about original “First Peoples.” To avoid the aforementioned dangers of cafeteria spirituality, each day I practice something from each of these disciplines, but also write about them and seek out their greatest proponents. What a blessing this has proved to be for it allows to be experience part of what the great essayist Pico Lyer calls “the world soul,” which I ardently believe is the future for the human race. We will need all the help we can garner if we are to survive.
