WHY GVS NOW?
The world and its citizens are indeed crying out for more meaning, authenticity, integrity, warmth, compassion, true social contact – in essence for a society where people come together, where people live with one another and where they’re not predisposed and manipulated to working against one another.
This is what people worldwide are longing for: a genuine, new societal contract! Isn’t it?
The rate at which our society is changing has never been as rapid as it has been in the last few decades. And like it or not, we too, as individuals, have also evolved profoundly during this time.
By highlighting and sharing an authentic, warm, positive and new story – a story that speaks to and moves the heart of the people, and triggers concrete, co-creative everyday life action – GVS is determined to offset the increasingly suffocating and paralyzing fatalism and cynicism of our societal doom!
We are all keenly aware – aren’t we? – of how our values have become bankrupt, including our ideological, political, cultural, moral, artistic, and, even, spiritual values, all of which are being eviscerated, to the point where it would be fair to say that there exists an overall erosion of all our societal values. This erosion also extends to the values of the Great Narratives (the various “isms” including Catholicism, Socialism, Communism, Liberalism, to name but a few). Even to the “pillars of our society”: democracy, change, sustainability, excellence, spirituality, citizenship, communication, and even love are more and more becoming empty words used with virtually no true meaning behind them anymore!
This may all be true, but let’s be crystal clear here: GVS won’t be focusing on this bankruptcy of values.
The good news is that more and more people all over the world are awakening, and building a crosscurrent towards a genuine revaluing and resourcing of all those values mentioned.
A spiritual revaluing and resourcing!
It can be true – and sadly, true it is – that the dominance of the market – that prescribes and dictates the law and our societal values – has become overwhelming.
So much so, that the values market has now become the market value.
And what are we getting on the daily news? Correct: the world is caught up in the grip of fear, selfishness, instability, uncertainty, pure egoism, navel gazing, perception, exclusion, and hypocrisy.
But the good news is: this gloomy picture is only one side of the coin…
The flip side?
The ever- growing crosscurrent in the hearts of the people – in the belly of society – voicing their awareness that solidarity is the real social concrete and tissue of our society, worth of that name.
Sharing is shining.
The time and glory of the “great I” – with the sole mantra: “Me, myself and I” seems to inflate and coming to an end…
The sources of power and beacons of light of the future?
Individual responsibility & bundled force: shared responsibility.
The insight and confidence that each of us in his/her unique quality contributes to that shared responsibility and creativity: all of us together…
Therefore: a new comprehensive healing and meaning-giving view of the person and the world in which vision, empathy, depth, heart and soul are central is due and timely, isn’t it?
A society in which eventually decision-makers, institutions, organizations, multinationals, SMEs political parties, the middle class, civil society, unions, outlaws of society, disabled people, young people and particularly the media join forces to face and master the many crises that paralyze us: financial, institutional, social, political, psychological, identity, and so on.
But let’s face it: all these crises are in reality only a reflection of a much deeper crisis: the crisis of the spirit!
A Spiritual and Cultural Renaissance is urgently needed. It is high time that we reconnect with the spiritual dimension of our being: of ‘who we truly are’.
It is well overdue to free ourselves from the worn out habits and from our convictions in order to find new ways of seeing that are truly durable.
For this, it is critically important that we create new mental maps to restore the lost paths of our human spirit: the capacity for awe, wonder, mystery, art, music, love and compassion, in short, a search for transcendence, uplifting and meaning.
The world and its citizens are crying out for more meaning, authenticity, integrity, warmth, compassion, true social contact, aren’t they?
In essence for a society where people come together, where people live with one another and where they’re not predisposed to working against one another.
An individual and collective change of mentality going beyond a pure productive and competitive mindset can only emerge if everyone shifts his/her behaviour and his/her interactions with others.
After all, you are/become yourself through the other, aren’t you?!
Let’s combine passion and profit: so all of us can benefit and prosper…
Spiritual leadership is called for!
And here lies a great potential for entrepreneurs who are the driving force behind so much social change and innovation. Indeed, the purebred entrepreneur has the capacity to develop new life in our society.
He/she is part artist, part visionary, part iconoclast. Inspiration, meaning creating, enthusiasm are words that precede the practical and that affect the operational.
Endowing meaning is not only a matter for one’s personal life, but also and just as necessary for each and every organization.
Current social research unequivocally demonstrates that citizens, who have awakened, yearn for leadership and long to become loyal to leaders who manifest credibility and confidence; leaders who also embody the capacity not only to create ‘order’ in this almost unmanageable complexity and chaos in which we find ourselves, but also to initiate the changes that are required of us: human motivation, self-actualization, authenticity, co-creativity, spirituality, that is to say, Spiritual Leadership!
This is what GVS stands for.