Transformational Philanthropy: From Conscious Capitalism to Festival of Consciousness
Awakin Call with Xavi Ginesta, moderated by Abby Falik
A telecoms engineer built a Barcelona tech company, ran it for twenty-five years, made it the best place to work in Spain two years running, and never intended to sell it. Then he did, because it had become too small a vehicle for what was pulling him. What was pulling him was a festival he could not explain even while running it. It lost money in its first year and blew his mind anyway; a senior employee came to thank him for letting her clean the floors. Along the way, a friend who once heard voices and was nearly medicated for it left for Sweden without a word, and Xavi followed him there to find out why. Out of all this came a definition of philanthropy that has nothing to do with being rich: the act of remembering who we are.
Ten quick ones with Xavi
What are you rich in that your parents were poor in?
Probably wisdom. They barely had room for expanding their consciousness, because their main concern was survival. What they were richer in was sacrifice.
Where does a true intuition come from?
Not from your mind, but from our higher mind, from a place of truth connected with your existential purpose. When you let it sink in, it very quickly develops into passion.
What has the Festival of Consciousness taught you?
That these great ideas are not really ours. They arrive to us. The fundamental mistake is that you don't realize the idea is coming to you, not from you, so you immediately take ownership of it.
What's wrong with a good plan?
You may even be successful. But you will never know what would have happened if you had let the plan unfold on its own. If instead of planning you start resonating, synchronicities start happening. That's the meaning of listening.
So what is the mind for?
Our mind is good for executing decisions, but not so good for making them.
Why do we plan so much?
Fear. It doesn't feel like fear, because fear is disguised as excitement: I'm gonna plan this, it's gonna be incredible, I'm gonna take control.
What is the opposite of fear?
Trust. The same neural networks that drive the sense of fear drive the sense of trust. Fear and trust are the same thing with different intensity.
How do you get from one to the other?
Courage. Courage is the frequency that takes you to the level of trust. Every time you need less and less of it, until you don't need courage anymore.
What changes when you see that the substrate of reality is love?
Scarcity disappears immediately. And it is impossible to keep your old behavior. Your behavior changes automatically.
Is reciprocity real?
Reciprocity is a mental construct. It stems from the idea of justice, which doesn't exist in the universe. Generosity has a feedback channel of gratitude, which is more powerful than money.
Below is a summary of the call.
Abby opened with a question Nipun had put to her students the week before: what are you rich in that your grandparents were poor in, and what about the reverse? Xavi answered one generation closer to home, with his parents. We tend to think of our parents as wiser than us, he said, but what he is probably richer in is precisely wisdom. His parents had no room for inner growth because their main concern was survival. His father was born at the end of the Spanish Civil War, on the losing side; his mother's family too. "They were lucky. They were not just killed." Everything they had went into taking their children to their highest potential, and "thanks to their effort and sacrifice, I've been able to do that."
What they were richer in was sacrifice. The suffering his parents' generation went through just to survive would be unbearable today, he said, and he does not know if he would be prepared to do what they did.
Asked about the quieter thread beneath his résumé, Xavi said he has always felt an invisible joystick driving his life, often in directions he did not want to go. What he has been following, he realized only later, is intuition, and the passion that grows from it. For most of his life he did not consider himself intuitive. The distinction he drew was about where an intuition comes from. When it comes from the mind, it is just another thought. When it comes from what he calls the higher mind, a place of truth connected with your existential purpose, and you let it sink in, it turns into passion. And passion is easier to follow than rational understanding, even when the two are in opposition. He had been intuitive all along, he now realizes, without knowing it.
That is how he ran Voxel. The company had two purposes: a business purpose that provided the fuel, and an existential purpose, creating happy workplaces, which was its reason to exist beyond business. Each fed the other, the opposite of what business school teaches, and he thinks it was the key to their success. He never built it to sell. Yet two years ago he saw that his not wanting to sell had itself become part of his ego. "There was a higher purpose that was driving me in another direction, and my company was becoming too small of a vehicle." Looking back, the decisions that sounded crazy at the time now look perfect. "Thank God I made those decisions," he said, and Abby, knowing he is not religious, pointed out the other way of hearing that sentence.
Raised in a very Catholic family, he lost his religion as a scientifically square-minded young man. What brought him back toward the question was noticing that no scientist has ever demonstrated that consciousness emerges from the brain; it is a hypothesis taken for granted that has become almost a dogma. All we know is that if you switch off the brain, consciousness disappears, and that, he said, does not explain consciousness any more than an image vanishing explains where the image came from. That enigma made him curious about what we call spirituality, "but to me it's science as well." It took perhaps fifteen years, and the Festival of Consciousness accelerated everything.
The festival was conceived during COVID, and Xavi calls it "almost a spiritual master." Its biggest teaching is that great ideas are not ours; they arrive to us. The fundamental mistake is that you don't realize the idea is coming to you rather than from you, so you take ownership of it: thanks for the idea, now it's mine. He remembers spending enormous effort trying to understand the festival's purpose and failing. They ran it without being able to explain what it was. Only after several editions could they look back and see what the festival wanted to be. It has made its own decisions all along; going to Mexico was not their decision, synchronicities took it there. Being in that space of surrender is "such a release, such a sense of freedom, when you are no longer responsible for making the decisions. Your only responsibility is to listen and accompany the plan."
"Many times, when we start strategizing and planning to make something happen, in reality, this planning means interfering with the plan." He cannot prove it, he said, except through his own experience.
You may even succeed with your own plan. But you will never know what synchronicities would have emerged had you let the plan unfold on its own. Resonating, not planning, is what he means by listening: not someone telling you what to do, but paying attention to the synchronicities and following them. Then trust, and "crazy things start happening, one thing leads to another, and before you know it, the plan unfolds in ways you would have never possibly imagined." They still plan, but only to execute decisions already seen; the mind, in his experience, is a poor decision-maker and a good executor. Abby recalled a morning in Mallorca when Xavi woke and said that whatever they did, they could not let their planning get in the way of the plan. If anyone brings her a five-year plan now, let alone a one-year plan, she said, an alarm bell goes off: how in control do we really think we are?
What is funny about all that planning, Xavi said, is that we do not realize we are acting out of fear. I'm going to take control, because in reality I fear that if I don't, things will get out of control. Wishing works the same way. Wishing comes from need, need from scarcity, and where there is scarcity there is fear. "You go from fear to scarcity to need to wishing, and wishing all of a sudden feels good." That is why it is so confusing.
Abby offered a teacher's line: we are always acting from fear or from love, and if we don't know which, it's not love. Xavi went further, and said this is neuroscience, not intuition. The same neural networks that produce fear produce trust, so what we call fear is simply trust at a very low level, an absence of trust. "Fear does not exist in reality." And one of the most fundamental forms of trust is this: if you want something and are not getting it, you trust it is because you do not really need it, because life always provides what you need to fulfill your purpose.
How do you get there? Not by deciding not to feel fear; no intellectual process gets you out of that state. What you can do is be courageous: I'm afraid, but I'm going to follow my intuition anyway. Courage, he said, is what carries you toward trust, because each outcome of a courageous move generates an increment of it. Next time you still need courage, but less, until you don't need it at all.
"How much time do we have?" Xavi asked when Abby brought up Sergi Torres. Sergi had a spiritual awakening very young. He could connect with what Xavi called non-human forms of consciousness; he heard voices, was prescribed medication, and intuitively knew not to take it. It took him about twenty-seven years to stop thinking he was crazy. Then he began teaching, two or three people in a library, who brought two or three more, until they had to hire a theater, which filled, and then retreats with hundreds across the Spanish-speaking world. He has no interest in being well known and no economic interest.
Xavi met him seven or eight years ago while leading the Spanish chapter of Conscious Capitalism, reasoning that conscious capitalism should at least understand consciousness to honor its own name. They began meeting one morning a month, wrote a book together, and founded Humanitas when Xavi sold his company. Then Sergi went to Sweden, out of the blue, with no explanation. On a weekly call Xavi said, I think I'm going to come and figure out what you're doing there, because nobody understands it. Come, Sergi said. There, Sergi showed him documents he had "literally downloaded" from these sources, so deep that he did not understand much of what he had written himself. "No matter how much I admire him, I knew that couldn't possibly have come up from his mind." The documents spoke of his purpose there: a center for inner peace. Xavi immediately said, I want to help.
"He's never asked me or anybody for help ever in his life. He always does his own thing, and resources pop up." Sergi told him once why he never asks: if somebody has sent me to Sweden, it's because there's a plan, and it is impossible that this kind of plan comes without resources. "I just have to wait."
Xavi was careful not to dismiss classical philanthropy, which he called beautiful and, unfortunately, still very needed. It mitigates pain and can even fix some problems. But it does not fix the reason the problems exist, and transformational philanthropy is about changing those underlying reasons. He took each word in turn. Transformation, as we usually mean it, happens on the surface. But the ultimate reason our system behaves as it does, he said, is that we are totally confused by our senses about what reality is. Change your understanding of reality, your belief system, and you create a new context in which the old behavior is no longer sustainable, because it just doesn't make any sense at all. If love is the substrate, everything we see is the most abundant and free thing in the universe, and scarcity has nowhere to stand. Integrate that not just intellectually but down to your bones, and behavior changes automatically, without effort. Wherever you find yourself straining to change something, a belief underneath is still driving the old behavior.
Philanthropy means love for humanity. So what is the most fundamental act of love for humanity imaginable? Creation itself. And creation involves forgetting: a manifestation of God, for lack of a better word, at a frequency so low that the beings created do not remember their source. So the next most fundamental act of love is remembering. What he likes about this definition is who it includes. Anyone on the path of inner development, irrespective of money, is by definition a transformational philanthropist, and no one can be pushed onto it. But if you walk it, you become a field of transformation for others, and a collective forms. In July, seventy people gathered in Mallorca with what he called not a new mindset but "an open mind, the opposite of a mindset."
From there he turned to money. Most of our concepts are mental constructs, he said, reciprocity among them, resting on a human idea of fairness. What he trusts instead is universal reciprocity: give without expecting anything and it returns through an invisible feedback channel, in forms you cannot imagine and at times you do not expect. Often the form is simply gratitude. His theory is that money itself probably originated in gratitude, until we said, that's not enough, I need something physical. Money became a replacement for gratitude. "If we understood money as gratitude, all of a sudden philanthropy becomes the new economy."
"I don't think we need to change the entire humanity, half of humanity plus one, to make the change." With just the right group of people committed to that inner path, he believes, an incredible shift may happen spontaneously, at a speed we cannot even consider.
Rohit brought up two moments from the festival's early years. In the first edition, the festival lost money. Xavi had only wanted to break even, and could not understand how he could run such a successful company and not a small festival. He was very upset at himself, until he realized it did not matter. He had the money; it was only an ego thing that he had wanted it to happen a certain way. The next edition will not charge for tickets at all. In the second edition, a senior employee thanked him for allowing her to clean the floors. She would never have done it for money, but she was not cleaning floors; she was serving a purpose, and the service happened to take that shape. Through experiences like these, "one day you realize, oh, it makes me happier to give money than to receive it. I feel a higher sense of plenitude when I give than when I receive. That's crazy!"
He then shared an insight that had come to him only the other day. Think of a moment when you felt really loved. It is impossible that you are feeling what the other person feels for you; they might even be fooling you. But as long as you perceive their love as true, you feel love. So whose love is that? "Whenever you feel love, what you're feeling is your own love. It's the love you're emitting." What you perceive outside acts as a faucet: perceive love and you open it; perceive hate and you close it. "We act as filters of love." Years earlier Sergi had told him that when you feel you are not being loved enough, it is because you are not loving with all the intensity you are capable of. That is how Sergi teaches: he gives you the sentence and leaves you to your process. It had only now kicked in. "I know that it's me who's not loving enough." Enlightened people, he added, are simply those for whom all this is obvious.
A listener asked whether any technology today is raising collective consciousness. Xavi's first answer, he warned, would not be satisfying: one of the most fundamental technologies we have is called generosity. Our mindset sets the highest frequency at which we can manifest anything, and today that mindset is scarcity, so no matter how honorable our intentions, anything executed from it has an upper limit. Generosity, compassion, all the fractals of love, are inner technologies that let you hop above that threshold, at least momentarily, into a space where ideas are no longer constrained by what you believe.
As for external technology, he is not against capitalism; he is for its evolution. Capitalism was meant to fight scarcity, and once technology can take care of our finite needs, we could say thank you and turn to inner development without worrying about survival. The problem is that we have put all our trust in the system and do not want it to die. "We've been so successful fighting scarcity that now the thing that's becoming scarce is scarcity itself." So we create artificial sources of it: fast fashion, digital addiction, any addiction, which makes no sense from a human perspective and a lot of sense from a business perspective. The same fire warms your house or burns your neighbors. AI is fire, only much more powerful. The problem is not technology but the level of consciousness behind it.
Beyond Humanitas and the festival, whose next edition is this January in Mexico City, Xavi supports the Barcelona Institute for Advanced Neuroscience. Science, he said, is a gateway to everything discussed on the call, but he means science with a capital S, one that transcends its own dogmas. "Part of the scientific world today is not very different from the Inquisition. They don't set you on fire, but they try to burn your reputation." The lab explores what the status quo will not bother with, like seeing without eyes. They have watched people fully blindfolded, with no light reaching their eyes, read a book and see colors. "It is true, period. The question is, how is that possible?"
Near the end, Rohit read from Xavi's bio, where the act of kindness he will never forget was: my mom giving birth to me. The answer had simply popped up when he read the question, Xavi said, with a gratitude so intense he could barely keep his tears from falling. He thanked Rohit for asking; he had not realized it before.
Abby closed with a thought that had kept returning to her: we have spent generations trying to solve things at the level of the story, the policy, and the program, and what is needed now is a shift to the innermost place from which we both remember who we really are and become who we are meant to be, in the service of all of us. "So, the how is the what." Xavi, who had learned of ServiceSpace only a few months earlier, offered the last word: "To me, that's also part of this transformational philanthropy network that I was talking about. You still don't know it, maybe, but you're part of it."
Awakin Call with Xavi Ginesta, founder of Voxel and the Festival of Consciousness and co-founder of the Humanitas Foundation, moderated by Abby Falik and hosted by Rohit.
Listen to the complete conversation with Xavier Ginesta.