Ekatva

Most of a day is spent inside a quiet, unexamined premise: that we are separate from other people, separate from the outcome of our actions, separate from the river, the forest, the climate. Separateness is so constant a background that it does not feel like a belief at all — it feels like simple observation.

Modern Western science has, for the most part, agreed with this premise rather than questioned it. A body is made of matter, matter is made of particles, particles do not know or care about each other — this is the working assumption behind most physicalist accounts of mind, and it filters down into how institutions, markets and even sustainability frameworks are built: as transactions between separate units, each pursuing its own interest, occasionally required to account for its impact on the others.

The contemplative traditions of India made a different, much older wager: that separateness is real at the level of appearance but not at the level of the ground. That wager has a name.

A-dvaita — "not two" — is the claim that the apparent multiplicity of persons, objects and events rests on a single, undivided consciousness, and that the sense of being a separate self bounded by a body is a case of mistaken identity rather than a false perception of the world itself.

The world is not denied; what is questioned is only its claim to independent, separate existence. The individual self one takes oneself to be (jiva) is not, in this view, different in kind from the ground of all appearing (Brahman) — the two are held to be the same reality wearing different descriptions.

This is not a solitary claim. Kashmir Shaivism describes reality as a single vibrating consciousness (spanda) taking the form of the many; Mahayana Buddhism arrives from a different direction at the interdependence and emptiness of separate selfhood; the Sufi phrase wahdat al-wujud — unity of being — and lines from Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart converge on the same territory. Contemplative researchers have started calling this convergence what William James and Aldous Huxley once called it: a plausible candidate for the experiential core of the “perennial philosophy,” recurring across unrelated traditions because it may be describing something real about consciousness rather than a shared cultural inheritance.

If non-separation is the deeper truth, why does almost nobody simply notice it? Because the machinery of ordinary cognition was not built to notice it. A nervous system survives by drawing a boundary — this side is me, that side is food, threat, or other — and by modelling the world as a set of discrete objects a self can act on. Subject/object structuring is not a mistake the brain makes; it is close to the brain's job description.

This is no longer only a philosophical assertion. Contemplative neuroscience — led by researchers such as Zoran Josipovic at NYU, and Richard Davidson's group at the Center for Healthy Minds — now treats non-dual awareness as a distinct, measurable dimension of consciousness rather than a poetic figure of speech. Advanced meditators showing states of felt non-separation display reduced activity in self-referential brain networks alongside unusually high integrative connectivity across the brain, and these states correlate with a durable sense of connectedness and, in several studies, with spontaneous prosocial behaviour.

The pointer is consistent: this is a real, trainable shift in the organisation of experience, and it is not reached by reasoning about it — reasoning is itself part of the machinery being asked to step aside.

If the premise is right — that separateness is a construction of the senses rather than a report on reality — then the place it costs most is not the meditation hall. It is the desk where a decision gets made.

Every public policy is an offer made to a human mind, and it is received through stress, memory, fear, pride, distrust and habit. A city can model a policy perfectly and still watch it fail, because the model assumed a calm, secure, future-oriented person who rarely turns up. Policy-makers are trained to within an inch of their lives in everything except the platform the policy actually runs on.

This is the second of Ekatva's two directions, the one that runs outward — into institutions, incentives and decisions rather than into stillness. It is the subject of a book in preparation, and of a working note written for this site.

There is a working precedent for bringing this cast of characters onto one stage: the Science and Nonduality (SAND) gatherings, running since 2009, which pair physicists and philosophers with meditation, music and art over four or five immersive days. Ekatva borrows the instinct but not the shape — a tighter, Advaita-rooted spine, and a one-day pilot form aimed at a working audience of leaders, policymakers and creators rather than a week-long retreat.

A second, longer edition is under discussion at a heritage homestay in the artists' village of Andretta, in the Dhauladhar foothills — twenty guests, five days, and a village that already supplies all four of Ekatva's doors: a working pottery studio for making, a bamboo-grove yogashala for stillness, sunrise ridgelines and waterfalls for wonder, and a long table for love.

Arrive · Understand · Wonder · Make · Love & close. Dates to be confirmed.

Under discussion with Banjara Experiences, the Himalayan company that has been running offbeat retreats, homestays and treks since 1993. On their ground Ekatva would run in both of its forms — the one-day pilot, and a five-day edition shaped like the one planned for Andretta, held at one of Banjara's own retreats rather than a single bought-out property.

This one rests on a verbal understanding rather than a signed agreement, and the site will keep saying so until that changes. Under discussion — venue, dates and numbers to be confirmed.

Faculty is being confirmed through the second half of 2026. The roles below describe the shape of the room; names and biographies will be published here as they are confirmed.

Ekatva is orchestrated by Alok Kumar and Prashant Nikam — the friendship behind the gathering, and the two inquiries it holds together.

Ekatva's questions are older than Ekatva. Underneath them sits a body of work spanning philosophy, neuroscience, the contemplative traditions, altered states, and now machine consciousness — scattered across disciplines, often paywalled, and frequently summarised badly.

Seekers Abode PL gathers it into one open, non-sectarian library: more than two hundred works and a hundred thinkers across six domains, each carrying an original summary and analysis rather than a copy of the text, with guided study pathways for anyone starting from nothing. It is also the company behind the retreat and research campus planned near Dehradun.

Not all of this has to happen in a room. Heartbound is a mythic inner-journey game in twenty-three short chapters — a Mirror Lens, a journal, and one question that is easier to walk than to answer — offered as a companion to the gathering, for the hours between sessions and the weeks after.

It puts the premise in the second person: what is left when the story you tell about yourself is quietly set down?