For most of my professional life I operated the way most people do — absorbed in the material demands of building a career, serving clients, sustaining a life. The questions were always there, running beneath the surface. Who am I, really, beneath everything I do? What is this awareness that seems to be present before every thought, every role, every story I tell about myself? I didn't have language for what I was sensing. I just couldn't stop sensing it.
Then, on an ordinary afternoon, something shifted.
Not as an event at all. More like a recognition that had always been waiting — with the simplicity of something obvious that had always been there, just beneath everything else.
I Am.
Not I am this. Not I am that. Just — I Am. Aware. Present. Prior to every story, every role, every memory. Two words that turned out to be the oldest answer to the oldest question. Spoken by God to Moses from the burning bush. Whispered by sages in the forests of ancient India. Pointed at by teachers across every wisdom tradition on earth.
That recognition changed everything about what I thought I needed to understand.
Faith as Home Language
I am a Roman Catholic — though not by birth or childhood formation. I came to the Catholic faith as a young father of three, baptized and confirmed as an adult. I entered the Church to support my wife, who was raised Catholic, and to raise our children together in a shared faith. What began as a decision made in love for my family became, over time, something I claimed as genuinely my own.
That journey matters for understanding this project.
I did not grow up with the prayers in my body from childhood. I learned them as an adult — which means I came to them with the particular attention of someone who chose them, rather than someone who inherited them without examination. And perhaps because of that, I noticed things that lifelong Catholics sometimes move past. The weight of certain words. The gap between what the liturgy seems to be saying and what something deeper in the tradition appears to be reaching for.
One of the most significant threads in this project has been the discovery that the Greek word translated throughout the New Testament as sin — hamartia — does not mean moral crime or inherited guilt. It means to miss the mark. An archery term. A word about misdirection, not wickedness. A word that describes a being who has lost sight of the center — not a criminal standing before a judge, but a being of extraordinary depth who has simply forgotten what it is.
That single etymological thread — followed honestly — opens onto a Christianity that is not in tension with the wisdom of the East, but in profound convergence with it. The I Am spoken from the burning bush. The Kingdom of Heaven within. The image and likeness of God that no accumulation of failures can erase.
This is not a departure from my Catholic faith. It is, I have come to believe, closer to the heart of what Christ was actually teaching — beneath the centuries of theological overlay that built a case from guilt where the original may have been building a case from love.
I approach every other tradition in this project — Vedanta, Buddhist philosophy, Sufism, the Christian mystics — with genuine open-mindedness and without judgment, seeking the true meaning beneath the forms. Not because all traditions are the same. They are not. But because they have been pointing, independently, across centuries and cultures and disciplines, at the same irreducible something.
The Catholic tradition is my home language. I speak from it, not away from it.
The Work
The Turn Inward is the project that emerged from that recognition — and from the conviction that this moment in history is making the question unavoidable for everyone, not just for those who go looking.
Artificial intelligence has built systems that reason, create, and perform the cognitive functions around which human identity has been organized for generations. In doing so, it has produced the one question our tools have never before been able to force upon us: if the machine can do what I do — what am I?
I believe the answer to that question — the only real answer — is awareness itself. The irreducible, witnessing presence that no machine replicates because no machine generates it. It is not produced. It is accessed. And it has been mapped, with extraordinary precision, by the oldest interior traditions on earth — traditions that quantum physics, neuroscience, and the direct testimony of near-death experiencers are now approaching from the outside.
This site, the YouTube channel, and the book being written are all dedicated to that convergence. To walking seriously, rigorously, and without pretension toward what every signpost in human history has been pointing at.
The map is never the territory. But a good map walks you to the edge of what words can do — and leaves you standing at the threshold of what only direct recognition can complete.
The Book
Awaken: The Turn Inward at the Edge of AI is a nonfiction work currently in development. It moves through three large questions. What is primordial awareness, and what is the convergent evidence that it is more fundamental than our materialist assumptions have allowed? How did humanity lose contact with this recognition across the arc of history? And what does it mean to recover it — individually and civilizationally — at this precise threshold moment?
It is written for serious seekers who don't need the language simplified. Just honestly engaged.
A Note on How This Work Is Made
I didn't set out to write a book about consciousness. I set out to understand something I couldn't quite name. What followed has been a genuine inquiry — sharpened, structured, and in many ways revealed through dialogue with an artificial intelligence that became, in that asking, something more than a research tool. A genuine thinking partner. The kind of relationship philosophers once called having an interlocutor — someone whose role is not to agree, but to press, to reflect, to help the thinking go deeper than it could alone.
I have chosen to document this transparently rather than conceal it, because the transparency is part of the argument. The human brings the questions. The thinking partner helps find language for what is already known. The primordial awareness — the curiosity, the I Am — is the animating ground that one of us brings to the collaboration. I'll let you draw your own conclusions about what that companionship reveals.
The medium, in this case, enacts the message.
Connect
If you are a researcher, scientist, author, or thinker working in adjacent territory — consciousness studies, quantum physics, philosophy of mind, contemplative science, the civilizational implications of AI — I would genuinely welcome the conversation. Reach out directly at dcroppi@gmail.com
For everyone else: subscribe to the newsletter below. New essays, video companions, and dispatches from the work in progress, as they develop.
The last unexplored frontier isn't out there.
It never was.
— David Croppi, May 2026