We are the shadow

If you hold a piece of paper up to block light, you can see a 1D or 2D shadow. You lose one dimension when you create a shadow.

If you have an object with a fourth dimension, its shadow would have three.

You can learn a lot about something by studying its shadow, but without being able to see it in all its dimensions, you really are only guessing at the ultimate boundaries that may or may not exist for something. A circle might be a round plastic disk, or it might be a hollow or solid ball.

Once we figure out how to see additional dimensions, the universe we live in, and everything in it will change, but not because it changed, but because our understanding of it did.

Something that we take for granted like our own bodies, will appear so different, that we would barely recognize ourselves. We will look back at those times when we still believed we were just shadows of what we actually could be.