As a young child, I was often left to my own devices. Before, during, and after school, I wandered the fields of tall lalang grass behind the school grounds. My friends and I spent hours chasing grasshoppers and dragonflies, but dragonflies were my obsession. I would catch them carefully and trap them inside my pencil case, listening to their iridescent wings beat frantically against the plastic. They rarely lasted long. Death did not register with me then. At eight or nine, we competed to see who could catch the most beautiful ones. Questions of cruelty or ethics never entered the classroom curriculum.

Back home, I would take the dragonflies out and study them for hours. Their long, delicate exoskeletons and especially their wings mesmerised me. Up close, the intricate venous patterns on the membrane-like wings seemed to possess a geometry all their own. In the afternoon sunlight, they shimmered with an almost psychedelic sheen, reflecting light like tiny mirrors. To my untrained mind, each wing was a universe unto itself. I would lose myself in the way light danced across them and daydream about what life might feel like as a dragonfly. Would I still be me if I were one?

When boredom or the absence of toys set in, I turned to whatever was around me. One of my childhood homes had parquet flooring on the staircase. I would lie on my belly for hours, tracing the natural swirls and grains in each wooden block. Every pattern was slightly different. In my imagination, entire microscopic civilisations lived within those lines. An invisible family making its home in every curve and knot. By the end of an afternoon, I could populate a thirty-centimetre square of floor with a whole thriving society.

Even at eight or nine, without understanding why, I was already sensing worlds within worlds. Layers of reality hidden just beneath the surface. Perhaps it was the loneliness of those long, unsupervised hours that fueled such imaginings, or perhaps it was simply a child's overactive mind. Either way, the habit of wandering into the unseen worlds never left me.

You could see the beauty in the dragonfly without feeling any empathy for its trapped life. Seeing comes before feeling. Pattern recognition comes before compassion. The entire spiritual journey is the slow, patient closing of that gap.

As I grew into my teenage years and felt the gravity of life more, I began to notice the self-made tragedies we create for ourselves. I saw the melodrama and dysfunction in my own family and in my friends' lives. I took note of the meaningless striving, pining and struggling everywhere. I always wondered why we are built this way. At sixteen, when I left home for good, I knew I wanted to live differently. I've had a whole childhood that many would describe as dismal, neglectful and lonely. But that is not why I left home. I left home to find my own sovereign selfhood. Yes, there was trauma and sadness, but I also had a rich creative inner life that needed to find a home of its own.

Adulthood was one big giant dream. I worked hard and reinvented myself a few times. I was always grounded but I never stopped searching. While many searched for big jobs and epic love stories, I knew I wanted the big answers to life.

I thought I was just a little weird and believed I needed therapy, inner-child healing, PTSD work and all kinds of psychological remedies. But I knew deep down I was not strange or ill, I was just too awakened for my own good.

I began to slow down in my late 30s because I realised that in order to hear the big answers, I need to be quieter in mind and spirit. In meditation and yogic circles, they describe this as cultivation of awareness and consciousness. But I believe that consciousness is not something you cultivate or grow into being.

Consciousness is who we are in our original forms. It is the one piloting the body, mind and spirit, and the one observing the world. We existed before this body, before this name, before this life. Whatever that original form was — vast, dimensionless, unhurried — it is still what we are underneath all of this.

So by that logic, we are consciousness first, humans second. I'm a spark of consciousness and so are you. And I believe this is why we are not only sentient, we're conscious and aware of our own existence.

And in this conscious existence, I continue to observe the endless human hoolabaloo, the grasping, the competitions, the conflicts over nothing and the restless accumulation. We continuously engineer entire systems, ideologies, economy, politics, religions and relationship contracts as guides for meaningful life. And yet they often bring out the worst in people. They certainly brought out the worst in me: impatience, pride, competitiveness and greed. The goals and milestones we design to progress humanity are the very same that fuel the griefs, traumas and tragedies that we then have to spend years trying to heal from.

And therein lies the contradictions in life. There is always an equal amount of beauty and richness in this manifestation of our existence. Just look at the stories, poetry, art, ideas and inventions we have produced since the dawn of humankind. We would never be able to experience this as pure consciousness without a human body in this time space dimension.

Consciousness cannot really observe itself because it is everything. Humanity solves that problem. It gives consciousness a way to express itself in a world governed by time and space limitations.

This is why despite the fact that very few of these structured human experiences fully appeal to me as a lifestyle, I still fully endorse the way life turns out for all of us because it is designed to be in constant push-pull dynamics.

As a young person I had no words for this view of the world. It took me decades of struggle and quiet rejection of society's prescribed school of life to begin to see a simple truth: the meaning of life is simply to live through it.

This 3D container we have built for ourselves is exactly the experience our consciousness has come for. We're wired to forget that we are just 'consciousness having a human experience'. I don't know who said this first, but it feels so true. We are consciousness having a human experience.

This book is written to give you a gentle reminder that you are this amazing spark of consciousness who has come to experience a world of density and gravity. We are grounded and tethered to time and space. These limitations led us to find ways to build resilient societies, governments, science, cities and even gods to worship, as if we ourselves are not cosmic beings.

The smallness of our humanity motivates us to design skyscrapers, rockets and the divine so we can know what it feels like to reach for something beyond us. We look out at the vast deep space from this 'speck of dust suspended in a beam of light', to borrow a phrase from Carl Sagan, and wonder if there are more of us out there. Consciousness does not wonder, humans do. Consciousness just be.

In this dimension, the school of life can be deeply rewarding and punishing in equal measure. Without any memory of our cosmic origins, we all start out believing this is all there is: this earth, the grind, the family unit, the school, the big job, the big love, the dream life and the value systems that promise to light our path. We are locked into a matrix of how to lead a good human life.

We romance our own experiences in books, songs, cinema and poetry. Gosh I love Rumi, Khalil Gibran and Oscar Wilde. They show us humour, love, transcendence, tragedy, human ambitions and folly, so that we can see ourselves more clearly. Through the fabrications of human life, we get to experience the full range of love stories and tragedies.

This is what our consciousness has come to do: to see ourselves through this human prism, the bad, the good and all the shades in between.

But this idea of consciousness also brings us to the deeper question: who and what are we truly, without this human meat suit and this 3D world? We are not the ones who possess consciousness. Consciousness possesses us. It is not a feature of being human, we are a feature of it.

So the question is not "what is this dragonfly wing?" But who is the one looking? And what world are they actually standing in? Which is the vertigo-inducing part. If we are consciousness inhabiting a human world, is this human world itself inhabiting something even larger?

Is our entire 3D reality just another dragonfly wing in somebody else's pencil case? And if that were the case, what does it mean to know we're living in a world within another world? Does our human life still matter then?