Like a misplaced puzzle piece

[Sacred Fool]

Here's a different puzzle.

How can a specified bit of consciousness understand what consciousness itself is?  Sometimes I ask myself--consciously or unconsciously--what is consciousness, and how can I answer this question when the consciousness asking is a small bit of the thing I'm inquiring about?  No one really knows.

Then how can a puzzle piece know much about the puzzle?  Puzzling, isn't it?  How can the piece know much about where it fits or does not fit when it really can't grasp the overall nature of the puzzle when it is only a small bit of it?  If a person asks this question from this perspective, why would it not feel puzzling, and this fact only compounds the puzzlement.

One cannot get to know consciousness deeply by looking at it from the outside because a piece cannot encompass the whole externally.  So, redirect the effort.  Close your eyes now and see with your inner eye.  The puzzle outside is but a reflection of the puzzle you see within.  You can never encompass an ever-expanding outward puzzle, but you can, from within, seek the very heart of the puzzle.  Once you can find consciousness in the heart of the puzzle, solutions to the puzzle begin to arise because the alignment of the heart and the consciousness are the initial purpose of the puzzling outwardly reflected, but inwardly centered, appearance of being.

And yet, nobody really knows if they are a true being or an appearance of being or something else.