Narrative, or the narrativisation of experiencing is only a particularly circumscribed way of realising its essential historicity, a kind of foreclosure, but with sudden gaps and openings. The latter is without rails or boundaries, is extensive, polyphonic, far and near, keyed callings from distant nearness and near distance. Art hints at this in various ways.

If mind and consciousness are distinguished, you could say that mind is ontic and consciousness ontological, in that what defines the latter is that in regard to it being is always at stake. Hence, not merely the temporality of protentions and retentions, or of prehensions etc., but the peculiar topology of historic and originary time are proper to consciousness, as well as the force of creative will. Qualia are quintessentially ontic, witness marks only the beginning of a turn towards to ontological. It also implies that there are undisclosed potentialities of consciousness, yet to be elicited by possible refinements of what serves as mind.

Will, not as desire, appetite, conatus but as creative future-directed urge towards some conceived goal and with the power to bend the immediate environment towards alignment with that goal - this is the sense of will, far from abstraction, that narrative and myths revolve around, human insofar as deeply embedded in the meaning of being alive.

The mind's directives to Being or to its own source, such as condition of possibility, background, containing space, who? etc. are necessarily flawed as they depend on already quite sophisticated model of happening. It only works in the negative in that it can be aware of how these fail, and of course it cannot make a thing out of this negativity either although it can spend a long time trying. This falling short has no ready description, is evident but at the same time, as a sort of directive, is the most delicate task possible. It must, as it were, always already be what you are.

Machines appearing to think as well or better than humans reinforces the idea that our thought is itself produced by mechanical operations, inputs and outputs, storage, processing etc. This paradigm completely erases any notion of Being that is not already a matter of beings, it is bootstrapped as it were from beings and nothing else. And yet for all of this the question of Being can still be formulated in language and hence remains a valid, if foreclosed, question. Attempting to fully cash out the notion of consciousness as arising inn this way one is forced to more and more recondite notions of some kind of 'true' situational awareness, of an immediacy which never quite fits into the system. There is a peculiar desire intrinsic to human thought to imagine systems that thoroughly exclude our very possibility. Is this the latest form of nihilism?

The feeling of the subject is the hidden knowledge of having been a witness/participant at the origin of everything.

It is taking into account the priority of the being-experiencing over the whatever-experienced, but so delicately as to not allow the ideas of mind or consciousness to obscure it. It is all that is and at the same time the most delicate of awarenesses and so must be held in a frame suitable to holding it. Such a frame must be your ordinary humanness, the intermediate point without any urge to leap either upwards or downwards, forward of back. Without will or any operation of will, stationary in thought and feeling.