When we were children, I forget how old, maybe 7 or 8, we went through a phase of using the words “actually” and “really” all the time to stress concrete existence. 

“That actually happened?!” 

“It actually did!” 

“Really?!” 

“Yeah, really!” 

Looking back on it I realise that we were simply trying to get a handle on the external world, and that, in a sense, the external is as elusive as the internal. 

What we experience of the actual world are only images, and pale ones at that. An image may be actual as an image, but it is always going to be an approximation as a representation of something else's actuality. And, in a sense, it is the frustration that comes from realising that representation is ultimately illusory and unsatisfying – that the external ever eludes us – that leads us to postulate – to feel the absolute necessity for – the internal. 

So, if the external is as elusive as the internal, then what sort of lives are we living? We find ourselves living representational lives – lives based on images, and lives that create images. Even our children are images – images of ourselves or images of the system – inauthentic. Even my taiji is an image – a copy of something I've done before or of my teacher or of my own designs. We end up living lives obsessed with images in a vain attempt to somehow grasp or become closer to something real, something actual, something truly external and authentic. What ends up happening, of course, is that we develop anxious minds choked with the processing and interpretation of these endless images. 

Spiritual work offers a way out of this morass. It suggests that instead of obsessing over the external and the barrage of images it throws at each and every one of us, we step back, quieten down, close our eyes, and feel – connect to – the natural process that generates the external. This is the internal. Spiritual masters say that the only way to become real, or actual or authentically external, is to join with the process of actualisation as it operates in the world and especially in you. This joining first requires us to enter a process of deactualisation – really a process of dismantling the intricate system of images that constitutes “my world.” This is the deconstruction of the ego. Once that ego (the bank of images I have stored in my mind, body and energy) is sufficiently destabilised, the adept, with the assistance of his teacher, will plug into the internal – the natural process – and hey presto – suddenly he is real – everything about him and everything he does is actual – is truly external. This is enlightenment. So, a person who is enlightened doesn't necessarily appear any different from someone who is not. The only difference is that an ordinary unenlightened person acts ignorantly – from their ego – the images they hold dear – whereas the enlightened individual acts from and with the internal – from the natural process itself as it operates in, through and around them. The external is by the by – the ultimate red herring. The external is simply what issues from the process – something we dare not get caught by lest we lose the process that created it.