Even though we know the external to be unreal, in our sense, we cannot go through life fighting or denying it. We must learn to interact with it and use it, but not to take it seriously, for which we need a sense of humour. We also need to learn to pretend – to act a part – as a matter of course, never letting the external world in on our own internal aspect, our reality. That separation must be clean, and in a way this is what the work does: cleans our connexion to the internal by untangling our connection to the external.