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I don't know much about philosophy, but I do know a thing or two about boxes. Boxes have an inside and they have an outside. In order to be a box, the inside must have an opening to the outside but also must have sides and a bottom to keep objects placed within from sliding out or falling through. It may also have a top, and of course a'' this implies a general understanding of use that includes a right-wise orientation. It is also important to note that these sides and bottom aren't inside or outside the box, though they have inside and outside faces.

You mentioned something about the reality of the external world [independent of the internal] and, I would think, things hold quite the same in this case. I suppose using this metaphor would mean that the body constitutes the sides of the box, with there being an inside face to the body and an outside face. To grossly simplify, the body (or, really, the brain) is a kind of box of electrical waves that are both generated spontaneously within, but also through the senses where wave patterns in external media converted to concomitant waves in the brain. For example, sound waves are converted to electrical waves through the ear, which within itself creates a kind of artificial lake for our still very amphibian hardware to translate the patterns within. However, one can say that these brain waves, too, are externalized in that they are physical processes theoretically observable to humans--even to the human itself who is under view.

It would seem, then, that it is physical reality that is external, and the sensory that is internal. The sides of the box that are external would be the sensing body, and the internal face would be the sensed body. Except that we can hardly locate that sensory experience within a particular physical space; and, indeed, under this dualism we would have to say that it is non-physical, and hence non-localizable, and hence not a spatial thing that we could understand as inside or outside or possessed of faces. It will be protested that this is just a metaphor, but I'd like to hear just what the problem is if we try to talk about this matter (whatever the matter is) without resorting to the metaphor. Yet this seems precisely what we do: we apply the logic of space to the non-spatial.

In light of this, I would humbly forward a recommendation for general consideration: perhaps if we can fold the mind into a box, we could also perform a kind of mental origami and, with skill, do other shapes as well. If we can fold our minds into a box, perhaps we can fold them into a crane as well, or a ship upon the sea. Such is one of shaman's arts: mind-space origami. To fold these shapes so that he is not a passive hole into which the world flows, all flow, into the something I know not what; but to relate to sense as a flying-aloft, moving by its currents, moving amongst its currents. Not as a jet engine but with graceful wings. Maybe, even, we could be unfurled as a sail, to be folded and unfolded, waving in the current.

The only hard shape to get out of is the fold of infinite regress. The worst thing you can try to do is create a box that internalizes the external, or externalizes the internal--the box that eats itself and everything else; the box that would have but one face, facing the abyss (what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the system of the white wall and black hole.) This is the very definition of black magic, and is the cause of the systematic error that is appearance/reality. Sensation never lies, and it never trades in wholes or parts. It is only when that sense is cut off from the sensed by the schematic of an infinitely regressing frame that it can be isolated as an image, doubled over, compared to its unknowable reality (which can never be the thing but only ever be the empty regressing frame)--and come up short.