External (‘transcendent’) events are ‘given as such by virtue of the intentional activities of consciousness.’ In this sense they really are external, yet they are ‘intentionally immanent’:
their status as external events for the system (as opposed to their status for an observer of the system) is a function of the system’s own activity. Their meaning or significance corresponds to an attractor of the system’s dynamics (a recurrent pattern of activity toward which the system tends), which itself is an emergent product of that very dynamics. The external world is constituted as such for the system by virtue of the system’s self-organizing activity.
— Thompson (2007, 27)
This is ‘one of the key guiding intuitions of the enactive approach and neurophenomenology’ (Thompson 27), advanced in the late 20th century by Francisco Varela.