Where do my drives ultimately come from? My unconscious, of course! Surely I can't reasonably claim to have reasons for wanting things except as the means of reaching other things I want; at some point, I want what I want just because I do.
And the drive to probe my unconscious? Why should a mind, a self-experience, be different than any other sort of experience? They are input, processed, incorporated into existing models of the world or, occasionally and unpleasantly, shatter familiar explanations and force me to regroup and rethink things.
I cannot pretend my mind is not myself, however, as I casually do with everything else. The thing I experience in this case is myself having the experience. And, if what I learn about myself changes me, it changes what I'm learning about at the same time. This is how personal growth happens, lifting myself higher and higher by my own bootstraps.
So where does the rest of the world fit into this? Do I stand alone and untouched in mental masturbation while it swirls and dances around me? Certainly not! I am touched by the sentimental, angered by the inconvenient, ironically surprised by a consistently ironic world time and again, and these experiences affect me as surely as do those of introspection; indeed, these effects are often so powerful that I find I must respond to the world in some way, feed the starving puppy or insult the imposing stranger, so that I may...well, because I just want to, really.
I experience myself, and am occasionally changed by my experience. I experience the world, and sometimes find cause to change it for the better, what you might call the world experiencing me. But if I am not independent and cut off from all around me, then I am a part of it, and what I do to it is what it does to itself, just as much as is what it does to me. We are one, I and the world around me, and the process of living in the world parallels the process of thinking about myself. There's no objective distinction, except that I can admit to being god of my own head. But, as I've noted elsewhere, a god could never be all-powerful while truly believing that it was a god. In life, I deal with this by imbuing God with characteristics both infinite and mysterious, granting Him all the power and knowledge I don't have; in my head, this role is filled by the aforementioned "unconscious mind."
