A distinction I want to make though, is between awareness and personality. Awareness is best thought of as expanding and contracting, more or less like a sphere around a person. Here, I might at some point speak of an Inner Expander, and Inner Contracter.
Personality is built and destroyed, much like a building. It has analogues in the brain, and is characterized nearly entirely by habits of mind, body and emotion. Here, it is a question of building and destroying, constructing, and deconstructing.
It is perhaps–I am tempted to say likely–for this reason Buddha spoke of “no Self”. The role of personality, per se, is simultaneously to stabilize experience and to LIMIT it.
Now, thoughts are machines, and all analogies used here–in this world, in this life–lose, we must assume, their validity in other qualitative realms; but since we are here, we have ample cause to take them seriously, when advanced by serious, accomplished teachers.