Thanks. I wish I could claim those metaphors, but they are mostly borrowed.

As for increasing self-awareness, that is indeed one of my favorite ideas in philosophy. And really we have direct experience of a consciousness that remembers and transcends what is has been, thereby increasing in its possessions and complexity. This consciousness creates its own nature in some sense, since it can only determine its own nature according to what it has already manifested. As it says new things about itself, it adds to this same nature, opening up new possibilities for self-determination.