As people who are enlightened know, your personality will carry on just fine without you. A teacher even told me that the personality is enhanced and becomes even larger when the illusion of the self is no longer in the way. She described having met Dipa Ma and Mahasi Sayadaw on separate occasions in the early 80s. Dipa Ma was late arriving, because she couldn't debark the plane without blessing everyone (and perhaps everything) on it. She radiated compassion and metta. Mahasi was different. People referred to him as Mr. Void (behind his back!), because he was inscrutable and would give terse answers to any questions. He also had a habit of (unintentionally) sneaking up on people, because he was so quiet. ("Positively vampiric", indeed.)
Point being, both of these individuals are highly enlightened, but they have very distinct personalities. Enlightenment does not turn you into a generic, purely equanimous personality. People retain their respective styles of interacting with the world and other people. They retain even strong likes and dislikes.
Unfortunately, at least in Theravada and Theravada-inspired traditions, there seems to be very little understanding of how enlightenment affects the personality and how enlightenment is experienced by different personality types. The best Theravada brings to the table is the 10 fetters, each of which is supposed to fall away at different stages. But there are many problems with this model.
First of all, the fetters themselves are abstract. The fetters are: identity view, doubt, ritual attachment, sensual desire, ill will, material lust, immaterial lust, conceit, restlessness, and ignorance. Each of these could have many meanings and interpretations, and it's hardly clear what they meant in their original context. Also, some personalities, by their nature, are going to exhibit some of these traits more than others. I know people that, at least in the opinion of many, aren't at all conceited. It didn't take enlightenment to accomplish that; it's just how they are. You could make a case like this for many of the fetters, and it's owing to the fact that they're not at all concretely specified.
Second, it's not clear that enlightenment really does result in the fetters going away. This issue has been covered at length in the pragmatic dharma community, so I won't bother to expand on it.
Third, this is a negative description of what happens to the personality as it undergoes enlightenment. It purports to show what drops out of the picture. It doesn't show what new, positive traits arise; nor does it attempt to show what happens to already existing personality traits once enlightenment has taken place.
Fourth, they're not really personality descriptions at all. Personality has more to do with your style of interacting with the world and with other people. It's a general framework you use for coping with things. It's your characteristic reactions to people and things. It's your particular sense of humor. It's the kind of people who draw you in and the kind of people who repulse you. So not only can't the fetters account for the personality; it's not clear they're even meant to do that.
Pragmatic dharma has largely dispensed with the fetters as a description of enlightenment. It has also differentiated spiritual development from Western psychology. This was a good and necessary antidote to the extent to which dharma had become identified, not with actual awakening, but with a specific subculture (60s anti-consumerist, psychotherapeutic, liberal culture). This made it possible to put aside for a moment the project of making a Really Nice Person (which is what a lot of American dharma seems to be about) and to speak directly and clearly to the awakening experience itself. This experience was now understood, not in terms of being "nicer", but rather of being able to see clearly through any notion of a center-point in one's experience, to stop for good the illusion that one sensation could perceive another sensation.
And yet, undergoing this process really does seem to do something to the personality! The problem is, we don't know exactly what it does. We're no longer expected, as enlightened people, never to feel or express a dark emotion or hold a strong opinion. We don't confuse it with being a bland coward. But we're left with something, and it's not clear what we're left with. One person might say, "I'm nicer to my spouse." But some people were always nice anyway. Another might say, "I don't get angry anymore." But what about a person who naturally denies their anger? And another might say, "My suffering has decreased." Whatever THAT means!
(I really, truly, deeply, sincerely wish that we, the pragmatic dharma community, could stop using the word "suffering" as a translation of "dukkha". It's confusing and misleading and vague and melodramatic for so many different reasons. But that's another post...)
I had a discussion with someone who said that after stream-entry, her anger noticeably decreased. I thought that was really interesting, because my anger hadn't seemed to decrease at all! It made me briefly and casually doubt the extent to which I was "really enlightened".
But then given more time and more paths, I realized, my anger isn't decreasing a whole lot; however, I'm less bothered by contradictions that come up in my experience and in my practice. My tendency to withdraw from something just because it's confusing or because I don't understand it has diminished. And for me - a person who really needs to figure things out before actually doing them - this is huge! Having that kind of confidence to figure things out as I go along is a quantum jump in terms of capability. And I know it's related to meditating, because the trait is most pronounced with regard to practice and with regard to things directly connected with practice.
So the point is, the effects of enlightenment on the personality are going to depend upon what your personality is like in the first place. The fact that you do not perceive one particular trait to be diminishing or increasing is meaningless. Humans aren't collections of isolated traits. And that's the problem with the fetters. What reason is there to believe that, by doing this practice, you're going to see your "sensual desire" (whatever that means in this context), decrease, as though someone reached in and started turning the volume down on something? That's just not what humans are like. (Now, if you happen to live in a monastery far away from members of the opposite sex, then I could see that happen, but that's caused, in part, by the context in which the whole thing is taking place.)
Regardless of what the personality actually is, it at least has the appearance of being an organic process that develops along some trajectory. So the tricks are: (a) figuring out what the different personality types are, and (b) seeing what happens to those personalities as the body-mind in which the personality resides wakes up.
I think this is basically what Riso & Hudson were trying to do with their version of the Enneagram. Each enneatype has nine distinct health levels. As spiritual practice advances, you find yourself at higher health levels. Looking at the health levels for my own type, I can see how this might have happened. What they're giving you is a map - much like our progress of insight map - except it's for your personality as the process of awakening unfolds.
Unfortunately the foundations of the enneagram are bizarre and highly complex. There are plenty of ways to divide up personality. Why should we prefer this particular one over others? And what if you don't like numerology, deadly "sins", or romantic notions of Cosmic Consciousness? These are foundations for the theory. Still, the maps R&H provide are a good clue for how to proceed - if it could be set on a more secure foundation.
