Phenomenology - a Mahamudra followup

I'm listening my way through some old Integral Naked/Integral Life recordings at the moment. One of these recordings is of Ken Wilber and Patrick Sweeney, discussing the Fourth Turning of the Dharma Wheel.


Patrick Sweeney is the lineage holder of the Karma Kagyü lineage, given by the Vidyadhara, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He is also the head of Satdharma—meaning "genuine dharma"—a Buddhist organization created with the purpose of propagating Chögyam Trungpa's unique transmission.

What does this have to do with phenomenology? I hear you, my beloved reader, mutter.

Patrick describes the Trikaya (three bodies) of Mahamudra in a way that I find a little more convincing than the parallel to the Christian Trinity that Wilber constructed in this conversation. (This is likely to be completely my own contraction - I have trouble identifying the Christian Father, an active creator principle, with, or as, the Ground of Being, which is the way that Wilber frames the Dharmakaya, here).

Patrick gives a different version of the essences of the trikaya. He describes that in the buddhadharma our human condition is fundamentally sane, and fundamentally, always already, pristine. Consciousness is always already open, spacious in dharmakaya, it is luminous and clear in cognitive lucidity as the sambhogakaya,  and is endlessly responsive and contactable in the nirmanakaya. 

What intrigued me about the interview was the 'veils' that he talks about, operating over the dharmakaya to create a subject, and the sambhogakaya to create an object, which then creates action, in the nirmanakaya. This is a contraction of our fundamental, open, spacious state, identified as a great tragedy in the Mahamudra tradition. We're considered to be stuck in a bad habit - continuously ignoring the lucidity, the pristine state, of our own minds, and we get caught thus in the 84,000 conflicting emotions.

I was struck by how antithetical this was to the use of the terms subject and object in my phenomenology readings of earlier today - how the subject and object in phenomenology actually operate as a clarifier at the level of second order reflexive experience, allowing the differentiation of this-that. Definitely not a veil.

Neither abject in spirituality, nor absorbed within transcendental philosophy, she moves in a forgotten soul.