On your third question: I don't know Kaminsky and it would be interesting to read his reasoning - can you link it? - but I know a small fraction of magicians who reached a point in their work where they switched to Vajrayana. A portion of those returned to magical work after a few years, often with a clearer sense of what they were doing and why. The only one of those people I know well said to me that he was motivated by two things: a sense of spiritual greatness ('true sanctity') in a teacher he had only encountered very rarely among western practitioners, and a more coherent, less patchwork spiritual tradition.
I think both of those are debatable, the first especially so: Vajrayana lineages in the west are just as rife with abuse as any other institution, and there's something odd that seems to happen to Buddhist teachers who emigrate to the US in particular - difficulty in adapting to the celebrity-style culture spiritual teachers can generate, and the US's comparatively extravagant material indulgences. OTOH, I can see the point about a coherent tradition with (relatively) well-preserved texts and traditions not just about the mechanics of practice but the pitfalls, ethics, cosmology, stages of development etc. Though it isn't my spiritual tradition - I'd argue some of the resources do exist in the fragments of the theurgists among other places - I've found a lot of helpful wisdom in texts from esoteric Buddhist practitioners.
(And, in my experience, individuals of 'true sanctity' really are there in the western traditions as well, but you're unlikely to find very many of them _very_ involved in the occult or neopagan scenes. So discernment is also an important skill.)
no subject
I think both of those are debatable, the first especially so: Vajrayana lineages in the west are just as rife with abuse as any other institution, and there's something odd that seems to happen to Buddhist teachers who emigrate to the US in particular - difficulty in adapting to the celebrity-style culture spiritual teachers can generate, and the US's comparatively extravagant material indulgences. OTOH, I can see the point about a coherent tradition with (relatively) well-preserved texts and traditions not just about the mechanics of practice but the pitfalls, ethics, cosmology, stages of development etc. Though it isn't my spiritual tradition - I'd argue some of the resources do exist in the fragments of the theurgists among other places - I've found a lot of helpful wisdom in texts from esoteric Buddhist practitioners.
(And, in my experience, individuals of 'true sanctity' really are there in the western traditions as well, but you're unlikely to find very many of them _very_ involved in the occult or neopagan scenes. So discernment is also an important skill.)
-888