Let me preface this post by saying that, personally, I greatly appreciate the existence of forums like this as well as magicians like EA whose principal aim is that of magickal education of the masses. Without them, I most likely never would have started getting into the occult in the first place.
That being said, from a purely pragmatic and/or selfish perspective, why do we want other people to learn magick? From my admittedly beginner’s perspective on the occult, it seems like one of the primary benefits of magick is precisely that it is hidden and behind-the-scenes. We employ it in order to gain an advantage over our situation and other people: for example, we may perform a ritual in order to manipulate our desired target’s emotions favorably for us, or to hinder a competitor in the workplace, or to eliminate someone who is threatening our peace of mind. In all these cases, we do not want the intended target knowing about our magick as this could allow them to enact countermeasures detrimental to our success.
Therefore, it seems as though the ideal world for a practicing magician is one in which everyone but them is unaware that magick exists. Why do we want to give strangers the power to spy on us astrally or influence and manipulate our thoughts/emotions? Why do we want to let our colleagues at work get an edge over us for that promotion we wanted? Why do we want to give our enemies the power to curse ourselves into misery and death?
Obviously, this goes against the semi-popular grand ideal of a Mass Enlightenment of humanity, where every living person is tapping into their own infinite potential as benevolent co-creators of reality. I have no problem with this ideal either, but we’re not there yet, and not everyone has the same goals. Educating mankind at large seems like it would diminish our own power to change the world in the way we want.
Thoughts?