How does one utilize the occult in an effort to help other people? (Reddit)

I don’t like to lay down dogmatic rules and stuff, but there is one which I always live by:

Don’t attempt to help others without their consent.

Even if you’re not attempting to harm someone deliberately, if they experience energies they don’t understand you may spook them so much you end up harming them accidentally. Besides which, if they themselves are not co-operating in the magick, they are likely to sabotage any useful effect of the spell you are trying to cast for them.

Perhaps even worse than performing magick on someone without their consent is performing magick on them to which they would definitely not consent if they did know about it. Even if you think it’s for their own good and you think you have their best intentions at heart, this sort of magick is actually the classic definition of a Curse: it will either end in harming the person, or in failure.