Magical Thinking

Ceremonial magic, while it is an important facet of the whole, it is not as important as they make you believe. Ceremonies, costumes etc. are like are crutch to place the practicionair into an altered states, a trance that can be achieved without any costume or hocus pocus.
true magic is not obvious yet consistent. That is the beauty of it! You operate under the radar and everybody thinks you are just lucky or blessed, while you are making everything happen. This way you avoid attention and negative consequences or unwarranted animosity or envy.
People come to you for a good show if you want to show off by all means try - good luck. True, transcendental magic is not like that. You do not want to show off and do not want attention. You do things for others and a little for yourself.
Magical thinking is only partial of the whole - there are the vibrations of letters, colors and sounds can and will work with your mental effort in tandem. Also there are utterances of words and magical speech to learn.
Lastly, your invisible selves must be in harmony in order to work with the elemental forces. Your physical is only ONE aspect of it. The invisible is ALWAYS more important.
On a certain, mental level time and space does not exist, in addition all possible events are not only possible but actual and probable, as nothing is yet final, sequential.

In our so called "reality" much of that we think as actual and final event is in reality, just a perception based possibility of one in the trillion of permutations of the whole.
What finally "happens" is based on individual and collective visualization, ideas, current and old thoughts and karmic balance of positive and negative individual or group Karma. Nothing is by chance or happenstance, at least not the way most people think of it. Akasha, the fabric of the Universe has traces of the karmic information. Everything is choreographed to perfection. but to a certain extent you (the initiated magician) can alter and change it. You can also create! Conjour up things from nothing. In fact, that is easier than altering karmically defined future events. In the old days the rainmaker or the soothsayer was often killed when his/hers prediction or effort was not realized, but many times the desired outcome - rain was karmically not possible that time.
For example, a shuffled deck of cards, on the mental level where there is no sequence of time based events, any possibility of the shuffled deck is probable so a true magician can "invoke" any cards, to the low level thinker(neophyte) who is stuck in the trap of time/space fabric of this Universe cannot see that as a probability but as hard as it is to believe this - ANYTHING is possible when imagined and acted out on the mental body, which then automatically gets pushed(propagated) to the physical realm and becomes, final and "REAL".
This is the true philosopher's stone, the true empowerment.