I am going to try and summon everything I know about magick that I feel needs to be shared.
The first step of a magician is to become aware of reality as it really is. He must be aware of his astral body and spiritual self. He must know the 7 Hermetic Axioms and the holographic fractal infinitely interconnected nature of reality. He must know the 5 elements.
The spiritual self is the same one you discover if you do the practices in The Arcane Formulas by William Walker Atkinson. It's the awareness that wills. It sits apart from the mind and body and acts on the later. The astral body is the mental self and can be strengthened by constantly imagining your whole body.
A magician needs a combination of book knowledge and actual experience. If you are fortunate enough to witness the paranormal with someone else, this especially is an important break-through. It establishes a basic truth of magick; that our thoughts do not exist in isolation "contained only within our head" but are in fact a real, substantial, thing; a form of substance. A good book to read on this topic is Dynamic Thought. If you can also establish the fact that the "material world" is subject to the influence of mental vibrations and so called "matter" can be acted upon by thoughtforms this as well as important. Just knowing this makes it easier for you to do it yourself in the future. Every realization you have takes you a step forward, doubts undermine you.
The next thing you need is an anchor. You already all have an anchor. Your anchor is that which you probably call "real" because it is the most familiar to you and it's stable and you can keep coming back to it no problem. The inhabitants of your anchor are the means by which you establish the objectivity of your experiences. Every day you wake up in this world and everything "checks out" and is "just like how you left it" then you are returning to your anchor. Some of us are not anchored to this world at all though the vast majority are; the ones of us that are not regard this world as "the dream" and we are entering this plane from outside of it.
Everyone is native to some plane or other. It's where they started, it's what they remember best, and regard as their home. Only at an advanced stage of development and illumination does a consciousness truly understand his own plane is just one amongst many.
There are 7*7*7*7*7*7*7 planes total. That is 7 to the power of 7, seven times. I don't know the number of the plane you are reading this text in and I wish I did. I don't even have a name for our plane. We just call it "the universe" and think that's all there is so we don't understand our relation to the other planes and where we fit in mathematically. Maybe in the future I will discover the true number of our plane.
Understanding where you are from and how your world relates to others is what I call bridging out. This is a process whereby you carefully create connections to other planes and get a sense of your location relative to them 4-dimensionally. It's hard to tune it properly and maintain a connection without accidentally changing your frequency constantly and ending up on other planes.
When you meet other entities some of them are not native to the plane and arrived where you are from somewhere else. They may think they are dreaming and behave erratically as a result. Meanwhile those who are native to the plane you are visiting probably regard their place as the "real world" and won't believe you or understand if you say you're from somewhere else. Others are well-aware of multiple planes of existence and travel easily between different planes and will be able to help you do the same.
When you build bridges between our world and others you learn to navigate the astral and can set up portals or nexions that can make the process automated in the future. You can for example enchant an object in your room and use it to go to a specific place in the astral by just touching it.
It is important to know how to enchant things and how indeed to perform magick at all. When you see magicians wearing robes, doing gestures, using symbols, and you mimic them you will not get any results because you don't know how to do things magickally. EVERYTHING can be done magickally and the technique is simple: imagine what you are doing while doing it.
If you want to become instantly clairvoyant all you have to do is look around you and imagine the things you're looking at with your physical eyes. When you imagine what you are seeing while seeing it, you end up looking at the thing with 3 eyes; your two physical eyes and your mind's eye. To imagine it to peer into the world with the mind's eye. By a process of tuning into the different planes of the astral as well, you can discover many things all in the same 3-dimensional space, overlapping.