In the JoS main we have the instructions of the steps of magick, primarily, raising and directing the energy.
The above is simply how every magick works. Magick however when one understands it, becomes a conscious process, compared to people who do this unknowingly.
Quite a few people can be natural magicians, ie, they have strong willpower or do in ways such as obsessing over a topic - they raise energy and direct it with their thought. Intention in magick is everything, and most important than even the technique.
Rituals that we do work upon these basic principles, as does every other form of magick. What is important to understand, except of the act, is one's intention.
Affirmation is essentially to help to guide one's intention and energy to the desired goal. Affirmation can be also tied into visualization, but above all, intention.
A simple explanation would be for example, you want to achieve an X situation such as healing. You have to raise the appropriate energy, and guide it, with affirmation and visualization. Your intention to heal is shown in this act, and the affirmation is the guiding force to anything that you raised.
All these states have to be on the correct place for magick to work. For example, if you keep raising energy but not direct it, then it will dissipate itself, like a torrent of water without direction.
Not all magick works in this way, but every magick is based upon this very basic principle.
Another example would be the Final RTR. The Final RTR is creating the reverse sound of an energy. Modern technology and sound insulation works exactly in the same way.
Modern electric cars like Teslas, do record with a microphone noise on the outside, and copy this frequency while they effectively use it to play the exact counter frequency to nullify the sound from reaching the car. The result is total silence, as if the primary sound [that which is heard outside the car] simply stops existing.
This is decided by the brain which uses the intermediary reversed frequency with the intention of blotting out the sound. Existence as a series of correlations, can be made void.
If one could play your life through a gravitational field in reverse, you would return to your mothers womb, and before this, your physical "existence" would no longer be. The light would return to the source. This is why also, in deep supernal teachings, "Light returns to the source". The "source" is associated with darkness or non-light.
Creation happens from the aether, focused outwards with creative intention. In retrospect, destruction happens in the reverse motion. That is one way to destroy.
All magick that is done is natural, and based on nature. All of the universe is based on vibrations. Vibration of a specific wavelength manifests itself as light. "Silence", manifests itself as "nothingness", but there is no actual "silence" in the observable universe, nor above nor below. Silence is achieved when a specific waveform stop existing.
On the very advanced level of magick where these things are sensed, magick can become more elaborate and move further than these basic steps, but it never escapes these basic fundamental laws.
When one does magick, they should know, that they are utilizing a "supernatural" force, but that even this is within the knowledge and wisdom of nature.