These are just a few magical ideas I've been having as I sit by the window on this rainy, quiet Walpurgisnacht. They're my ideas—not statements of absolute truth.
Magic is natural, not supernatural. Uncle Anton wrote: "Magic is like nature itself, and success in magic requires working in harmony with nature, not against it."
But magic is also intelligent. When you do a working, you program aether to serve you or access an existing aetheric presence. You are creating and / or locating and tasking an aetheric being. Incidentally, you do that with any creative act. This aetheric "djinn," whether created by your magical-creative act or already in existence, will seek to fulfill the success criteria you give it in the ritual performance. Some have argued that all magic is "spirit" magic—i.e. that all magical workings call and dispatch one or more spiritual entities, even if the magician isn't aware of this or didn't specify it. The legendary German chaos magician, Frater UD, in his famous "Models of Magic" essay, calls this the "Spirit Model" and says, "The shaman or magician is someone who can enter this otherworld at will, who has travelled widely in it, knows its language and customs and has made friends, smitten enemies and/or acquired allies and servitors there. This is important as all magic is of these entities' making." Other models of magic are useful, but I personally work within the spirit model most of the time. Note that some spirits of sufficient individuality and power have free will and can say no. When the magic doesn't work, I believe this is what's happening.
Magic causes change in line with the magician's expressed intent. Donald Michael Kraig wrote: "Magic is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will, using means not currently understood by traditional western science." This was based on Crowley's old definition and comes to us via him and the Golden Dawn. However, what it doesn't say is that the intent must be made explicit in the working. As Michael Aquino puts it in one of his books, "Beware of 'unintended consequences' [in magic]. Preset careful limits on your workings, lest you conjure daemons easier to invite in than to invite out."
Spirits enjoy working with and for magicians. One is seldom "tricked by the djinn" into horrible situations. It is much more likely that, in its exuberance to fulfill the task, the spirit will take the path of least resistance. The time and space to be navigated by the djinn of the work is sometimes vast and involves retroactive causality (going into the past to make a condition manifest in the present or near future—this can be mind bending when we start to consider the implications: what actually inspired us to do this working? Was it us? Was it the djinn who wanted to work with us? Demons are notorious for engineering a retroactive-causal chain to make you want to work with them once they become aware of you and decide they like you. That said, most demons who go out of their way to do something like this usually make sure that you are very pleased with the results. One exception to the idea that spirits enjoy the work is when you're doing necromancy and tasking spirits of the restless dead. Their energetic bodies are often in a slow process of decay (just like their physical bodies were / are) and by the time that reaches their "emotional" energetic layer, they don't feel too enthusiastic about anything. This is the origin of a disembodied, "ghostly" voice you may hear sometimes when having clairaudience. The dead can do a lot of things for us, but they're not fun to deal with unless they're remarkable individuals who know how to maintain themselves after death.
Every magical working teaches you how to be a better magical worker. Ramsey Dukes, another legend who I admire, recently said this in a YouTube talk: "Magic is individualistic. The value lies in the surprising things that are subjectively meaningful to the individual." This fits with my belief that there is no real distinction between so-called operative or illustrative magic. Every working (including a divination) that illustrates something, changes something. Every working that changes something, illustrates something. This is why it's so essential to keep a magical diary. It's your highly subjective, individualistic grimoire. This is also why another chaos magician, Gordon White, says that all magic always works in some way on some level.