All ritual, therefore, are undertaken to raise the levels of awareness and also of the senses. They contain symbols, gestures, movements and colours that act to open up a dream state where those present are able to communicate not only with their own higher levels of understanding, but also with other beings who exist in other dimensions and on other levels of existence. To do this successfully requires training over a significant length of time, and even then it is not always completely successful.
It is said that "form precedes manifestation"; which means that everything that manifests in this, the real, physical world, is preceded by a process of "formation" - which is a process described by the doctrine of Sephirothic emanation and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. This premise is not so odd or metaphysical as it might seem. Every object in the room we are sitting in are a product of human manufacture. All the forms began existence as nothing more than a thought in their creator’s mind.
"The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible"; that is, it can be described using language. There are abstract forms which describe change in the physical world, and they can be comprehended by mind, and although it is a large step to propose that mind takes primacy over matter, it is a view attractive to the practising magician. It is a view completely consistent with Kabbalah.
If "form precedes manifestation", then practical magic is all about learning to understand how the future is formed from out of the present. The seeds of many futures are planted in the present, and are accessible to the magician as the forms of the future. The forms of the future are being progressed by many minds; where they overlap, there is conflict and inconsistency, a situation resembling a bus where each passenger has a steering wheel providing an unknown and variable input to the eventual direction of the bus. In one interpretation (primacy of will) the magician is the person with the most powerful steering wheel; in another interpretation (Taoist nudging) the magician is a person who understands the dynamics of steering sufficiently well to use opportune moments to move the bus in a desired direction. In both cases the magician must have a clear notion of direction, what is usually called intention.
Formation is a process of increasing limitation or constraint. Once something is manifest it is constrained or limited by what it is at that instant.
To summarise: if magic is about making things happen, then the magician might want to understand the process of formation which precedes manifestation, and understand not only the forms which other people are intending, forms which may be competitive, but also the detailed relationship between formation and intention. You don't have to understand these things; many people like magic to be truely magical (i.e. without causality or mechanism), but Kabbalah does provide a theoretical model for magical work (the lightning flash on the Tree) which many have found to be useful (Hermetic.com)
