About a year ago I decided to improve my fitness routine by combining it with intermittent fasting…
And the card game, solitaire. Believe it or not, it’s been a great help.
Why not?
Suppoedly Napoleon found solace in playing solitaire during his exile at St. Helena. If the stories are true, Tolstoy played solitaire when he hit blockades in his writing process. He cleared his mind by playing solitaire, thereby opening himself up creatively once again.
But it’s Madame Blavatsky I have to thank for introducing me to the card game as a simple and engaging way of occupying the mind.
Finally, The Right Time
Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky is a seventeen century mystic and spiritual leader.
She’s most notably one of the founders of the occult philosophy and belief system, Theosophy. (It’s not a religion, contrary to common belief.) Claims about Madame Blavatsky state that she had command of some incredible powers—as it usually goes with mystics and spiritual leaders. She could will items to materialize, apply psychic force to objects, communicate with her “hidden masters” using globe-trotting telepathy, call up and command spirits, and acquire knowledge from afar with a kind of second sight.
But for whatever reason, it is Madame Blavatsky’s devotion to the card game of solitaire that stands out most to me.
I’m an avid reader of Gary Lachman, the occult historian and author. Anyone who watched Sons of Sam on Netflix will recognize him as the occult expert tapped to lend some insight into that whole bizarre saga. (It’s an incredible watch, by the way.)
The first book I read by Gary Lachman was Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality. I first learned of Madame Blavatsky while playing Persona 03; she was a topic of discussion in one of Mr. Edogawa’s offbeat classroom lectures teaching all things occult, ranging from Aleister Crowley to the Tarot.
Soon after I discovered Lachman’s biography of Madame Blavatsky, but I didn’t bother reading it. As these things go—the time wasn’t right.
It wasn’t until many years later—after moving forward in my life from a disastrous relationship—when I rediscovered my deep interest in all things occult and esoteric. I started listening to all Gary Lachman’s interviews for New Thinking Allowed on YouTube, not initially realizing that he was the author of the Madame Blavatsky book I found years ago.
The time was finally right.
“Purposeful But Unimportant Work”
Call me an old maid, but I love playing cards.
One of the fonder memories I have from that aforementioned disastrous relationship was when we’d have friends over to the house for dinner followed by a game of cards. It was very I Love Lucy of us, but what can I say? I’m an old soul.
And it wasn’t until I read Gary Lachman’s Madame Blavatsky that I realized I could incorporate the card game of solitaire into my life similar to Madame Blavatsky’s approach.
According to Gary Lachman in his book, Madame Blavatsky: The Mother of Modern Spirituality:
Later acquaintances remarked on [Madame Blavatsky’s] apparent obsession with playing solitaire; in their accounts, it is as ubiquitous as her cigarettes.
Archibald Keightley, who knew [Madame Blavatsky] during her last years in London, remarks that “while solitaire occupied the brain, [Madame Blavatsky] was engaged in very different work.”
She could “take part in a conversation going on around her… tend to what we used to call the ‘upstairs,’ and also see what was going on in her own room and other places in the house and out of it, at one and the same time.”
Lachman explains that while a person is engaged with the “purposeful but unimportant work” of some kind of activity, it can create a kind of psychic distraction that “frees up” some space in the mind for another “self” to manifest.
This other “self” is separate from the main personality and character of a person; it is reported to show itself when given the proper room to appear. It’s said to potentially happen when under hypnosis or anesthesia.
Psychologists like Adam Crabtree and Pierre Janet believe that the human psyche is vast and malleable, and other personalities can take shape and manifest themselves deep within the wells of the mind.
Yes, think Split.
Later on in Madame Blavatsky, Lachman documents that Madame Blavatsky was often seen by friends and visitors in the middle of a game of solitaire. She also used it to relax after her long days of writing. Lachman notes that she worked around 12 hours a day; she’d wake at 06:00 AM, start writing at 07:00 AM, and would end at 07:00 PM. She’d sneak in only a quick lunch to break the day up.
Changing Conformity With Will
If only my games of solitaire were as paranormally fun and interesting as Madame Blavatsky’s.
Alas, they are not.
But I will say this: with the care game of solitaire, I trained my mind away from the nigh-unbreakable habit of evening snacking that’s harassed me for a lifetime (I’m 38 at the time of this writing). I willed myself to actively reject nighttime eating and instead focused on playing solitaire.
I can say that—for me—it’s worked.
It’s now incredibly rare for me to eat anything after my evening meal. Instead, I maintain a fasted state ranging from 16 to 19 hours. A little bit of Aleister Crowley can be added here, too, by citing his definition of “magick”: magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.
I typically play solitaire on my iPad. The version published by Brainium is wonderful; it’s incredibly clean, visually pleasing, and a joy to play. But it’s certainly not unheard of for me to rough it the old-fashioned way with a physical deck of cards. There’s reward in the tactile manipulation and maneuvering of the cards as you identify patterns and build piles.
Why, if I was going to let my imagination run away, I’d even say it’s a small exercise in some kind of imaginal alchemy. You’re taking the random chaos of the hand you’re dealt, and then you’re attempting to transmute the whole mess back into the purest forms of the four elements (hearts are water, spades are air, clubs are fire, and diamonds are earth). If you successfully build these four stacks, from ace to king (assuming you’re playing Klondike), then you win and your brief operation proves successful.
But again, that’s only if I was going to let my imagination off the leash.
I usually do.
