Feelgood Theosophy
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Playing Cards with Hoodies.
The
Game of Cards
By
Anna Kingsford
A
story that suggests that your attitude and
expectations
influence the hand you are dealt
From Dreams and
Dream Stories
I dreamed I was
playing at cards with three persons, the two opposed to me being
a man and a woman with hoods pulled over their
heads, and cloaks covering their
persons. I did not particularly observe them. My partner
was an old man without
hood or cloak, and there was about him this
peculiarity, that he did not from
one minute to another appear to remain the same.
Sometimes he looked like a very
young man, the features not appearing to change in order
to produce this effect,
but an aspect of youth and even of mirth coming into
the face as though the
features were lighted from within. Behind me stood a
personage whom I could not
see, for his hand and arm only appeared, handing me a
pack of cards. So far as I
discerned, it was a man’s figure, habited in black. Shortly
after the dream
began, my partner addressed me, saying,
“Do you play by
luck or by skill?”
I answered” “I
play by luck chiefly; I don’t know how to play by
skill. But I
have generally been lucky." In fact I had already,
lying by me, several tricks I
had taken. He answered me: —
“To play by
luck is to trust to without; to play by skill is to trust to within.
In this game, Within goes further than Without.”
“What are
trumps?” I asked.
“Diamonds are
trumps,” he answered.
I looked at the
cards in my hand and said to him: — “I have more clubs than
anything else.”
At this he
laughed, and seemed all at once quite a youth. “Clubs are strong
cards, after all,” he said. “Don’t despise the black
suits. I have known some of
the best games ever played won by players holding more
clubs than you have.”
I examined the
cards and found something very odd about them. There were four
suits, diamonds, hearts, clubs, and spades. But the
picture cards in my hand
seemed different altogether from any I had ever seen
before. One was queen of
Clubs, and her face altered as I looked at it. First it
was dark, — almost
dusky, — with the imperial crown on the head; then it
seemed quite fair, the
crown changing to a smaller one of English aspect, and
the dress also
transforming itself. There was a queen of Hearts, too, in an
antique peasant’s
gown, with brown hair, and presently this melted into a
suit of armor which
shone as if reflecting fire-light in its burnished
scales. The other cards
seemed alive likewise, even the ordinary ones, just like
the court-cards. There
seemed to be pictures moving inside the emblems on their
faces. The clubs in my
hand ran into higher figures than the spades; these
came next in number, and
diamonds next. I had no picture-cards of diamonds, but I
had the Ace. And this
was so bright I could not look at it. Except the two
queens of Clubs and Hearts
I think I had
no picture-cards in my hand, and very few red cards of any kind.
There were high
figures in the spades. It was the personage behind my chair who
dealt the cards always. I said to my partner: — “It is
difficult to play at all,
whether by luck or by skill, for I get such a bad hand
dealt me each time.
“That is your
fault,” he said. “Play your best with what you have, and next time
you will get better cards.”
“How can that
be? I asked.
“Because after
each game, the tricks you take are added to the bottom of the
pack which the dealer holds, and you get the honors you
have taken up from the
table. Play well and take all you can. But you must put
more head into it. You
trust too much to fortune. Don’t blame the dealer; he
can’t see.”
“I shall lose
this game,” I said presently, for the two persons playing against
us seemed to be taking up all the cards quickly, and
the lead never came to my
turn.
“It is because
you don’t count your points before putting down a card,” my
partner said. “If they play high numbers, you must play
higher.”
“But they have
all the trumps,” I said.
“No,” he
answered, “you have the highest trump of all in your own hand. It is
the first and the last. You may take every card they
have with that, for it is
the chief of the whole series. But you have spades
too, and high ones.” (He
seemed to know what I had.)
“Diamonds are
better than spades,” I answered. “And nearly all my cards are
black ones. Besides, I can’t count, it wants so much
thinking. Can’t you come
over here and play for me?”
He shook his
head, and I thought that again he laughed. “No,” he replied, “that
is against the law of the game. You must play for
yourself. Think it out.”
He uttered
these words very emphatically and with so strange an intonation that
they dissipated the rest of the dream, and I remember
no more of it.
ATCHAM,
Feelgood Theosophy
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