The Interior Castle

The Interior Castle is Teresa of Avila's own 1577 treatise on the stages of mystical prayer and spiritual growth, presented here in the standard modern critical translation by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez published by ICS Publications, the Institute of Carmelite Studies, the recognized scholarly authority for Carmelite primary texts in English. As Teresa's own primary text in a translation used throughout academic Carmelite scholarship, it is the correct and authoritative source for her own account of contemplative prayer. Its limit is genre, a work of devotional theology describing interior mystical experience from within a specific Catholic contemplative tradition, so a claim about the psychological or neurological nature of the states it describes needs a source that examines that separate question rather than Teresa's own theological account of it.