📚 Interior Castle - Fourth Mansions (Pt. 1) 📚

Jumping straight into Chapter 1 because it is so relevant right now! Pt. 2 to come, and summary once I’ve read all the Fourth Mansions. 

Chapter 1

1. Temptation

It is better to face temptations than to never be tempted. Then our soul is always growing as we face opportunities to show our merit, and we don’t become comfortable in consolation, or too self-absorbed. 

"Into these Mansions poisonous creatures seldom enter, and if they do, prove quite harmless – in fact they do the soul good.”

2. Worldly vs. Spiritual Joys

Later called Spiritual Sweetness and Spiritual Consolation. More detailed description in Pt. 2!

“...worldly joys have their source in our own nature and end in God, whereas spiritual consolations have their source in God, but we experience them in a natural way...” 

3. Love!

“...the important thing is not to think much, but to love much; do, then, whatever arouses you to love. Perhaps we do not know what love is...for love consists, not in the extent of our happiness, but in the firmness of our determination to try to please God in everything...”

4. Thought vs. Knowledge

 Wow wow wow...before I continue, I just wanted to say that again, my spiritual reading is perfectly timed with state of my soul! 

At Hearts Aflame (blog post coming soon!) something was brought up from my past, and I realised that I spend a lot of time in my mind, glued down by my thoughts. Every interaction I have with people, every conversation, and even my relationship with the Father is impacted by my thoughts because I care so much about what others think of me. It’s exhausting! And because I live a lot in my head and not my heart, or in my soul, close to the Lord, I often fall into the trap of believing the lie that I am unlovable. 

At Hearts Aflame, my mind was full of the phrase “Out of my head, into Your heart.” It was my constant prayer, and I did see an answer as I began to understand just how much my thoughts were pulling me away from the Truth! As St Teresa describes, I still felt that deep tranquility despite the raging of my thoughts. 

Yet I was complaining of ‘interior trials.’ And then I was reminded of the fact that, as St Teresa puts it, “there is an interior world close at hand.” During free time, halfway through Hearts Aflame, I sat in the chapel and wrote this in my prayer journal:

This interior battle,

Am I going deeper into my castle?

Or have I let down my guard and let the snakes and creatures drag me out?

I feel like I am residing in one of the deepest, innermost Mansions of my soul. 

So close to You. 

Yet I feel so drained, so empty. So devoid of emotion, so nothing. 

So exhausted. So overwhelmed. 

Is this one of those moments where You’re kissing me? 

So close I can’t see You?

I don’t believe You have left me alone. I believe you are at work. 

But it doesn’t feel good to be so empty. 

I feel lost. 

So alone.

Now I have read this chapter, I understand that maybe my mind was in the outskirts of the castle fighting a battle, but my soul was in a Mansion very close to the Lord. It’s good to know You can be spread across both, and I wasn’t just going crazy!

Apologies St Teresa for the plagiarism, but this whole chapter is so good and so meaningful. Below are the sections I just spoke of.

“So we suffer terrible trials because we do not understand ourselves; and we worry over what is not bad at all, but good, and think it very wrong. Hence proceed the afflictions of many people who practice prayer, and their complaints of interior trials...because they fail to realise that there is an interior world close at hand. Just as we cannot stop the movement of the heavens, revolving as they do with such speed, so we cannot restrain our thought. And then we send all the faculties of the soul after it, thinking we are lost, and have misused the time that we are spending in the presence of God. Yet the soul may perhaps be wholly united with Him in the Mansions very near His presence, while thought remains in the outskirts of the castle, suffering the assaults of a thousand wild and venomous creatures and from this suffering win merit. So this must not upset us and we must not abandon the struggle, as the devil tries to make us do. Most of these trials and times of unrest come from the fact that we do not understand ourselves. 

As I write this, the noises in my head are so loud...they have been making it almost impossible for me to obey those who commanded me to write...all this physical turmoil Is no hindrance either to my prayer or to what I am saying now, but the tranquility and love in my soul are quite unaffected, and so are its desires and clearness of mind.” 

“It is not good for us to be disturbed by our thoughts or to worry about them in the slightest; for if we do not worry and if the devil is responsible for them they will cease, and if they proceed, as they do, from the weakness which we inherit form the sin of Adam, and from many other weaknesses, let us have patience and bear everything for love of God. Similarly, we are obliged to eat and sleep, and we cannot escape from these obligations, though they are a great burden to us.”

“But it is necessary (and His Majesty’s will) that we should take proper measures and learn to understand ourselves, and not blame our souls for what is the work of our weak imagination and our nature and the devil.”

TBC...

27th April 2021

Before I move on to my Pt. 2 post, I just re-read Chapter 1 to refresh my memory, and there was another line that stood out to me:

“But if the higher part of the soul is in the upper part of the head, how is it that it experiences no disturbance? That I do not know but I know that what I say is true…”

When I first read this, it made no sense to me. 

But here's a random fact for you, I’ve just finished studying a Theology paper, and one thing our lecturer brought up was the ‘Orchestrated Objective Reduction Theory.’ A quantum physicist, Stewart Hameroff, has supposedly discovered that our consciousness (or our soul) resides in the microtubules of our brain. 

Now I’m not saying this is 100% true, and I’m not a physicist or a theologian so I don’t have the authority or knowledge to back this theory. But when I re-read this sentence of St Teresa’s, I was reminded of this theory, which places the soul in the brain, the upper part of our heads.  

Fourth Mansions Pt. 2 post up now!