Now let us return to our beautiful and charming castle and discover how to enter it. This appears incongruous: if this castle is the soul, clearly no one can have to enter it, for it is the person himself: one might as well tell someone to go into a room he is already in! There are, however, very different ways of being in this castle; many souls live in the courtyard of the building where the sentinels stand, neither caring to enter farther, nor to know who dwells in that most delightful place, what is in it and what rooms it contains.
Teresa Benedicta (Edith Stein), Finite and Eternal Being, Reinhardt, tr. ICS Publications (Washington, D.C.: 2002) p. 373:
The soul as the interior castle--as it was pictured by our holy mother Teresa--is not point-like as is the pure ego, but "spatial." It is a space, a "castle" with its many mansions in which the I is able to move freely, now going outward beyond itself, now withdrawing into its own inwardness.
