Mysticism in Luis Villoro's La Mezquita Azul

William James claims that the mystical consciousness possesses a noetic quality. He writes, “Although so similar to states of feeling, mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge.” All this, despite these experiences being, on the one hand, ineffable, that is, defying expression (“no adequate report of its contents can be given in words”), and, on the other hand, transient, after which “they fade into the light of common day." If the mystical consciousness is “discontinuous with ordinary consciousness,” and the corresponding experience ineffable in its meaning, how ought we regard the veracity of the mystical beliefs after the experience has come to its inevitable end? I consider two works by Luis Villoro in which mystical beliefs seem to stand in tension with those belonging to ordinary consciousness and work out one way we might go about reconciling seemingly contradictory beliefs.