John Stuart Mill and My Attempt to Include Tibetan Buddhism

In this particular reading, John Stuart Mill seems to focus specifically on the freedom of thoughts and opinions. I, for one, was really interested in how he says truths and opinions are formed, and how they're related to one another. As I continued reading this material, there was a little itch at the back of my mind that I couldn't get rid of. At the time, it hadn't seemed related to what I was reading, because that little thought was about an episode from the first season of Supernatural, 'Hell House', where Sam and Dean hunt a being called a 'tulpa'. 

Soon, however, I started thinking maybe it wasn't so farfetched, after all. I did a little research on tulpas and found that they aren't 'monsters', so to speak, but a concept in Tibetan Buddhism; a theory of mysticism, really. You can sort of liken it to when a child creates an imaginary friend or something like that, because tulpa is--at least as far as Tibetan Buddhism is concerned--any being or object created through deep meditation. 

They're basically thoughts that become real things. 

Now what, you might ask, could this have to do with John Stuart Mill's 'Liberty of Thought and Discussion', read in a college classroom? 

Well, the answer, my dear reader is... I'm not entirely sure. 

It was when Mill says at the beginning of the article that even if only one person has an opinion or a thought that's different from the rest of the crowd, it still needs to be acknowledged that I really began thinking about the word 'tulpa'. Mill also goes on to say that people need to step out of their comfort zones and talk to one another in order to truly learn. And that, he says, is how truth is found. That was primarily why this reading made me think of tulpa meditation. The way I saw what Mill was saying was that the simple acknowledgment of the thought's existence is what makes it a real thing, like a form of mental validation. However, it's when enough people come together to talk about it and keep it in their minds that it becomes a 'truth'. 

That's precisely what happens in the episode of Supernatural I mentioned in the beginning of this post. Enough people were thinking about a legend made up about a nearby haunted house, and they're combined thoughts made the legend become a truth. The legend also changed when people gained new information about the original concept, and added that information to their thoughts as well. 

To me, it seems a lot like how Mill says truths in discourse and debate are found as well.