Testimonial letter from A. J. Coppes
This letter is one of a remarkable series of over 2650 letters amassed in 1983 to support Osho's attempt to get permanent resident status in the US at the time of the Oregon ranch. The image is reproduced here with the kind permission of The Oregon Historical Society. Information about their collection of these letters and other supporting material -- the "Jeffrey Noles Rajneesh Collection", named for Osho's immigration lawyer Jeffrey Noles, who compiled them in 1983 and donated them to the OHS -- can be found at this page. The wiki is grateful to the OHS for making access available for these documents. For more information and links to all the letters, see Testimonial letters.
This letter is from A. J. Coppes. It is "Exhibit A-885" in the Noles collection.
The text version below has been created by optical character recognition (OCR), from the images supplied by OHS. It has not been checked for errors but this process usually results in over 99% correct transcription. Most apparent "errors" are correct transcriptions of typos already in the original. The image on the right in the text box links to a pdf file of the original letter, it has one page.
 July (?) 1983 To Whom It May Concern, After my graduation from the Agricultural University of Wageningen. The Netherlands, from 1976 to 1980, I have been working as a rural sociologist in Colombia, South America. There is an urgent need for cooperation at all levels, from production to marketing to distribution of agricultural produce. The existing rural organizations, like production credit and consumer cooperatives, are having a hard time, due mainly to the human factor. Distrust, lack of education, paternalism, the interference of all kinds of political and religious ideologies: the causes of Latin America’s underdevelopment are well documented, but badly understood when it comes to solving the major problems. In the area where I was working there was a promising new approach to the development of peasant cooperation. A group of wise old peasant leaders got together with agricultural and social scientists to organize a cooperative organization at province level. At that time I started reading books of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. What I read touched me so deeply on a personal level that I became a disciple within a couple of months. In fact, as soon as I could make it from Colombia to India. But also I found Bhagwan's ideas highly relevant to the situation in which I found myself working. They reflect the same common sense knowledge which characterized the old peasant leaders who had experienced, maybe I should say suffered, decades of well intentione(?) but unsuccesful development efforts from above. Bhagwan also presents a clear sociological perspective, which is no only merely theoretical as I have been able to witness during my visits to Rajneeshpuram, Oregon. To me Rajneeshpuram has the most alive, well functioning rural cooperative organization in the whole world. People from all nationalities cooperate in a loving, harmonious way, apparently without the major problems that even succesful rural cooperative such as the kibbutzes of Israel are suffering. There is a tremendous potential in Rajneeshpuram as a pilot experience for rural cooperation, due to Bhagwan's inspiration. He is the source of the creativity that is developing in Rajneeshpuram’s rural organization. Sincerely, |
(Please note: We assume that the above letter is still copyrighted, but we regard its historical interest to constitute a Fair Use exception for publication in this wiki.)
