Testimonial letter from Arnold Schleger

From The Sannyas Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

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 Dr. Arnold Schleger Phd. It is "Exhibit A-188" 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 23, 1983
Dr. Arnold Schleger
Bremgartnerstr. 19
CH-8003 Zurich
SWITZERLAND

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

Dear Sir,
I was astonished to hear your refusal to give resident status to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh as a religious teacher.

During the last ten years, I was working in research at the Institute of technology of the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland and received my Ph.D. in physics there in May 1980. I worked mainty in solid state physics using various methods of optical spectroscopy and wrote some ten papers in journals like Solid State Communications, Physics Letters, Physical Review and others.

At that time I came to know many people active in the field of art, science and psychology, many of them trying to find a creative synthesis which we felt was absolutely necessary as a foundation for our future. When, in 1979, I got in touch with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, I felt deeply impressed and enriched by His teachings. Never before or after have I encountered anybody having such a harmonious and immensely creative view encompassing art, science, human psychology and religiousness, and certainly we would lack substantially without His vision of the new man.

It is therefore absolutely not understandable to me how it can happen that Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh has not yet been acknowledged as a religious teacher and welcomed, especially in a country like the U.S.A.

Yours sincerely,
[signed]
Dr. Arnold Schleger


(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.)