Testimonial letter from Birgit Burkhardt
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 Birgit Burkhardt. It is "Exhibit A-694" 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.
 C.H.BECK'SCHE To whom it may concern. After training as an Art Teacher in Higher Education in Munich, I completed a 2-year postgraduate course at the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London in 1969. I then studied for 4 years to accomplish a Master of Philosophy degree in Educational Psychology at Kings College, University of London. My theses was on Alternative Education. At present I am working for C.H.Beck’s, one of the higgest german publishers in books on law and science, in the advertising department. Working in the field of Alternative Education I became interested in Group Dynamics and participated in such a training group where I first experienced methods of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. These gave me such immediately striking insights on my own personal development in context with others in group settings, that I decided to learn more in Poona where Bhagwan then lived. I stayed an worked there for three years. I feel that the teachings and methods of Bhagwan are absolutely brilliant concerning the field of Psychotherapy. With his original integration of eastern and western methods he has not only determined the success of his therapist followers but has influenced deeply the methods of progressive psychotherapists all over the world. Psychotherapy in general owes a great deal of renewal to Bhagwan. This is of even greater importance as methods and recognitions gained from psychotherapy are being used more and more in the wider field of Education. Therefore I feel it being of worldwide relevance to ensure and support the further growth and development of the experiments that have been possible through Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Yours faithfully |
(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.)
