Testimonial letter from Brenda Mary Burkitt
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 Brenda Mary Burkitt. It is "Exhibit A-1200" 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 3 pages.
 THE POLYTECHNIC TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN My name is Brenda Mary Burkitt. I am a Principal Lecturer in Social Work at Huddersfield Polytechnic, Yorkshire, England. I have a BSc in Psychology and a Certificate in Social Sciences from London University. I have published articles on Social Welfare and Social Group Work in a variety of journals and given papers at conferences on these themes. I am the Editor of the Bulletin of the Group Relations Training Association, and Associate Editor of the journal of Social Work Education, published by the Joint University Council. I am a member of the British Psychology Society, the Group Relations Training Association, the Psychology and Psychotherapy Association and the Behavioral Social Work Group. I chair the Bradford Metropolitan District Council Youth and Community Consultative Committee and their Training SubCommittee, which involves me in training Youth Officers to work with young people, particularly in the field of race relations. I am used as a consultant and trainer by several district council social services and by the Prison Govenors College at Wakefield, Yorkshire. In addition I take groups of people from a variety of backgrounds (medicine, clinical psychology, business management, education) for personal growth and do individual counselling. I first became aware of the teachings of Bhagwan when I contacted the Sangeet Rajneesh Centre in Leeds. There I found many people able to put his teachings into practice and make a notable contribution to the quality of life in Leeds. It is one of Bhagwan’s most notable achievements that centres of this kind have sprung up round the world. They provide a glimpse of Bhagwan’s ideas operating in everyday life. One of their strengths is that interested people who come to the centres do not have any pressure put upon them to become followers or Rajneeshees and there must be many thousands of people who are influenced by and value Bhagwan’s teachings who are not among his numbered followers. I found the Sangeet Centre a source of strength and stimulus to seek new approaches to my work and I have introduced many of his ideas into my teaching and practice skills. My work is with people from the helping professions who are interested in developing their skills and learning more about themselves in order to unblock their creativity and become more effective both at work and in their personal relationships. I have found that Bhagwan’s teachings and the movement he has inspired have been instrumental in my work. For example, his writings gently insist on personal awareness as a real way of changing the world. In my field there tends to be a strand of hopelessness which ultimately leads to the preaching of revolutionary doctrines as a solution to personal problems; Bhagwan’s teachings provide a healthy antidote to extremism of that kind. He also counteracts the over-intellectualism of the young and the academics and insists that any idea takes its place in the hard school of practice. Abstractions like love, relationships, honesty, integrity, caring, making the world a better place to live, must all be tested in personal actions. He renews the great truths of the world’s religions by his emphasis on each person’s own responsibility for creating a loving, caring environment. His teachings make a good guide to all those who come into the helping professions wanting to make a contribution to improving the conditions in which so many live, but who then find themselves tied up in bureaucracy and overwhelmed by the mass of misery they find. Bhagwan’s great contribution in the field of Psychology has been to introduce humour and scepticism into this essentially technical science. He does this through his use of poetic images and his wide knowledge of Western psychological theories. Using paradoxical injunctions, he gets people to rethink their entrenched attitudes and seek creative solutions to intractable problems. His philosophy integrates in a new and lively way the teachings of both East and West, bridging the gaps in understanding between our two traditions and contributing to mutually productive communications between Eastern and Western views of the world. [signed] [The following text fragment was found in the letter, at the bottom of the first page, superimposed on the typing, as if stamped on afterwards. (If not that, it would be a footer found only on one page that she typed over.) It was also partially cut off by the photocopy process. Whatever. Here it is, fwiw: |
(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.)
