Testimonial letter from Charles Fisher
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 Charles Fisher. It is "Exhibit A-1720" 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.
 Brandeis University To whom it may concern: This is a letter on behalf of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Among world ! spiritual leaders his work is outstanding. The lives of many of his over a quarter of million followers have been changed to make them more effective contributing members of society. Having followed the activities of Rajneesh and his community for three or four years now I have some sense of who they are and what they are doing. As far as I can discern Rajneesh’s contribution to spiritual search in the modern world is unique. In his public discourses, hundreds of volumes of which are now published, he has created a revolutionary synthesis of Eastern forms of meditation with Western forms of psychology. Beyond this he has contributed new and original ideas concerning a range of religious subjects from Christianity and Judaism to Sufism and Zen. It is interesting that a teacher with such wide ranging contributions has stopped giving public instruction. This is not at all unusual for Asian spiritual leaders who having said all that need be said to their followers continue their teaching but without words. This is a hard concept for Westerners to understand, but neither an Indian nor a Japanese would think it at all strange. In fact it may be another way in which Rajneesh is bringing a practice of the East to the West. In the university I have taught courses to hundreds of students on the social psychology of consciousness. Among other books I have used a number of the works of Rajneesh. Notonly are the books useful for teaching, but the existence of the Rajneesh community in America gives the students insight into the real world application of his ideas. At the beginning of each semester my students usually find all the Eastern ideas, as they would say, "weird"; by the end of the course they readily see that the kind of teachings put forward are applicable to their minds too, and moreover, although the students may not want to live that way, the style of life of Rajneesh and his followers is comprehensible to them. It seems more than obvious to me that whether Rajneesh speaks or not, he is beyond question a great spiritual leader and maintains an ever changing rapport with his disciples. Sincerely yours, |
(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.)
