Testimonial letter from Christiane van der Spieren
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 Christiane van der Spieren. It is "Exhibit A-70" 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.
 TO WHOM it may concern. In July of this year I was a visitor in your country on the occasion of the second annual world celebration in Rajneeshpuram, Oregon. I would like to sincerely thank the people of the United States that this could happen in their country. Now I heard that Bhagwan has not yet got his permanent visum to stay in the U.S. Being a teacher of Roman Catholic religion in Belgium for wore than 20 years, I can only admire Bhagwan’s important teachings. I have read a lot of his books, which provide a real alternative to create a new happy world and a new manhood. Please give Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh the space to work it out. Thanks to him I am doing my job with much more love and responsability and I now understand Christ and his work much better. Sincerely yours Van der Spieren Christiane [signed] |
(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.)
