Testimonial letter from Claudia Maes
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 Claudia Maes. It is "Exhibit A-1944" 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.
 Claudia Maes To whom it may concern: I am a teacher at a Secondary School in Berlin since 12 years. That means I have to deal with young people who are socially and spiritually lost, who don’t have any aims and ideals in life and who therefore become very destructive, hateful. I was about to quit my job because I didn't feel able to pass on other values of life then geography and german language. But I knew that couldn't be all. When I met Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh my life and attitude towards life was changed totally. His teaching of acceptance and respect of all living beings opened a new dimension in my work. I started to bring his meditation into my work and realized a beautiful change with my students, becoming more peaceful and softer in their behaviour. It's so important for the Western society to have a man like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh to teach a way out of boredom, destruction and misery that many people in the industrialised parts of the world are infected with. Therefore I respectfully ask you to make it possible for him to stay in the U.S.A. It will an immense benefit for the human society. Claudia Maes |
(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.)
