Testimonial letter from Cornelis A. S. Groen
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 Dr. Cornelis A. S. Groen. It is "Exhibit A-1725" 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.
 Dr. Cornelis A. S. Groen To whom it may concern The religious teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh have my full support. I know his ideas well, because I read about ten of his books. I am a physicist and physics teacher since 1966 and have been co-director of one of Holland's major projects in educational innovation (PLON, project for curriculum development in physics teaching for secondary education, Dept. of didactics of Physics Laboratory, State University of Utrecht, Princetonpiein, Utrecht). I have worked together with almost all the important projects in educational innovation in the world for the past ten years. At the moment I am working as private educational counsellor. My opinions about Rajneesh: - From the point of view of science: There is more to mysticism than just "religion". The whole process of human thought is at stake. His ideas can mean a Breakthrough in the philosophy and methodology of science. At the moment scientific thought is stuck in a blind alley, which has been pointed out by people like Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Fridjof Capra. Rajneesh is one of the people that can really help a change to happen. - From the point of view of education: Especially in the schools can be felt that mankind is going through a deep depression in self-esteem. Rajneesh's ideas about education can mean a radical change in the mentality from which we are teaching to the benefits of the students and the whole society. - In general: The work done by his disciples all over the world and especially in Rajneeshpuram, Oregon, is to me the most eloquent expression of a spiritual leader's vision I ever heard of in my life. I don't know much about "silent communion" between master and disciple, but the results in the behaviour of his sannyasins are obvious. Yours sincerely, |
(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.)
