Testimonial letter from David W. Kidner

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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. David W. Kidner. It is "Exhibit A-346" 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.

TRENT POLYTECHNIC
Burton Street
Nottingham NG1 4BU
Telephone 0602 48248
Telex 377534
PLEASE REPLY TO:
CLIFTON HALL,
CLIFTON,
NOTTINGHAM,
NG11 8NJ
Our Reference
Your Reference
August 9th 1983.

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing to bring to your attention the importance of the work of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in the field of Psychology.

I have been a Psychology Lecturer at Trent Polytechnic for the past seven years, in addition to teaching for short periods at a variety of other academic institutions, including one year as Visiting Professor of Educational Psychology at Lyndon State College, Vermont, USA. I have a First Class Honours Degree in Psychology from London University and a Ph.D. from the same institution, and my research interests are currently concerned with the relationship between personality and response to temperature biofeedback training.

I was introduced to the writings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh by a colleague, and my initial scepticism notwithstanding, I was persuaded to read one of his books. I was surprised and deeply impressed by what I found there. The profound psychological understanding shown by Bhagwan is, in my opinion, matched by no other writer in the area; his insights go well beyond anything available in the conventional psychological literature, and taken as a whole, his work represents a holistic psychological and spiritual view of mankind which is of extraordinary importance. I believe that it is difficult to overestimate the significance and potential impact of his ideas, not only within Psychology, but also for related areas such as Education.

[signed]
David W. Kidner (Dr).
DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION STUDIES
Director E A Freeman, BSc
[letter truncated]


(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.)