Testimonial letter from Graham Bird
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 Graham Bird. It is "Exhibit A-1707" 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.
 HAWKESBUR{?) Re: Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh For the last three years I have been familiar with the spiritual leadership of Bhagwan. I have read some of his books, and I have participated in workshops conducted by Sannyasins. Also, for the last ten months a Sannyasin has been a member of our staff. My impression is that Bhagwan is one of the worlds leading thinkers about psychology. He has turned that thinking into practices that are very effective in enriching the lives of people and in enhancing their effectiveness in their work. Central to Bhagwan’s psychology is his role as a religious leader. He fulfills this role by developing a strong environment of growth that is centrally created by his presence and is evident in his followers joyfull, prayerfull, aware and celebratory approach to life. His role in silence is a normal part of the environment created by religious leaders of his tradition. It cannot be said that his thoughts are not available in view of the extremely large number of books and video tapes that are always available at Rajneesh centres. A generalisation of communication theory is that 90% of communication occurs in non verbal channels. People who understand this will readily recognise that a presence in silence of a spiritual leader can be a natural and effective religious experience. At this College I am currently Head of the Department of Communication and Acting Head of the School of Management and Human Development. Methods developed by Bhagwan Rajneesh are being used to an increasing extent in our approach to helping people to understand society and themselves and increase their communication skills. I personally have had an extensive series of experiences in communication training workshops over the last thirteen years and therefore feel able to compare the different approaches to such growth experiences. In 1984 I will be co-director of a workshop, which we are conducting jointly with the Australian National University, on recent developments in psychology and their implications for education. The Rajneesh approach will be one theme of this workshop. [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.)
