Testimonial letter from Guenter Gehrke (1)
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 Guenter Gehrke. It is "Exhibit A-1470" 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.
 Gehrke is also the author of another letter, written seven days later. There is enough commonality between the two letters to establish definitively that the same one person has written both letters, not two different people with the same name. There are 22 other such cases known. We may be amused by the illicit possibilities here but just as likely he was simply giving the organizers two letters to choose from. His second letter is much fuller and deeper than the first, making the possibility of improving his input as likely an explanation as any. See also Testimonial letters#duplication for more on this. Dip. Ing. Guenter Gehrke To whom it may concern. During my 20 years' academic involvement at the Technical University in Berlin, tutoring in Technical Mechanics, lecturing in Civil Engineering and Engineering Mathematics, and researching and publishing on the matters of aluminium and copper-zinc products, I was always concerned to find some sort of clue to life with its very profound universal background, especially in my study of theoretical physics. As a well-educated Christian and scientist, I couldn't trust the Christian-made jealous omnipotent God, who is supposed to have created the universe in six days, taking one day off and since then never showed up again. I do trust in godliness but I can't trust such an irresponsible God. On my spiritual search I met Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, practising the so-called "siddhis", Patanjali's most esoteric and ego-fulfilling yoga techniques and two years later I met Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, first through his non-traditional meditation techniques, various religious books, audio and video tapes. Bhagwan's comments cover a tremendously wide range of science and wisdom I never met before; he speaks on any subject with such a great insight that 1 couldn't stop listening to him and living his devices and advices. Of the siddhis I got taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, he told me on August 18, 1980: "Guenter, it is not that I am not aware that there are many hidden powers in man, but I don't want you to become interested in them. Hence I say simply that they are stupid, and there are far more miraculous things happening all around. Become interested in them, because my whole effort here is to help your spiritual growth, not to hinder it". Feeling his overwhelming love, also by giving me advices Bhagwan brought me back to my senses from many power trips I really did not enjoy. Bhagwan's meditation techniques and comments helped me loosening up and enjoying my whole life much more with a certain lightness and awareness, naturally including my research and lecturing in mathematics which more and more I recognized with Bhagwan's help as my special meditation. [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.)
