Testimonial letter from Gunter Nitschke
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 Gunter Nitschke. It is "Exhibit A-1721" 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 2 pages.
 (?) Institute of Technology To Whom It May Concern: Since 1979, I have been offering a seminar on meditation within the Department of Architecture at MIT. It is registered in the MIT catalogue as a graduate course (4.698) by the title of “East Asian Research Project". It is worth noting that MIT, commonly known for its excellence in the “outer sciences", at this moment in history, recognized the need to explore possibilities in the "science of the inner" and offers courses in it. Perhaps behind this fact is the suspicion that the process and experience of true creativity and of meditation are the same. They are, as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh emphasizes very often, characterized by a very paradoxical state of human consciousness: they are not action, neither are they inaction; they are action through inaction; they are a deep allowing of something to happen through you. This is the reason why every person interested in creativity can grow by a training in meditation. In my meditation seminar, I let students experience techniques of meditation which I myself have experimented with at the former Rajneesh International Meditation University in Poona, India since 1974; many of these techniques are based on various spiritual traditions but have been modified by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh to fit and help the modern human being. In addition, to help students in their quest to discover themselves, to go beyond all parental, social and religious conditioning, to find out who they truly are, I play relevant taped discourses Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh has delivered in India over the last ten years. In these discourses, he addresses problems arising in meditation and speaks on aspects of various former spiritual paths of the East and West as well as on modern Western therapeutic and humanistic growth practices. He often answers spontaneous questions of listeners concerning their own life problems or problems related to the evolution of human consciousness in general at this moment in history. From the over one hundred books by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh available In Western languages, I selected as texts for the seminar the five volumes of “The Book of the Secrets" in which he comments basically on all meditation techniques the human being has ever experimented with, and the ten volumes of “Yoga, the Alpha and the Omega", in which he, as only an enlightened master can, speaks on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, perhaps the first meticulous scientific approach to meditation. The clarity, beauty and humanity of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh which once caused thousands to come to his ashram in Poona are now, in the form of books and taped discourses, an invaluable source of inspiration and real help at various universities and modern growth institutions all over the world. He might not only be the only enlighted master alive, but he is definitely a spiritual leader of world scope. His voice has already touched in one way or another, every person on this globe sensitive to the ecological, psychological and spiritual plight of humankind in this age. His presence reaffirms our hope in the possiblity of survival of the human being in the future. He is a living example of the direction in which human consciousness has to evolve. The opposite direction is filled with the tensions and neuroses caused by fears of self-extinction through mass destruction or ecological suicide. I know of no other human being alive today who with equal authority, clarity and compassion could also talk on the means of this quantum leap the human being has to take in our time, the only two arts he has to learn or re-learn: meditation, the art of being alone, and love, the art of being related, on an individual or global scale. Sincerely yours, |
(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.)
