Testimonial letter from Harald Kempf
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 Harald Kempf. It is "Exhibit A-1169" 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.
 Harald Kempf, Lehrer To whom it may concern, I heard that you intend to cancel the permission to stay in America for the spiritual master Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. I feel really astonished that this should be possible in a free and democratic country like America. I am not a Sannyasin of Bhagwan, I am a teacher in a German school. Among other subjects I teach religious education. Three years ago I started to read books by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, especially the ones about Jesus, which to me opened a new outlook on Christ and Christianity and which brought Jesus nearer to me than many sermons at church, lessons at school or books I read. Bhagwan has spoken more than 100 books about many different supkcts.Now he has has stopped to give lectures and has started to work through silence. Is that the reason why you can't look at him as a spiritual master? Don't you know about the constructive and healing power of silence? Why don't you give him and the place which he is bidding up with his Sannyasins a chance? Auroville in India, which was created by Sri Aurobindo was and still is such an experiment of people trying to live their love. Why cant you tolerate an experiment like Rajneeshtown in Oregon? Dont we need experiments like this in a world full of threats and anxieties? I do hope that you will give Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh permission to stay in your country as long as he thinks his presence to be necessary and as long as he wants to. 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.)
