Testimonial letter from Henning Eberhagen
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 Henning Eberhagen. It is "Exhibit A-1156" 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.
 Henning Eberhagen To whom it may concern I studied at the Technical University of Berlin, Economics and Engineering, and received my degreees in 1971. In 1972 I received another degree in education from the Free University of Berlin. After practical training I was teaching mathematics at a Berlin High School. All teachers there were confronted with the phenomenon of aggression. It was a new type of school in Berlin and nobody had really experience in handling 1500 pupils in the age between 11 and 16. Though everything was absolutely perfect from the technical and organizational point of view, the kids were just running wild. Something very essential seemed to be missing in our teaching system. At that time I did not know what it was. But then I met a disciple of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and was introduced to the teachings of this great spiritual leader. I started meditating, listening to the taped discourses of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and reading his books. I was deeply impressed: here was a man with very exceptional abilities, a great philosopher and psychologist, a teacher of teachers, a source of truth. Soon I went to Poona, India, to meet him. And I learned what was missing in our teaching system: love. We all were brought up in Christianity, where Jesus taught us to love the world, because God is love. But nobody seems to know how to love; we simply forgot it during that 2000 years being busy with getting rich and powerful and therefore fighting each other. And here comes Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh reminding us who we really are and helping us to find our way back to ourselves, to our sources, and he teaches us love. Rajneeshpuram, based on the principles of love, can become an example to the world: how man can live in harmony, freedom and love. And again such an incredible experiment has to happen in America, because only the U.S.A. with their long tradition in preserving human freedom, their openness for new ideas and their technical intelligence can provide the base. He could not have chosen a better place - these people can be proud. [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.)
