Testimonial letter from Jörg Marxen
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 Jörg Marxen. It is "Exhibit A-68" 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.
 Jörg Marxen I have been trained and working as a councelor in the protestant church, studied psychology at the Technische Universität Braunschweig and received my diploma in 1981 for practical and theoretical research about the use of meditation in therapy. I was invited to lead seminars in this field for the Institute for Psychology in Braunschweig. Now I work as a clinical psychologist in my own practice and for the Centre for Biosynthesis, England. I published some articles about meditation and therapy, for example in the journal Partnerberatung. My way to Bhagwan began, when I was deeply impressed by the love, clearity and quality of therapeutic work of one of his disciples. I visited him in India in 1978 and had the possibility to talk with him. In this personal contact he gave me tremendous help for my spiritual path and my work. Overlooking hundreds of publications about therapy and meditation I have to testify Bhagwans books give an outstanding overview, genious methods and important practical details that show his qualification as a religious teacher and his deep understanding for the situation and the needs of modern society. The scientist Marjorie Schuman (1) devides the methods of meditation into three types. She mentions Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh as an important creator of methods of the third type: active meditations. In old traditions this type is very rare. In our time Bhagwan is the first and up to now almost the only one who has been creating them. He did it out of his insight in the needs of our western lifestile. The early research of meditation suffered from a deep misunderstanding that a relaxed state of consciousness needs a low arousal of body-functions. Marjorie Schuman (1) points out there is no specific pre-condition for meditative experience even if often correlates have been found. This point of view brings the focus of science more to active meditations. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh shows these insights already in his early publications (2). This is one of the reasons why he has been a source of inspiration for scientific and therapeutic work. Another researcher who is using quotations from Bhagwan’s work to gain deeper understanding into theory and practical details of meditative technics is Patricia Carrington, Ph.D. (3). She talks about Bhagwan as ’’the Indian SPIRITUAL LEADER Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh” ( (3), page 255 ). But Bhagwan does not only offer his own methods. He inspired yearlong experiments of a great number of therapists. The results of this process are now crystalizing in the form of Rajneeshtherapy. In the field of Therapy and Meditation Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh has proofed to be a spiritual leader and religious teacher with a rare and outstanding ability to combine science and religion. [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.)
