Testimonial letter from J. Kolff
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 J. Kolff. It is "Exhibit A-1107" 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.
 137 Dixon Street, To whom it may concern. I am a graduate in Economics with the degree M.A. (Hons.) from the Victoria University of Wellington. 1 have also done postgraduate research on developing countries (especially Indonesia) at the Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, Canberra. I wish to state that Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is a man of exceptional ability who has made a profound contribution not only to religion, but even in areas such as my own, namely economics. He has clearly expounded something I had suspected for some time - the limitations of economics if studied too narrowly, out of context of the wider human perspective. And he has shown beyond any doubt that a tightly-controlled communist economy is doomed to failure - only a free-enterprise economy can survive in the long run. It is also an established fact that Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is internationally recognized as a religious teacher and leader. There are few men of his stature alive in the world today. I first came into contact with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh through his amazingly lucid books. For the first time in my life I discovered a religious man who was not an insult to my intellect, but who so obviously respected my intelligence - unlike the mumbo-jumbo of most other so-called religious teachers. Consequently, he has had a profound influence on me, enabling me to make a much more positive contribution to society in many ways. And I have seen similar changes in many of my friends and colleagues. 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.)
