Testimonial letter from J. Paul van den Bergh

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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 Dr. J. Paul van den Bergh. It is "Exhibit A-255" 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.

Wageningen, July 19, 1983
Dr. J.P. van den Bergh
Englaan 2
6703 EW Wageningen
the Netherlands
subject:
men with exceptional abilities

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

The undersigned was born in 1925. He studied at the Agricultural University in Wageningen and got his M.Sc, in 1954. He worked at the Central Institute of Agricultural Research (CILO, Wageningen) and in 1968 he got his Ph.D at the same University on the subject "An analyses of yields of grasses in mixed and pure stands". At the moment he works at the Centre for Agrobiological Research (CABO, Wageningen) and is specialized in "grassland ecology".

He was invited to give papers in Sheffield (U.K.), Seattle (U.S.A.), Leningrad (U.S.S.R.) and Berlin (B.R.D.).

He is editor of the Netherlands Journal of Agricutural Science, member of the managing board of the Institute of Ecological Research (Heteren), member of the British Ecological Society and member of the Royal Botanical Society of the Netherlands.

The undersigned declares that after reading the works of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh 5 years ago, his life has changed considerably. Bhagwan is not promoting a special religion, nor a phylosophy, but he is giving lessons in "being". His psycological insight is of exceptional order and his ability to stimulate large groups of people in experiencing the joy of life, is of invaluable worth.

[signed]
( J. Paul van Bergh )
[notary stuff]


(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.)