Testimonial letter from Jan Kraal
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 Jan Kraal. It is "Exhibit A-1060" 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.
 TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN My name is Jan Kraal (born 18 December 1950). I am a Dutch citizen, and I am living at the Prins Hendrikstraat 64, 1931 BK Egmond aan Zee, Holland. I studied sociology at the "Vrije Universiteit" in Amsterdam and received my degree there in 1976. My specialization was social work. I have done research projects 1) in the field of social work (functional analysis) and 2) in the field of education (evaluating experimental educational programme) and have published about this. In 1979 I first read about Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh ,and his teachings appealed so much to me that I decided to visit him in India. There I became a sannyasin. It is my belief and strong conviction, that Bhagwan's view on man is leading to a totally new way of living, such as is recently being realized in the new commune in Rajneeshpuram, Oregon and many Rajneesh communes throughout the world. Sociologically these are to be recognized as unique experiments. The communal cooperation, the civic organization, the approach to the environment, the humor and basic lightness, can truly be hardly compared to any similar past or contempary attempts to further the wellbeing of man. July 17, 1983 |
(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.)
