Testimonial letter from Jim Terry
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 Jim Terry. It is "Exhibit A-1002" 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.
 THE AMERICAN WAY To Whom It May Concern: I am an independent film and television producer, own my own companies and have done so for 25 years. I think that it is disgraceful that our government is harassing Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and trying to invalidate his status as a Spiritual Leader. He is obviously a great Spiritual Leader and has the right to practice his religion any way he chooses. No other leader in the world has published as many books or even attempted to create the kind of spiritual community that he is now creating in Rajneeshpuram. Oregon. I feel he is a credit to our country. I know several of his followers and find them to be intelligent, articulate and loving citizens. Our country is founded on freedom of religious choice and I feel that it would be a terrible blow to all of us and our Constitutional Rights if Rajneesh is not granted his Visa as a Spiritual Leader. 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.)
