Testimonial letter from Jobst Fiedler
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 Jobst Fiedler. It is "Exhibit A-1387" 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.
 Jobst Fiedler To whom it may concern I am director of the department for labor market and immigration affairs in the state government of Hamburg. I hold degrees in German law and a M.A. degree in Political Sience from the University of California (Berkeley). I came into contact with Bhagwan through books and friends who have become sannyasins about four years ago. Ever since I continued to read Bhagwan's writings and I am highly impressed by his views on life and religion. For the first time in my life I feel to be in contact with a living religion which offers answers to the problems that everybody today is faced with. Although I am not one of Bhagwan's followers it seems very understandable to me that he attracts tens of thousands of intelligent people, because through his whole work the experience of truth is felt. Since I have to deal with problems of job creation I am very intersted In the unique experiment which is taking place In Rajneeshpuram, Oregon, where his discpies are building a new city from scratch. Such a magnificent work can only be accomplished by a community which lives and works in an authentic way. Rajneeshpuram of which I have received numerous reports, including video-tapes, is an obviuous manifestation of Bhagwan's inspiration and spiritual guidance. I plan to visit Rajneeshpuram next year. In Hamburg, as in other big European cities, we observe that especially young people suffer from a great loss of work motivation. From such a visit I expect new insights as how work can be made meaningful again. [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.)
