Testimonial letter from John E. Whiteford Boyle
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 John E. Whiteford Boyle. It is "Exhibit A-1737" 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.
 FOREIGN SERVICES RESEARCH INSTITUTE & WHEAT FORDERS Dear Sir: Devadeep, the Rajneesh Sannyas Ashram in Washington has asked me to provide information concerning why, in relation to one’s field the Baghwan is considered a man of exceptional merit in the arts. We publish a series of books written by our Director called Primers for the Age of Inner Space. One of these in particular was written in part after study of the Baghwan's work. This book, The Indra Web concerns, as its subtitle indicates, 'the renewal of ancient Oriental concepts in modern Western thought'. There is now in the world an oecumenical religious movement, uniting Eastern and Western concepts and finding sanction for this in the ancient Brahmanic, Buddhist and Taoist texts in religion and philosophy. To be a contributor to this is to be a religous teacher and world leader whose presence in the United States is an asset to this country. Our author has derived benefit from the work of the Baghwan and hopes in turn to have had some influence on him. I would like to add my voice and the voice of these organizations to the request that the Baghwan be allowed to remain in the US. Yours, |
(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.)
