Testimonial letter from Jorgen Thorndal Larsen
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 Jorgen Thorndal Larsen. It is "Exhibit A-55" 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.
 Jorgen Thorndal Larsen, TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN I am a holder of a M.S.C. degree in philosophy and philosophy of religion. The first part of my study was in philosophy, which I started in 1974 until 1978. In this field I was mainly concerned with philosophy of Science, and in the last part of it I was concerned with mysticism and Eastern Philosophy. I finished this off with a report on the Bhagavagita and its influence on the early romantic movement in Germany. The next phase in philosophy of religion lasted from 1979 until 1982. Here I was mainly concerned with science of religion and in my thesis I tried to give a scientific background for explaining religious experiences. I received my M.S.C. at the University of Copenhagen. I came to know about Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh writings in 1978. Unfortunately his books were not available in the library of the university, but I got them from India and visited the Rajneesh meditation center in Copenhagen. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's religious writings have been of utmost importance to me in my approach to science of religion and I would like to state two examples of His importance. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s view upon religion and science helped me to lighten up the discussion between a fictionalistic (E. Dürkheim) and essentialistic (M. Weber) sociology of religion. Another important topic is his theory about the "psychology of the Buddhas", which means a psychology that contains human potentiality which has hardly been under research by traditional science. The whole approach of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh towards science, psychology and religion is a new way of thinking and of extreme clarity. The importance of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in human science is comparable to the importance of Einstein in physics. yours 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.)
