Testimonial letter from K. A. Aitken
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 K. A. Aitken. It is "Exhibit A-425" 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 2 pages.
 P.O. Box 53 TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: I understand that a new application is being made for Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh to have permanent residence in the United States. As a qualified scientist, I wish to add my support to his application as a person of exceptional ability in Arts and Sciences. I received an Upper Second Class Honours Degree in Pharmacology at University of Edinburgh in 1975. I also have experience in Humanistic Psychology and am a certified Postural Integrator. I have come to know Bhagwan in many ways: through personal contact with him when I visited India, through many of his religious books and through being around his sannyasins. In my own field of Pharmacology (study of the action of drugs), Bhagwan's contribution, I feel, is immense. Pharmacology is tied to a concept of man as a machine. Machines always react in a predictable way to a stimulus, e.g. a drug. So in theory, human beings should always react in the same way to a given drug. But everyone knows that even the same person may react differently to a drug at different times. Pharmacology at present is unable to explain this. One of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s tremendous contributions is his understanding that man’s mind and body are so deeply inter-connected that they should be considered indivisible. So drugs act on both body and mind, not on just the body or just the mind. The human mind can be so powerful that it can reduce or even reverse the action of a drug. Cancer treatment is one dramatic example of this, where cancer can proliferate in spite of an impressive array of drugs. Another is the 'placebo effect' where an inactive substance can mimic a drug. Many illnesses can be cured by treating both the body and the mind in appropriate ways. This includes when a person simply feels unhappy about him - or herself. In my own life, many of Bhagwan's concepts have really helped me to understand life in a balanced way and to feel a new zest for living. I feel that Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh would be a priceless asset to any country and would benefit the country economically, culturally and to its general welfare, because his ideas and vision touch on every aspect of human life and enables people to live more happily and with a better understanding of their world. My own experience testifies to this. [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.)
