Testimonial letter from Kaj Håkanson
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 Kaj Håkanson. It is "Exhibit A-1748" 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.
 To whom it may concern. I Kaj Håkanson am associate professor at the department of Sociology, Uppsala University, where I have been teaching and lecturing since 1965. I have earlier published books in cirminology, the sociology and philosophy of psychiatry and political theory. My three recent publication Dubbla verkligheser ("Dooble realities"), Stockholm 1980, Vetando och ovetande ("Knowing and unknowing") Göteborg 1961 and Det osedda ("What is not seen") Stockholm 1903 deal in problems on the borderline between sociology, psychology, philosophy and religion. The review of the first volume of this trilogy in one of the most widely spread Swedish newspapers says that "Certain parts...are maybe something of the greatest any swedish social scientist has achieved so far." My contacts with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's transscribed talks date back to around 1976 when I had started working on Dubbla verkligheter. In his talks I found succinct and penetrating analyses of many of the questions I discussed in my book, e.g. questions about the relation between psychological health and religious transcendence, about the assumptions of conventional western social and behavioral science compared to the transcendent world-view you find in many eastern religions. Through reading these talks and applying them in my own research I came to recognize Rajneesh as one of the outstanding teachers and spiritual leaders appearing in public in our time. Uppsala , July 15 th, 1903 |
(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.)
