Testimonial letter from Katherine Reeder
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 Katherine Reeder. It is "Exhibit A-725" 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.
 Katherine Reeder To whom it may concern My life has been spent evolving around music. My grandmother was a well-known organist in Cleveland, Ohio and my father an experienced music professor from Ashlan College, Ohio. I grew up learning techniques of teaching music and specifically keyboard instruments and began teaching piano at age fifteen. I studied piano since 1953 with Elizabeth Pastor and later harpsichord with Doris Ornstein, both exceptional musicians from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and who have performed frequently with the Cleveland Orchestra. I received my Degree in Music, majoring in both harpsichord and piano, from the Karlsruhe Musikhochschule in Germany (1973) and did graduate work in harpsichord as well as receiving a specific degree in pre-school music education from the Freiburg Musikhochschule (1978) - both schools of exceptional quality. Simultaneously I did work towards my Master’s Degree in Psychology at Freiburg University in Germany (having received my B.A. in Psychology already from Ashland College in Ohio where I was born). Having taught many years in America, I continued teaching private music lessons and running music groups with small children in both public and private music schools in Germany, and with excellent success. In the fall of 1979, I heard of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and went to Poona, India, to experience personally his teachings and practices. I took part in meditations and therapy groups for one month. When I returned to Germany and continued my teaching, I realized that the style and results of my teaching had changed dramatically. Although in the past I had been well-respected for my teaching abilities, I often wished I could be more sensitive with "problem" children, with the ones who in overexuberant enthusiasm would disrupt a classroom situation. Upon my return I began to notice that my students were learning much more rapidly and many of them began composing their own music. I no longer had the feeling of having to struggle to assist a "difficult" child in becoming musical. It was suddenly as though I only had to lift a blanket to reveal his or her own innate musical ability. The pre-school children’s groups seemed to flow much more easily and the parents came frequently to me to thank me for being so loving with their child and with wonder - stories of their 4-year old sight-singing out of the hymn book or picking out tunes on the piano. I can only attribute these changes to the effect Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh's meditation practices have had on myself. Being in the community of this internationally-recognized religious teacher for only those few weeks started a process in me which freed me from certain restraining habits I had — enabling me to express my own creativity much more flowingly and lovingly. I feel this man is indeed of exceptional talent and ability to create in such a short time such dramatic changes in myself - especially after my having taught music already for almost 20 years. He is a mystic, of course. But he is also, most certainly, the greatest psychotherapist of this age. [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.)
