Testimonial letter from Leo and Diane Horowitz

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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 Leo and Diane Horowitz. It is "Exhibit A-132" 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:

This is to describe my experience of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, a man who has profoundly affected my life. I am forty-nine, married and Senior Technical Advisor to the President of Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical Co., a large aerospace company in San Diego, California. I hold a Bachelor of Science degree in physics and Master of Science degree in applied mathematics from the California Institute of Technology. I have twenty-five years experience in the aerospace/electronics industry, and was previously Chief Scientist, General Electric Space Division, Senior Scientist, TRW Space Systems Division and Assistant Professor of Mathematics, California State University. My wife Diane holds Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in education and has been a Fine Arts teacher in the National City, California school district for fifteen years. We have a seventeen year old son Elliot who is a senior in high school.

I have found Bhagwan a man of consummate philosophical pedigree, a lover of the arts and a proponent of technology. But what astounds me the most is the brilliance he brings to humanistic psychology.

After spending time with him in India in 1980, my wife and I participated in many of his psychology groups. We were delighted with the ease and gentleness with which anxieties and resentments began to disappear from our marriage. Long standing human relations problems at work also began to lessen. We were more than curious to determine how such long standing and stubborn psychological patterns could be released so quickly and gently. We began to study his books to see if we could get a better perspective. What we discovered was a psychological breakthrough in understanding twentieth century man. As far as we can determine, he seems to have managed the near-impossible task of synthesizing a brilliant new psychology of our times. Our own lives are testimony to its effectiveness.

Please contact us if we may supply further information. And if you will, please extend him every consideration. We think you will discover with us he is truly ’a man for our times’.

Sincerely,
[signed]
Leo and Diane Horowitz
5081 Montessa St.
San Diego, Calif. 92124


(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.)