Testimonial letter from Ma Deva Amita
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 Ma Deva Amita (Elke Bayer). It is "Exhibit A-1566" 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.
 EIke Bayer To whom it may concern I was brought up In a wealthy family. After my school period I had been at University studying various subjects, such as German Literature, Arts, History, Philosophy and Psychology. After marrying and having a child I finished my favourite subject, psychology, and did my examinations in 1972. I and my husband, a teacher of psychology at the University of Munich, and a circle of friends tried to establish an alternative psychotherapy clinic or little community, based on the understanding that humanistic psychology has of man. The idea to do that came up, because we all felt not satisfied with our daily private life or the terms of scientific work. But we seemed to get always to limits of heart and mind, we couldn’t go beyond. In 1976 I met for the first time in my life a group of people called sannyasins, which I found quite extraordinary and amazing. So I got to know about Bhagwan and already 14 days later I went to India, to meet him. In terms of society my life was quite valuable and settled; in terms of looking for a higher form of growth it wasn’t. I met Bhagwan and took sannyas. He seemed to me the most beautiful person I ever met. The inner and outer growth I was always looking for in my life seemed to really start for the first time. All that I was missing in science, I could find in the outstanding vision of life of this man, I began to understand what a Master is, what amazing ways of guinding people he has. One of the most basic teachings I got, that love and compassion have to be the foundations of any science, otherwise sciences are getting inhuman. I always felt that Bhagwan’s genius-intelligence was showing us the different ways, a complete new horizon and understanding of science and man, and that nobody caught up in the single parts will ever be able to develop a human and basic understanding of man and the universe. Accordingly, the whole work happening around him In his community has a completely different flavour than outside. The fearless society so much spoken about, humanistic psychology, here it’s happening. The reason why Is that the people are relating to each other on the basis of love; one man is there having realized it and radiating through silence. Instead of nervous and stressful energy, you find here happy people, a lot of laughter, no competition. The work Is worship and in the middle of this new experiment the new man is growing. Bhagwan always said, the true understanding of life is beyond words, a matter you can only experience yourself. Step by step this silent space is growing inside his disciples. I’ve experienced it during my seven years of being with Bhagwan more and more. In this space we are discovering a lot of talents in ourselves; so everybody is doing everything, in a way, with a lot of enthusiam, seeing there isn’t any limit in his personality. In Bhagwan’s presence people get adventurous, tremendously under taking and full of initiative. Love makes the impossible, possible. Having experienced Bhagwan’s incredible givingness, his tremendous love, my life is enhanced and enriched in the most beautiful way. The experience of transformed human beings in this Buddhafield is an example for the world for a better human life worth living; Bhagwan created it. [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.)
