Testimonial letter from Ma Prem Samvida
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 Prem Samvida (Patricia A. Nave). It is "Exhibit A-880" 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.
 P.O. Box 10 TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN Before coming in contact with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, I was a tenured college professor at Montclair State College, Montclair, NJ in the Department of Fine Arts. I received my advanced degree, Master of Arts at Columbia University, N.Y. City, in 1963. My major field was dance with minor studies on psychology and humanities. I spent five years travelling in Europe and the Far East studying the dance style of the people, with special interest in how the psychology and religion were connected to the art of the dance in various cultures. Strangely enough, this search led me to discover Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who is so astounding on his grasp of human nature and the religious experience. All my studies in dance had led me to discover that in all cultures dance was the first expression of man’s religious experience. Every religion including Christianity had found dance as its earliest expression. And now I found a modern living religious teacher who understood, who had indeed experienced the same religious experience as all the mystics, and who was leading his disciples into active dancing meditations in which they too could begin to experience the religious. His books, His tapes, His meditations, His teachings are a tribute to world understanding. He will go down in history as an exceptional, extraordinary man, a religious giant. America can only gain from His continued presence in this country. Sincerely, |
(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.)
