Testimonial letter from Ma Satnam

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 Satnam. It is "Exhibit A-2274" 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.

Ma Satnam P.O. Box 10 Rajneeshpuram, OR 97741 July 23, 1983 To whom it may concern. I’m writing and painting children’s books. "Hans and Peter", "Dominique and the Dragon" are two of them being published by Harcourt Brace and Longmans. The others were published in Switzerland by Atlantis, In London by Oxford University Press, and in Japan. I studied psychology and education and took my degrees from Hamburg University, West Germany. For six years I worked in a therapeutic children’s communtiy. But I always felt that my work -also as a writer of children’s books - was too much influenced by method and theory. I could not penetrate that space where a child is coming from - so that I wouldn’t write about them, but look at the world with the innocence and playfulness as a child does. Of course nobody in the University could help me on that way. It was only when I met Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh that I knew I had found somebody who is not only talking about that inner space, but who has realized it in himself and can help me to find it in myself. Reading his books and doing his meditation techniques, I didn't only get an insight into the human mind far beyond all the teachings at the University, but I also found a way to enter into those deeper layers within me, where true creativity and playfulness come from. He is the only psychologist and pedagogue I have ever met who can speak and teach about the inner world of a child, and show you at the same time the way to find it in yourself. But he is even more than that: a man of wisdom, a religious teacher whose influence reaches the farthest corners of the world. He’s the first mystic in the history of mankind whose teachings are being studied in Universities during his lifetime. [signed] Ma Satnam

(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.)