Testimonial letter from Manfred Volkmar
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 Manfred Volkmar. It is "Exhibit A-2142" 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.
 Rajneeshpuram 14.7.83 TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN I am Diplom-Soziologe and I got my degree at the Johan-Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, West Germany in 1982. Part of my examination was the research on new religious and spiritual movements. In connection with this I worked comparing different systems of societies and their understanding and their picture of human being. Among this I was occupied with the different development between eastern and western societies. During this work it became clear that western societies went through very important changes during the middle ages and developed what we call today science. This change also is the reason for a lot of disorientation and emotional problems we are experiencing (where Sigmund Freud is a symbol for it). About one year after this work I heard about Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and his teachings. I noticed that he came to the same conclusions but from his own point of view which is a religious one. This totally amazed me because this is a religious leader who came to the conclusions which I and other people had in their scientific work. This and his simple and clear statements and reasoning took me to the point that he is a man of rare vision outstanding even in my scientific subject. In my opinion, he is teaching - as far as I can see it - a quite new understanding of nature of mankind which says that mans basic nature is freedom and that he has the opportunity to grow above his biological and his social boundaries. This is a point of view which has given a really new light to the old question of determination of the human being. As far as I am concerned Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is an amazing man so he comes to quiet, interesting and even far-seeing conclusions in subjects which are basically not his own. This makes me feel that he is a man of great insight. [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.)
