Testimonial letter from Margaret Kunzle

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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 Margaret Kunzle. It is "Exhibit A-736" 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.

Margaret Kunzle
Via Colautti 1
Milan
Italy

to whom it may concern

After obtaining a First Class Honours MA degree in Modern Languages (French and German) at Cambridge University in 1955, and working as an assistant principal in the British Foreign Office (UN Dept., 1956-57) I settled in Italy, where I taught at the British Institute in Rome (1958-62) and subsequently became a partner in the publishing company La Pietra (Milan, 1963-).

My 25 years of work on books - reading, translating, editing, research.- finally led me to indipendent writing - after publishing Mutus Liber (Mazzotta, Milan 1980), a book about alchemy and the European esoteric tradition, I discovered the works of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. I can testify that Rajneesh's teaching represents the influx of a strong new current into a stream of knowledge - the gnostic heritage -which over the course of time, as the gap between science and religion widened, had grown dry and almost inaccessible. Rajneesh's unequalled achievement has been his ability to teach a way to bridge that gap as it appears in individuals in the form of a split between direct knowledge and intellectual understanding. I can think of no other living writer who has been so able to illuminate for modern minds the path of material and spiritual evolution that the medieval alchemists also followed, in their sublime attempt to turn lead into gold.

[signed]
Margaret Kunzle
July 27, 1983


(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.)