Testimonial letter from Michael Solonevich
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 Michael Solonevich M Ed. It is "Exhibit A-198" 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.
 AFFIDAVIT I, Michael Solonevich, Master of Education, do hereby acknowledge and respectfully submit that: It is my professional opinion that Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is personally responsible for the most innovative, exceptional and significant experiments in the area of affective learning in the world today. I am an educational psychologist who teaches people to improve their learning ability in the emotional and motivational areas of their lives. They learn how to learn better, with a result of improved health and effectiveness. In 1974, I was invited to West Germany by one of the leading authorities there in the field of humanistic psychology, Dr. Med. Wolf E. Bunting, to help make available in Germany the latest techniques developed in this field in America. Since then, I have worked individually and in groups with over a thousand persons in Dr. Buntig’s Zentrum fur Individual und Sozial Therapie (ZIST) near Munich, which was the first and is still the leading center of its kind in Germany. ZIST has, in the last years, become famous as also a center where persons with cancer re-learn to live in such a way that the cancer recedes or stops. Mostly, however, it is visited by teachers, psychologists, doctors and other professionals of the helping professions. Although my work was not religious, I also led numerous seminars at the Buddhist Center in Scheibbs, Austria, which is a highly innovative center seeking ways to expand the Buddhist framework for modern man. While in Europe, I was increasingly struck by the laudable healing effects achieved in India in the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh on Germans, Austrians and Swiss who had been there and whom I knew closely in my professional capacity at ZIST (though ZIST was and is not connected with the ashram). By "healing effects" I mean marked improvements in these peoples’ intelligence about the give and take of life — learning their real present needs and learning to find people and other resources to meet their needs, and also what they themselves can now give and to whom. All this with increased humor, lovingness and also strength. Even for a professional it is very remarkable to see deeply ingrained life-time habits of immobility or inappropriate mobility in the face of insecure and ambiguous life situations changed so quickly and genuinely as it was with this diverse and sizeable sample of sannyasins. These effects are causes as well as symptoms of increased learning ability. After a year of observing these effects in Europe, I knew that I would have to investigate the unique methods being evolved by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh if I wanted to stay at the forefront in my profession. After two additional months of investigation and experimentation in this ashram, I had learned that I was not deluding myself in my impression that Bhagwan has a creativity and a perspective vastly beyond any profession of specialty. Especially my concept of "learning" became bleak compared to what I saw and experienced going on there, as I began to sense for the first time the infinite gentleness and cyclone power of something that has moved man for thousands of years but had not been recognizable for me: it was my first sensing of religion. Now, having experienced for several months, the immensely creative and fast pace of change inspired by Bhagwan at Rajneeshpuram, and having seen the broad and deep effect of this process on how individuals and I myself learn about ourselves, I stand fully behind the sentence at the beginning of this affidavit. [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.)
