Testimonial letter from Nancy Dobson
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 Nancy Dobson. It is "Exhibit A-1097" 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.
 LIFE ARTS To Whom It May Concern, I am a licensed Music and massage therapist and a professor of Clinical Philosophy. I have worked professionally as a counsellor and professor for eight years in Santa Cruz County, and two years previously in Norway and San Jose, California. I came to know Bhagwan Rajneesh while working with my husband as a psychiatric aid. Some of the other practitioners were Sannyasins and offered us discourse tapes from Bhagwan's talks in Poona. I was amazed at the range of knowledge the man had, integrating Eastern and Western philosophy. My first real understanding of His work came when the Sannyas Center (Deekshant) rented our growth center (Life Arts) for a meditation week-end.... Aug. 11th, 1978. For the whole time I was hosting this camp, I was fascinated by the depth experienced in Bhagwan's unique meditation techniques and the parallel: in my own work with movement and art. I was amazed at the poetry of his presentations (taped discourses) and the univeral appeal he had speaking from all religious systems and practices. I had been teaching the phenomenological model of being to professionals, which means I was teaching people to be in the moment, and come to each situation (especially counselling) without preconceptions or a priori decisions. Bhagwan's emphasis on the present and his way of integrating arts and sciences turned my little song into a huge symphony. Taking the intellectual wisdom he offered into more experiential context liberated my abilities as a teacher, student and lover of life. I consider him to be a person of exceptional abilities, who is world-renouned and perhaps will someday be known as one of the greatest minds of our times. If he is not famous now, he will be, as educators in the West come to know of him. His sophistication as an artist of religion, philosophy and science is beyond any I've known in over twelve years of study and application. 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.)
