Testimonial letter from Paolo Nepoti
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 Dr Paolo Nepoti. It is "Exhibit A-267" 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.
 Milano, July 16, 1983 TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN I am Dott. Paolo Nepoti, 40 years old and I write this open letter in order to witness that the work and approach of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh have a social and cultural significance that place them amongst the experiments about associative life and the most relevant comprehensive models about the human being of our age, that are rich of information helping to understand how significant experiments of our society are evolving. My first professional activity was territorial planification - I have a degree in architecture by the Polytechnicum of Milano where I worked as a researcher for two years with a scholarship of the National Research Center (C.N.R.) and the Ministry of Public Instruction. In that period I was also the editor of the architectonial and urbanistic magazine 'ZODIAC', published by 'COMUNITA'. Working with the organization of the territories I started to occupy myself with the organization and projection of the services for sanitarian health assistance, particularly mental health. My scientific and philosophical interests brought me first to look for a more explicate correlation between geographic-economic and social group structures; later I was pushing my research more deeply in the direction of understanding the sense of human trouble. The nature of this research brought me to the point of getting personally interested in psycho-analysis and psychotherapy. Already then it seemed evident to me that in the project of a new society one would not neglect the experience of the world of values: the choice of an alive world in order to let go a dead world. In this period of research for a connection between the social and the individual it happened to me to read Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. I was deeply touched by the strength and potence of this project. Thus I studied with interest all the books of this great psychotherapist and all the same spiritual Master. I experienced for seven years the teaching of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and although I never was his disciple I can witness that this experience allowed me to enrich my professional education in a determinative manner. In fact, the big variety of points of view and of information is a problem being faced by a major part of all researchers and shows a desire for truth which goes beyond single schools. Today all these questions can be found discussed in the current debate between the methodological proposals of the socio-ecologist N. Luhmann, which are similar to social engineering and the theoretical projects of the 'Critical Theory' of the sociological school abound J. Habermas. This is how - from an urbanist and through sociology - I found myself on the street of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Now I am member of an association of group analysis (S.G.A.I.) and am working as a psychoanalyst in Milano. Yours faithfully |
(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.)
