Testimonial letter from Rainer Artenfels

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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 Rainer Artenfels. It is "Exhibit A-366" 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.

Rainer Artenfels
Karl Toldtweg 33
1140 Vienna/Austria

To whom it may concern:

I am a well known actor and director working for almost all famous theaters in German speaking countries. My residence is Vienna. There I am a member of the famous "Theater in der Josefstadt", which was founded and led by Max Reinhardt.

Since 1959 I am working for "ORF”, the Austrian State Television Company. For ’’ARD’’ and ”ZDF”, the two biggest German TV stations. All together I was standing in more than 150 productions in front of the camera either TV or movies, in leading parts, national and international, and I had the chance to experience almost all the famous actors and directors during these years. In 1978 I was guest in Berlin at the Rennaissance Theater. I was in the starring part, my partner was Inge Meysel. At that time I came in contact with disciples of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Immediately I felt the value of his meditation techniques, as I started using them before I went on stage. And listening to some of his taped discourses, it became clear very soon that I had to go to India to see this man who could give me such simple and deep insights of the human psyche. In India I heard him speaking about theater. It was the most profound and insightful I’ve ever heard to that issue, like opening new dimensions, new angles to look at. To me Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is a man of exceptional abilities and he seems to have no limits in helping people to explore their own individuality and creativity in a joyful, loving way. Besides that, I feel, through him I have found back my religiousness.

No doubt Bhagwan Shree Rjaneesh will be a precious enrichment to this country and America can be proud that it has the chance to offer residence to such an outstanding being.

[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.)