Testimonial letter from Robert A. S. Fox
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 Robert A. S. Fox. It is "Exhibit A-907" 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.
 R.A.S. Fox To Whom It May Concern, I am a professional philosopher, specializing in Philosophy of Education. I hold a B.A. (Melbourne) and M. Sc. (Monash) degrees and have worked and taught in several universities. I lectured in Education at the University of Western Australia for eight years. I first read Rajneesh's work in 1977 and was immediately gripped with an intellectual excitement surpassing even that which I experienced on first reading Nietzsche over twenty years ago. It was almost as if a Philosopher who knew only Plato's "Republic" and "Laws" were to stumble across all his early dialogues. Suddenly the presence of Socrates would be revealed as the well-spring of Western Philosophy. What higher praise could I bestow than to say that on reading Rajneesh I now know what Socrates said, and how Plato misinterpreted him? For Socrates is an original source, a reference point for philosophy; and so with Socrates as a standard we can see that Rajneesh is an original source also. More than this Western Philosophy cannot say (being, as Whitehead remarked, little more than "footnotes to Plato", and Plato a misunderstanding of Socrates). It is difficult to believe that an exceptional phenomenon has occurred contemporary with us, but it is my judgement that Rajneesh is a thinker occurring only once in an age. [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.)
