Testimonial letter from Rolf Zimmermann

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. Rolf Zimmermann MD. It is "Exhibit A-2177" 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.

DR. MED. ROLF ZIMMERMANN, M.D 12th of July 1983 DIETRICH-SCHÄFERWEG 32 1000 BERLIN 41 GERMANY-WEST I am working my profession as an M.D. and psychotherapist with all sorts of different people asking for physical or/and mental help since 12 years. The first four years I was working as a Psychiatrist in a State Hospital in Berlin-West and as Health Officer in a State Health Department. Later I worked for two years in a Hospital of the Red Cross with people in deep life crises. I am now working since 5 years as Psychotherapist -Gestalttherapist with students of Ireie Universitat Berlin, Technische Universitat Berlin and from other different State and Private Schools in Berlin. Within these last 12 years (when I look back) I had the opportunity of an thorough and deep insight into needs and nature of human being both average life and in life crisis of different depth and their conflicts that made people decide to resign (consciously and unconsciously) or even quit, life. After my training as Psychotherapist I felt that an important dimension was missing in my training, even though I had the choice to train with several highly qualified and experienced teachers. The longer I worked with people the more I got to know that this central aspect I was missing in my training, most people were missing in their life and were unhappily searching and often resigning. Having met innumerous famous teachers during my whole pxofessional education since the begin of my study 1965 at University Hamburg, later University College Galway in Ireland, and University Heidelberg where I qualified as M.D. I didn't meet anybody, who was able to teach the approach to that missing and most important dimension: deep trust and love in life. So I feel very grateful that I had the change to meet and study with Bhagwan who is a worldwide known religious and spiritual teacher, to have the opportunity to develop and experience my capability of deep trust and love. For my work it means that I am more competent and helpful with people in need. My getting to know to Bhagwan’s exceptional capability as a spiritual teacher was both through his numerous publications and colleagues who have met personally, have become disciples and whose personal experience and development during their "study" with Bhagwan impressed me. So I took my time to study Bhagwan’s religious books and came to appreciate his exceptional ability as a religious teacher in all fields and in the science of psychotherapy particularly. [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.)