Testimonial letter from Stephen M. Read
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 Stephen M. Read. It is "Exhibit A-504" 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 3 pages.
 UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE To whom it may concern I am a teacher, writer and researcher in biology at the University of Cambridge (a short personal synopsis is attached) and should like to write a brief testimony concerning that portion of the work and abilities of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh on which I am competent to form a judgement. I have visited Rajneeshpuram, Oregon, twice, firstly in the summer of 1982 and more recently a month ago, and have to record my personal and scientific amazement at the extent and the quality of the changes that have been initiated on the ranch during that period. A substantial programme of erosion control has been thoroughly thought through and then carried out, to such an effect that it was difficult to credit that my return visit was taking place only one year after my first visit, so much had already been achieved. The creeks and stream beds, even those some miles away from the city of Rajneeshpuram itself, now contain green reeds and marsh plants, dragonflies, small mammals, and a host of birdlife, where previously was dust and bare rock. The growing plants are trapping silt and allowing the development of real soils again, for these hills of Central Oregon are so very bare after decades of mismanagement and neglect. I have seen the effects of erosion and over-grazing from North Africa to Mexico, and it is a joy to witness the major ecological achievement of the process, for once, being reversed. All of the work that has been carried out to achieve this has occurred according to Rajneesh’s ideas and philosophy, taking care of the land, that most valuable part of any country, and always using natural materials, and has been carried out on private property without any need for government finance. Rajneesh has an unequalled ability to bring together and hold together a multi-disciplinary team of able and educated workers (agriculturalists, botanists, ecologists, geologists, soil scientists, surveyors ...), finding the most human qualities in highly intelligent and academic men and women, and motivating each individual to produce work of higher quality and perception than each had ever thought possible. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is not just an idealist or a philosopher: he is a man with the immense and remarkable abilities required to turn a vision into a reality. [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.)
