Testimonial letter from Stuart William Elliott
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 Stuart William Elliott. It is "Exhibit A-1000" 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.
 5/3 Grantham St. To whom it may concern, I am a mathematician, trained at the University of Sydney, then Cambridge University and Harvard University. I have worked postdoctorally at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School in London, the National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, and the Institute for Medical and Veterinary Science, Adelaide, Australia. I am currently the senior maintenance programmer for Lloyds Bank in Australia. I came to know of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh through his religious books and meditations, especially his dance meditations'. Bhagwan is the only religious teacher since Pythagoras to appreciate the deep connection between really abstract pure mathematics, its playfulness and beauty, and meditation. Bhagwan’s approach to creativity is identical to that practised by the world's greatest pure mathematicians whom I worked with at Harvard. I recall in particular the love of one famous Japanese algebraic geometer for Zen gardens and kites and my own Harvard supervisor’s passion for wild flowers. Yours sincerely, |
(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.)
