Testimonial letter from Sw Anand Prashant

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 Sw Anand Prashant. It is "Exhibit A-2280" 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.

Rajneeshpuram, July 20, 1983 TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN I want to share with you what an exceptional experience of life I’ve known since I met Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. All my life, I’ve been interested by knowing more and more about human life and human mind. So I put myself in all kinds of situations that I believed would help me to learn more. I’ve been reading in all fields of knowledge, artistic or scientific; I’ve been travelling around the world as much as I could; I’ve been studying psychology and clinical psychology for ten years in universities - I’ve been trying through all this experience of life to picture to myself what human life, my own in particular, was all about. I guess I was trying to do what all sensitive human beings try to do for themselves with more or less energy; since I don’t think anybody can be alive and not be submitted to these questions related to the mystery of life, by life itself if one is only open to life. One day, preparing a course on developmental psychology that I had to teach in a college, I found a book of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. At that point, he was an unknown being to me. But the clarity and love I experienced from that man was a precedent. Later on, I read another book and I decided to go to India to find out better. I found in Poona, the most alive and vibrant community I had ever met before. I found myself touched to my very being by the Master Bhagwan, and by all this community working around him. Bhagwan in His discourses every day was opening my heart to life, what no other human being, or no other society or no other anything had done before. Just feeling His being, His presence was to me a real gift from life that my life before has always failed to give me. And it remains so, and even more since Bhagwan is silent, the heart to heart communion is much deeper than verbal communication. The discourses not only opened my heart, but lightened up my mindly understanding of human being because they were coming from that space beyond all prejudices, school of thoughts, traditions, etc.... Bhagwan was sharing clearly and simply, how own and deep understanding of life, and as a human being, it became clear to me. It makes no doubt to me that Bhagwan is a Buddha, an exceptional being, a being of the consciousness towards which each of us is going. So that life becomes meaningful and a deep experience of love and mystery. His commune is an expression of His being and since I'm part of this commune, I can see myself going deeper into the richest experience of life, love and laughter. Life is becoming lighter and lighter, clearer and clearer. The burden of life and society as I knew then before Bhagwan and His commune disappeared. Life in this International commune is a new way of life, a new vision of human relationship. It is the other native society to a society where trust, love, and laughter do not exist. In Bhagwan’s community, the work has become worship, because in each of Bhagwan’s disciples, the sacred has become identified with the whole of the life. Because of the love that Bhagwan has showered on us, because of the love Bhagwan has awakened in us, our participation to human society has the color of fire. Our existence is disturbing because we are a new phenomenon in western society. But a phenomenon utterly needed if we want human being to keep breathing. [signed] Swami Anand Prashant

(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.)