Testimonial letter from Sw Anand Ragen
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 Ragen (Pieter Cornelis van Steenwijk). It is "Exhibit A-782" 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.
 DEEPAM
rajneesh sannyas ashram I hereby like to express my deep connection with the Enlightened Master Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who undoubtedly enriches my life and work as a scriptwriter/producer for various Dutch television broadcasting companies and filmproduction agencies. My curriculum vitae: Born in Holland the 11th of December 1937. After college I attended the Dutch Film Academy and got a degree in scriptwriting. Found myself a place in society as a journalist for various newspapers, became a columnwriter specialised on television and film, worked seven years for Panorama-magazine as a feature-writer and developed a brand new magazine. I was married, had two beautiful children, two cars, a nice house of my own and enough money to buy happiness. Somewhere at the end of 1976 I came across the words of Bhagwan, which gave me a shock of both recognition and bewildrement. Here I listened to a man who had reached something which I could not fully understand but it triggered my heart enough to travel all the way to India - with my family - to meet Him. I stayed in His ashram in Poona for three years and sharpened my writingcapacities by translating five of His books into Dutch. I also worked at the ashram press office which gave me more insight as a journalist in the way this profession could become more clear and truthful. When Bhagwan left India for America due to His fragile healthconditions, I travelled back to Holland and picked up my work as a free lance journalist. Soon I was contracted as a scriptwriter and televisionproducer, a field I was trained for but never had the chance to be creative in. As I look back I cannot say more than that Bhagwan has an exceptional ability to free all the available creative sources in man. It is just unbelievable and not only to me but also to the people I work for how creative and supporting I can be when I relax in my work, do my meditations and try to be His beloved disciple. Having participated in the Second Annual World Celebration at Rajneeshpuram this year, I can only see more prove of His exceptional abilities by looking around in that littile piece of earth in which people can live and worship to their fullest. A Master like Him should be treated as an emperor and not as an outcast. [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.)
