Testimonial letter from Sw Antar Samira
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 Antar Samira (Harry Mark St. John II PhD). It is "Exhibit A-835" 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.
 Post Office Box 10 TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: My name is Swami Antar Samira, aka Harry Mark St. John II, and I have been a scientist for the past 14 years - I have done scientific research; I have taught Graduate Level Physics, Mathematics, and Psychology courses and I have worked with some of the greatest scientific minds alive. My academic credentials include a Bachelor’s Degree (Magna Cum Laude) in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton Unviersity, a Master’s Degree in Physics, and a Doctoral Degree from the Physics Department at U.C. Berkeley. For three years I served as an Associate Researcher in the Physics Department at U.C. Berkeley and as a lecturer in the group in science and mathematics education. During this time I published over a dozen research articles in the fields of physics, psychology and education. During my time at Berkeley I came to know many of the best scientists in the world. I found that what distinguished great and creative scientists from those doing more ordinary research was the high degree of perception and insight they brought to their work. While many scientists were very knowledgeable in their fields and possessed great intellectual skill, few had perceptive insight into the whole of their scientific work and it was these few that made real contributions to their field. It was my fascination with insight, with individuals of extraordinary perception and clarity, that led me to Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Bhagwan, in his teachings, displays a deep scholastic mastery of Philosophy, Religion and Psychology. While some scientists achieve insight into a specialized field, Bhagwan displays a deep insight into and understanding of the structure of many fields - science, history, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, art and religion. Bhagwan is not a research scientist in the ordinary sense; rather his understanding and perspective on the whole of science provides an overview that can alter the place of science in the world today. His observations of the functioning of the human mind are as profound as Einstein's insight into the universe. He not only is an extraordinary intellectual and scholar, but he is also a teacher of all that he has discovered. Even when compared with the world's best academic scholars, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is a man of extraordinary capabilities. More than anyone I have met, he possesses the extraordinary powers of perception and insight that are the root of real creative work in the arts and sciences. His contribution to the arts and sciences is already profound and of great potential significance. His oral and published discourses are highly original works offering new perspective in many traditional fields. The community of disciples living around Him, creating beautiful music, art, literature, and landscapes, are testimonies to his creative inspiration. Bhagwan is indisputably an extraordinary individual, of the highest creative and intellectual caliber; to have him as a resident of our country is an honor we should not deny ourselves. [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.)
