Testimonial letter from Sw Deva Smito
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 Deva Smito (Gerhard Böckler). It is "Exhibit A-250" 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.
 TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN My name is Gerhard Böckler, born 12th May 1952 in Wetzlar, Germany. I'm a doctor and right now living at Bennbacherweg 2, 6290 Weilburg, Germany. In June 1978 I was sent by the German government with a stipendium to practice and study in a hospital in Bombay, India. In Poona, a close by city, I met Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and felt immediately a deep connection to his being, and his visions and teachings as he gave them out in lectures and evening meetings. Besides being my spiritual teacher since then, he inspires me daily in my practical work as a doctor, by being able to reconcile and bring together essential concepts and insights from various fields of human science, such as Theology, Psychology, Medicine, Sociology and Psychiatry. I feel greatly helped by this to find a more humanistic approach towards myself and my clients. His teachings, which are available in books and on tape, and his meditation, which expresses itself in his silence, make him for me one of the most outstanding individuals I ever met or got to know about on this world. 17.7.1983 |
(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.)
