Testimonial letter from Sw Devam Vanni
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 Devam Vanni. It is "Exhibit A-2577" 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.
 Swami Devam Vanni To whom it may concern. I live and work in contact with nature in a Rajneesh community in the countryside of Tuscany, Italy. We share the quest for understanding our own nature, the attempt to grow as whole human beings, capable of fully living ordinary everyday life while at the same time touching, feeling the depth of our spiritual nature, beyond the dichotomy of matter and spirit. Before that my life was facing some safe and well-defined paths, which lacked though soul and joy. Since I was a cybernetics student and later, while working with computers, I had felt that reason, and reason alone cannot understand and explain the totality of reality. Inside and around us there is more than just logic circuitry. In between the abstract polarity of "yes" and "no" of a logic circuit, in that whole universe of complexity where it is hard to know how to move I met Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. His lectures and meeting His sannyasins opened up the horizon of my life, starting a process of work on myself which is still going on. My life changed totally, or rather it is still presently changing every day, since meeting Bhagwan is not exhausted all at once but is a constantly evolving experience. It is easy to describe external changes which have happened (living in a spiritual community, doing hand work), harder to explain what has happened inside. I feel closer to wholeness, I experience greater love and joy for people around me and for life, I feel life is more meaningful. A computer can analyze a breeze or a sunset, but it cannot feel it, it cannot enjoy it. Bhagwan helps me this way, to live every moment fully and to love it. To visit Bhagwan in Rajneeshpuram, Oregon every year makes these experiences fresh and new each time. The contact with the community growing around Him, and the deep love which is communicated through His silence pushes us ever more into this new life. (Swami Devam Vanni) |
(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.)
