Testimonial letter from Sw Devopama

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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 Devopama. It is "Exhibit A-460" 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.

Swami Devopama
P.O.Box 10
Rajneeshpuram, OR 97441
July 24th, 1983

To Whom It May Concern

I have been a University teacher for 15 years in the field of social history and political science. I first visited this country ten years ago as a visiting professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo. I have a B.A.(with honours) from the University of Cambridge, England, and a Ph.D. from the University of London. Part of my undergraduate studies were in Theology as I was intending to enter the Anglican priesthood. What turned me away from the priesthood was the defensive posture of contemporary Theology and Christianity compared to the time of their greatness, when Theology was rightly called the 'queen of the sciences' and religion was the motivating force for all that was new and creative in society and the arts. The Christianity I was surrounded by could never have built the great Gothic Cathedrals I used to love to visit nor was it the home of the greatest minds of the University.

Instead I entered the field of education and beside teaching authored three books on some of the nineteenth-century thinkers who first faced the social implications of the Industrial Revolution. Men and women who saw that industry and science could free all men from the drudgery of labour. It was their writings - Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Etienne Cabet - that inspired the early experimental communes in this country.

1 have visited Rajneeshpuram several times and I feel this is the commune I have been searching for all my life. It is a commune that fulfills all that was great in the communes of the past, both monastic and 'utopian', and is putting into practice many of the ideas of today’s urban and country planners: men and women living together, working for a common purpose, caring for the children. Charles Fourier, the most profound of the nineteenth-century social thinkers, wrote of a playful society of what he called "harmonious men and women"; Rajneeshpuram is such a society - playful, hard-working, where there is a real and unique harmony between its inhabitants. Two outstanding traits of the Rajneeshees are the care and love they show in everything they do, from their relations between themselves to the way they are building a city and making a desert green. And secondly their use of innovative methods in everything. Rajneeshees are boldy experimental, and that courage and willingness to face the new was what was so sadly lacking in the traditional religion of the Churches and University.

The Rajneesh Commune is an eloquent testimony to the spiritual leader, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, whose vision and physical presence are a continuing inspiration to this experiment. One has to go back over a thousand years to find such a vital connection between religion and the whole range of everyday life; to a St.Frances, a St.Benedict or to the great prophets, a Moses, a Mohammed. The social philospher Herbert Marcuse in the ’60s spoke of how modern man was "one-dimensional"; Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is so clearly the opposite - multi-dimensional, someone who can give insight into so many fields, music, the arts, science, ecology, and of course psychology. When I did my military service we would follow a pathfinder, someone who knew the way because he had already been there; Bhagwan is a pathfinder of the human soul, someone who has chartered it in a way no one alive today has done.

The Professor of Modern History at Cambridge when I was there, Herbert Butterfield was himself a Christian. He used to talk of a thread of evil running through modern times that twisted the whole of humaniy’s attempts at progress. To have Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in the US at this juncture is the only hope I can see of shifting the headlong rush of mankind to its own self-destruction. America should be welcoming him both for its own benefit and for the whole planet’s.

[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.)