Testimonial letter from Sw Dhyan Nirvesh
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 Dhyan Nirvesh (Tom Utne). It is "Exhibit A-662" 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.
 August 2, 1983 To whom it may concern, U.S. Immigration Service: I received Sannyas initiation last year—August 12, 1982—several weeks after my first pilgrimage to Rajneeshpurem for the First World Festival. I had considered Bhagwan "my teacher" since January, 1975; in the years after I read his books frequently, experimented with the meditations he designed, and listened to tapes of his discourses—all of which gave me insight and inspiration that aided me enormously in my personal life and in my work, first as an editor of New Age Magazine, and for the past five years as the senior writer on personal and cultural change for Wilson Learning Corporation in Minneapolis, the nation’s foremost industrial training company. Bhagwan's clarity and vision also inspired my occasional free-lance writing for the Opinion Page of the Minneapolis Star, Northwest Airline’s Passages Magazine, Lutheran Brotherhood's Bond Magazine, and Training and Development Magazine. Part of and essential to Bhagwan's "message," as I read it for years, was and is that the "words" of the message are only indicators and that the universal human tendancy is to let the words suffice—to mistake the map for the territory, to let doctrine substitute for spiritual experience. In other words, even agreeing with him is not really getting the message. This I never fully appreciated until actually being with him in silence. The experience of joining thousands of sannyasins in Bhagwan's presence, basking in eachother's wordless love, was itself profoundly moving for me and one I count on repeating at least each year. It somehow has made me less egocentric, more innocent and playful, and brought me into greater, more genuine—less merely cerebral—contact with life in my relationships with family, others, nature, and myself. The rational, theological mind has a certain utility, but does not help us to love, to appreciate beauty, to sense the divine in a breeze or a child's smile. Rajneeshism may have the element of the absurd, but when the belief is that beliefs are not enough, there is certainly nothing illogical about the teacher becoming silent. It is a clear, legitimate, rational, and necessary extention of everything he has taught. In short, Bhagwan "told" his message for years in his innumerable discourses; now, in his silent satsangs and darshans, he is showing it. Please let him keep doing his work here. Sincerely, |
(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.)
