Testimonial letter from Sw Gyanprem

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 Gyanprem. It is "Exhibit A-2529" 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 GYANPREM MIASTO RAJNEESH Neo-Sannyas Commune - 53010 FROSINI (SI) ITALY TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN : I would like to tell something about my experience as a disciple of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. In the first place I have to say that I did this choice not in order to escape from a frustrating reality, neither because of social mischlef; in the contrary, I was keeping a great responsability inside a ship building company of world-wide expansion and I was surrounded by the love and honour of the people in lower and higher positions. So for me the reason to change life was in order to undertake the research for something of which I was sure I could never find where I was, although without knowing very well what I was to look for. With the distance of 4 years from when I started to be interested in Bhagwan for the first time and the two years that I have been living in his spiritual commune (in Italy, and not where he is living), I can say that I have become aware about what at former times I was only unconsciously searching: the realization of all my psychological and physical potentials and the discovery of really I am. It is neither a easy nor a simple thing, but it is fascinating. All this years, since when Bhagwan has come to Oregon, we go to Rajneeshpuram for seven days for a big celebration that finds its peak in a daily being together with him and where we find ourselves around him, silently, in a great communion from heart to heart. I can positively say that, really, each word would be too much although it was beautiful to listen to his words. I would like to invite you to verify personally what it means to be in the presence of a living Buddha; only if you make this experience can you have some intuition of what is an Enlightened Master. Make the experience in order to believe! Friendly greetings - Swami Gyanprem Miasto Rajneesh [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.)