Testimonial letter from Sw Navaneet
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 Navaneet (Anand Bill Rose). It is "Exhibit A-1745" 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.
 July 23, 1983 TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN I consider Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh - a man of exceptional ability in science and art - whose permanent residency in America would be a tremendous asset to the general welfare of this country. Prior to moving with my wife and family to Rancho Rajneesh, I was employed as a college administrator for over ten years (State University College, Oswego, New York; Rochester Institute of Technology, New York; and most recently as director of student services at Austin Community College, Austin, Texas, from 1976 to 1981). For an interim period in my career as an educator, I was employed by the Texas Commission on the Arts and Humanities in the statewide program of Artists-in-the-Schools, 1973-1975. Subsequent to a 3-month visit to the Rajneesh Ashram in India, I returned to Austin Community College as an instructor in the Human Development Program where I helped students learn how to gain a clearer understanding of their strengths and skills relative to developing a plan to meet their needs. The educational effort was to move beyond therapeutic problem solving to self-reliant realization of one's potential. My own academic training finished with a graduate M.A. in counseling psychology and student personnel services in higher education from the University of Alabama in 1965. I have been a disciple of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh for over four years - during which time I had direct contact with Him - darshan, when He spoke directly to me, and numerous discourses when I heard Him speak on a broad range of topics including the nature of man and ways of tapping the creative potential of man. All this, while it encompassed much of the work of prominent psychologists from Freud to Abraham Maslowe to Rollo May, was within the context of a synthesis of established religious teaching, particularly Buddhism and Christianity. In my career field of psychology and higher education as well as in my work relative to art, I can say that Rajneesh's understanding of the nature of man and His proposals for helping man attain a greater measure of self-realization are significantly beyond anything contained in standard psychology texts currently in use. I was pleased several years ago to hear Dr. Rollo May, former president of the Association of Humanistic Psychology, refer to Bhagwan’s teachings at a national conference of psychologists and educators on the topic of stress management. It was in that same period of time that a book I had written was published - People Helping People. Some of the material in the book was influenced by what I had learned from Bhagwan; the decision to even write the manuscript was prompted by new insights into my own skills and creativity that I attribute to having become a devotee of Rajneesh. *Harcourt, Brace, Jovanich marketed the book through a consortium of college administrators, college staff development officers and human development trainers. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh has an important message for the new man that is needed for the world today. Thousands of people worldwide have heard His message and are devoted to Him as their religious teacher and spiritual master. Thousands more, who are not directly involved with Rajneeshism, acknowledge the profound, exceptional ability of Rajneesh and His influence on the science of psychology and creativity. His message rings clearly, even in these days of His public silence. I cannot imagine another place where my family and I could be happier, living a fuller more productive life than here in Rajneeshpuram; it's heaven! I ask your support for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to acknowledge Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s status as a man of exceptional abilities -is enlightened exceptional enough? Sincerely yours, |
(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.)
