Testimonial letter from Sw Prem Puneet
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 Prem Puneet (Tim. R. Mason). It is "Exhibit A-2080" 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 Prem Puneet To whom it may concern. I went to a highly-rated English ’Public School’, Eastbourne College, and graduated from there at 18 with three ’A’ levels - Maths, Higher Maths, and Physics. From there I went on to the City University, London, to study Civil Engineering and graduated with a B.Sc. (Hons) in 1971. I then gained employment with Tilbury Construction Ltd., a company dealing mostly with land drainage schemes and began making the usual advances through the company. In fact, my life became very much part of the norm in that world, in that I became very goal-oriented in seeking promotion at work and possessions at home. This was fine for a while, but the more I achieved my goals the more I became aware of something lacking in my life. As a person I was very typical of the engineering mould where human contacts are fairly dry and distant and the people mostly closed to any real and soft human contact. I didn’t exactly know I was looking for any guidance until in 1975 an old friend of mine lent me a book by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. I had had no contact whatsoever with any of the "spiritual movement" stuff of the late sixties and seventies and basically I didn’t want to know. My friend, hoever, insisted I read this one particular chapter that was on human contact and, to put it mildly, I was quite stunned at this man’s understanding of my situation, it was almost as if he knew exactly the kind of personal difficulties I was having. To cut a long story short, I ended up taking six months’ leave from my company and visiting his Ashram in Poona. There I heard him speak personally every day and was more and more amazed by his total understanding of the human condition and how he related this to the past in terms of human and psychological evolution of man and how this related to the great figures in history from Nietzsche to Jung to Marx and even Einstein. It was his talking on science and technology that surprised and impressed me most, one does not expect a spiritual teacher to talk on science and yet in Rajneesh’s understanding there is only one world, nothing is apart and technology and spirituality must not remain separate as they have been up to now and only then is there a chance that a real, loving and whole human being can evolve. I returned to England and continued in my career as a Civil Engineer only radically changed both as a person in that I’d found a lot of warmth in my contacts with others, and also in my approach to technology in that we have to use it and not let it use us as has mostly happened in the past. It is his all-encompassing wholistic approach to life that makes Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh so exceptional and why it is he appeals to people of every background and nationality. You have to be blind not to see that the world needs a new approach to life and this man offers a radical new approach and would be an enormous asset to America. [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.)
