Testimonial letter from Sw Satyaprem
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 Satyaprem (Klaus Karst). It is "Exhibit A-1373" 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.
 July 26, 1983 TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN My name is Klaus Karst. I’m a retail trader by profession. After my apprenticeship training I had a good position as manager of a large supermarket for two years before doing my military service. My family are practising evangelists and I've always been a religious person, so you can imagine my surprise when a childhood friend and minister’s daughter wrote me from Poona, "You simply must visit this great Indian philosopher, Bhagwan. He is a living Jesus for me." I had known her and her family for years and wondered how she could have changed so completely . I understood the moment I experienced Bhagwan in a discourse. I loved him immediately and this love has become the most important and beautiful thing in my life. When Jesus said to Peter "Come follow me", Peter left his fishing net and went with him. In Rajneespuram it isn’t necessary that Bhagwan speaks. In Germany we have a saying "speech is silver, silence is gold". This silence is our heart-to-heart communion with Bhagwan. In fact my own relationship to Bhagwan has become deeper with his silence. Finally I'd like to mention that I'm a respected businessman, a joint-holder of a restaurant and discotheque in my home town. Being a disciple of this enlightened master has made me wealthy in both a material and spiritual sense. Yours 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.)
