Testimonial letter from Sw Shunyam Paras
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 Shunyam Paras (Mag. Wolfgang Hämmerle). It is "Exhibit A-2113" 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 4 pages.
 Ma Latifa Sw. Shunyam Paras To whom it may concern! I became acquainted with Bahgwan Shree Rajneesh already in the course of my studies in Sociology and experienced through him a significant enrichment of my scientific work. Knowing his views on so various fields of life as society, law, morals, family, education, psychology of man, sexuality, etc. strongly influenced me in my own scientific approach. This influence became manifest not only in a way concerning exclusively the rational interpretation of man and his ways of living, but even more through influencing my life itself in all of it's forms of appearance. To me Rajneesh is a man whose thoughts go beyond the old and stereotypiced ways of thinking, who is providing us with new facts that are able to transform the traditional ways of seeing life. But more than a teacher, dealing only with intellectual attempts of understanding, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is to me a real master, whose capacity of analysis and whose inspiration come from sources that cannot be defined through the mind. He does not only help to understand, but even more to accept life and affirm it in a joyous way. The power of his visions and the radiance of his personality have made Rajneesh well-known throughout the whole world. His view of a new kind of religion, which is life-affirmative and containing all the aspects of life, of a new man, who is no longer divided between matter and spirit, between body and mind, and of a new society, which does no longer live out of fight and competition, but of an developed ability of experiencing and living togetherness, give the teachings of Rajneesh a tremendous importance for many of us. So it is not amazing to me that people from all over the world are attracted, no matter of what nationality, race or religion they are. In fact his message is concerned not with a special type of man, but with man and his future itself. As the Social Sciences will have to contribute something to a responsible way of development of mankind, there seems to be no sense in ignoring such profound knowledge or knowing as Rajneesh can provide. Especially the Social Sciences have come to know that fullfillment of life in so significant parts of life as work and leisure time, that joy, spontaneity and harmonious social living are not the things which usually happen, but more the exception. We can see rigid ways of behaving, as they are forced on human beings by a number of roles, norms, institutions, etc. and unconsciously performed by the members of all societies. We can see the many disharmonious aspects of social relations and we are not able to deal with all that in an other way than either in resignation or in functionalizing them, neither way bringing a solution. There are very rare opportunities, that there are men, whose views are reaching beyond these answers and, more, are containing possibilities of a real change. I don’t think that the Social Sciences, as far as they are developed up to now, can ignore such insights. In the contrary it seems to be a real necessity to use the knowledge of a man like Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and to help everything that makes his knowledge available for as many as possible. In the way he helped me to understand, that Science has to be less an intellectual game of a few people, as long as we want to have any benefit out of it’s results, and more a holistic understanding of life itself in it's various forms, he will be able to help many more people, if we give him the opportunity to do that. Every support given to him will be a support given to Science and in this to the possibilites of human development. [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.)
