Testimonial letter from Sw Veet Chintan
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 Veet Chintan MA (Claude Vacheron). It is "Exhibit A-204" 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 Veet Chintan, M.A. TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: Love There are different ways of approaching farming: exploiting nature in such a way that a maximum return is the only goal, or keeping a balance between a short-term economic necessity and a long-term productivity. As a student in agriculture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in ZUrich, Switzerland, I always felt that the farm management practices around the world were only of the first category: high yield was the only consideration. Even if something else was talked about, nothing was actually put into practice. I felt that basically a wrong approach was taken but without being able to point-out why. I graduated in 1976 (Master’s degree in Agriculture). After 3 years as farm manager in Celigny, Switzerland, I felt even stronger that contradiction between short-term and long-term goals but still without any understanding of the dichotomy. Then a friend of mine invited me to stay for a while in Poona, India, where I met Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh for the first time. After listening for weeks to His discourses I realized that the missing link was a general understanding of nature, where the priority is not only production but a general balance between all the components of nature. By His teachings, Bhagwan impressed me as a man with tremendous insight and knowledge in many fields. Bhagwan’s vision became obvious to me when I arrived on the ranch in Rajneeshpuram. Here land was exploited and after only 100 - 130 years of farming was turned into a desert: an example of short-term oriented management without any long-term consideration. My work on the ranch as agronomist in charge of the technical part of the farming is to try to integrate all the different aspects (soil-watershed-crop-livestock management) in one farming practice in order to restore the original potential of the land guided by Bhagwan’s vision. The recovery of the ranch is obvious for whoever comes to visit. Our watershed improvement is considered by Harold Weneger from Fish and Wildlife as a perfect example for all the ranches in Central Oregon. If Bhagwan’s teaching of respect for your environment could influence farming activities on a wide scale it would be a tremendous value for any country and an important contribution to reverse the process of land degradation happening all over the world. [s[gned] |
(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.)
