Testimonial letter from Toby S. Lipman
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 Toby S. Lipman. It is "Exhibit A-1446" 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.
 Toby S. Lipman To whom it may concern. I have been a life-long student of psychology. In 1975 I attained a B.S. in psychology and proceeded to open a bookstore in Princeton, N.J., which catered to people who were also students of psychology, astrology, and all aspects of religion. It was called The Astrology Shop. In this shop we frequently held seminars on Eastern religion, Christianity, Judaism, and the Kabala. I applied my understanding of psychology to a deeper study of astrology. In 1977 I heard about a master psychologist named Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and I acquired some of his books to study, discuss, and sell at my Bookshop. Upon reading these books - transcripts of taped discourses on Zen, given in Poona, India, I was amazed at the insight of this man. His understanding seemed to far surpass anyone else I had read on the subject of human psychology. He is obviously a person of exceptional ability and genius in the field of psychology and religion. No one has spoken with as much wisdom and as much contact with those -mysterious forces we call God, as Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. At this time he is a world-renowned Religious-Spiritual leader of tremendous import to thousands of people. Thousands of people across the world look to him for vision and hope that this world can be a beautiful, peaceful and harmonious whole again. Not only would this country be tremendously enriched by allowing him to live here, its really the only country where the socio-economic and educational levels are sophisticated enough to really benefit by his genius and vision. His message is creative, positive and significant to those who are seeking a meaningful life. Yours truly, |
(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.)
