Testimonial letter from Ulrich Welzbacher
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 Dr. Ulrich Welzbacher. It is "Exhibit A-133" 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.
 July 22, 1983 To Whom It May Concern. I am Chief of Department for hazardous materials at the German Union of Professional Associations, and in this position it is my concern to coordinate all activities of the German professional associations in this field. I’m a Ph.D. in Natural Science (Chemistry) since 1975 and have worked more than four years as an academic teacher at the University of Wuppertal in West Germany. At this time, I’m writing a book about Dangerous Materials and have been asked by the publishing company to coordinate a series of books about occupational safety and health. I'm a member of a consulting committee in Dangerous Materials for the German Minister of Social Affairs and a wellknown publisher in my field in German-speaking Europe. In the field of occupational safety and health and accident protection, much work has been done to reduce the numbers of accidents and occupational diseases, but now, nevertheless, billions of dollars are lost every year in many countries by accidents. We are at a point where it is very difficult to reduce the loss further by technical means. The most important factor in changing the situation is man. himself. Two things are important to this point: 1. The whole attitude of man to his work has to be changed. Awareness is a factor which follows directly from a man’s attitude to his work. All our work in trying to be successful in this field with all our well-known methods of psychology, etc. have often failed. Totally new ways now have to be found. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s work is meeting exactly this point. As everybody who has eyes to see, can see at Rajneeshpuram, how Bhagwan’s work succeeds. You can see the utterly new attitude of the sannyasins towards their work, and you can see the extraordinary awareness, with which they do their work. And you can measure the success in counts: compare the number of accidents in ordinary work around the world with the count of accidents at Rajneeshpuram. When I came first in contact with Bhagwan and his teachings by my wife six years ago I had many doubts about his work. By and by I experienced how this man changed myself, my whole attitude towards life and work. Though I had been against all religions and all kinds of religious teachings - I have been brought up as a Catholic - I recognized that real religion is the only way to change the world and to contribute to mass welfare. For me, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh is not only the most authentic religious teacher in the world, he is the only real spiritual leader on Earth today. He is the only one, in my feeling, who can bring religion to brain oriented western people, as I have been. 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.)
