Testimonial letter from Urs Meister
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 Urs Meister. It is "Exhibit A-1909" 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.
 URS MEISTER To whom it may concern, Let me quickly introduce myself to you. I’m a physician with an own practice in Basel, Switzerland, and member of the Swiss medical society. I’m working as a family doctor trying to apply a holistic medicine since I have encountered many examples how close body and psyche are connected in my daily work. Holistic medicine involves also the use of meditation and the eastern approach to man. I have tried several techniques of meditation but I always felt there was something missing for todays people. After I had read some books of Bhagwan I realized that there is somebody of great insight who can get the things together ,east and West, psychotherapie and meditation. Half an year later I found myself in Poona to experience this autstanding man .. live. His charisma left a deep impression on me. Itook sannyas sommer 1980 . Since then he has been of great influence on my personal and professional life. For my work he showed me first of all the importance of love in therapy. His meditations and groups made me more sensible to the needs and sufferings of my patients. I got to know the role of catarrhsis, this total expression of mainly negative feelings, which makes the person free for positve experiences. I think he is the first religious teacher whose meditations are proceeded by a catarrhsis which is enormously helpfull for western people. My personal experience in meditation helped me a lot applying relaxation-techniques in my work, and Bhagwan's open approaches to tabu-themes like sex and death gave a good background in dealing with strong hidden fears of some of my patients. The experience of awareness and living right in the moment which is a central point in allgreat religions, is very helpfull ,of course for everybody, but especially for depressive states. Bhagwan’s concept of medicine is not curing symptoms but making the person a whole entity again. With my kindest regards |
(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.)
