Testimonial letter from Wolfgang Lebenheim
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 Wolfgang Lebenheim. It is "Exhibit A-294" 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.
 Berlin Dear Friend, I am a computer scientist working in R & D in the field of Natural Language Understanding/Knowledge Representation. I am holding a degree in Biology from the Free University in Berlin, one in Informatics from the Technical University in Berlin, and a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park. In 1979 I was awareded a scholarship for one year from the German Ministry of Science to study the state of the art in the above named field reached in the U.S. Many thousand man years of work have been devoted in the last years to the task, to put man’s capability of problem solving into machines, and especially to create an interface where a computer user can direct the computer with his voice or per keyboard in his natural language. There are many sciences involved in that area, like linguistics, bionics, neurophysiology, psychology, parapsychology, and I studied whatever I found worthful towards the end in these fields. After working through a couple of hundred books and papers it became very obvious, that although we brought some light to specific spots , what is really missing is a general understanding: As if we can’t find the forest because of all the trees. There are a lot of basic questions, where you won’t find an acceptable, fulfilling answer in the scientific literature. What is intelligence? What is intuition? How does one reason? How is knowledge stored and retreived? In short, science has only a partial understanding of the human mind. And knows far less about emotions, let alone "being". One day I got a book of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in my hands - and was shocked, full of awe, ecstatically happy: clarity, deep and total understanding, simple understandable explanations... For the first time I met a human being who had that total sureness in what he was saying, which I had desired forever. And what he was saying was so plainly and evidently true, it was sheer delight to bathe in his clarity. He is simply outstanding in the whole world, as he layers what a human being consists of, and what areas these, our parts, are active. I learned, why there is so much vagueness and mist everywhere in science: Besides that there are these huge gaps of knowledge, we are groping with logic in areas, which can't be accessed by logic at all, which are beyond it. Over the years I came to understand that the human mind is something that can be called a biocomputer, and that there are means to model it (partially) on a computer, although it’s functions are still very far ahead of the degree of sophistication we have reached so far. What I learned from Bhagwan was to see the limits of the mind and as such the limits of science itself, which kept me from wasting energy into work which can never succeed. I want to make it very clear: He is the only one I ever met in this life who gave such clearcut and very simple, very basic truths about what a human being is. Opposed to the scientific literature, where you will find none or very unpleasant, vague theories about this most important underlying issue, derived by dissection, analyzation, by means of dualistic approach, His insight into this matter is invaluable. His vision of the human being as a whole and in its parts and structure is so deep and thorough, and He shares His view in such an easy to understand way, that in my opinion His books belong in every university library. And, just by the side, everybody gets an understanding in other fields as well. And the funny thing about it all is, it seems to me that these wonderful, treasury informations He is giving, are not His real concern at all, but just a device to get us started to look deeper within. [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.)
