Web article: About Ananda Metteyya (2003)

As Hubbard averred in Hymn of Asia, the name Metteyya is a magic one, or at least it has a significant magical connection. Ananda Metteyya, aka Charles Henry Allan Bennett was Aleister Crowley’s teacher and yoga instructor. (1872-1923) ¹Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Grand Master of The Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn, adopted Bennett when he was seven years old. It was through the Golden Dawn connection that Crowley and Bennett first met.²

Bennett was a Golden Dawn initiate prior to becoming a monk. He changed his name to Ananda Metteyya in 1901 upon becoming ordained in Burma. Ananda Metteyya aligned himself with Theravada Buddhism, otherwise known as The Way of the Elders.³

[Bennett] tried to produce the money he needed for his missionary scheme by marketing his inventive powers. Even before the mission came to England he had been experimenting on a machine for registering the power of thought. He was successful in causing a spot of light to move across a screen when he concentrated with all his power on his apparatus, which he had previously linked to a galvanometer.⁴ But he longed for more convincing experiments in the presence of witnesses, and to enable the new instruments to be acquired, turned his attention to a new method for extracting Oxygen from air. Nothing, however, came from this potentially priceless discovery, and the longed-for thousands of Pounds remained unearned.⁵, ⁶

Bennett was an analytical chemist and experimented with the “higher electricity.”⁷, ⁸

He was also published in The Equinox, the official organ of A.’.A.’., the mystical order of Aleister Crowley. In The Training of the Mind, Bennett wrote of past life memories and their storage in the mind:

To the gaining of this knowledge of past births there is a way, a practice of meditation by which that knowledge may be obtained. This at first may seem startling; but there is nothing really unnatural or miraculous about it: it is simply a method of most perfectly cultivating the memory. Now, memory is primarily a function of the material brain: we remember things because they are stored up like little mind-pictures, in the minute nerve-cells of the grey cortex of the brain, principally on the left frontal lobe. so it may naturally be asked: “If memory, as is certainly the case, be stored up in the material brain, how is it possible that we should remember, without some miraculous faculty, things that happened before that brain existed?”

The answer is this: our brains, it is true, have not existed before this birth, and so all our normal memories are memories of things that have happened in this life. but what is the “cause” of the particular brain-structure that now characterises us? […]

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