The Cross is the Way on which there is no travelling, for it perpetually enters into itself; it is the true Meth-od, not so much in the sense of the Way-between or the Medium or Mediator, as in the sense of the Means of Gnosis.
It is also called Seed because it is the mystery of the power of growth and development; it is self-initiative.
And if the Cross be Son and Father in separation and union, or as simultaneously Cause and Result, it is likewise Spirit or Ātman, and therefore Life.
It is also Truth or the Perpetual Paradox, distinguishing and uniting in itself all pros and cons, and all analysis and synthesis in simultaneous operation.
Therefore also is it called Faith, because it is the that which is stable and unchanging amid perpetual change. Faith in its true mystic meaning seems to denote the power of withdrawing the personal consciousness from between the pairs of opposites, where these appear external and other than oneself, and embracing the opposites within the greater consciousness, when they are within oneself and appear as natural processes in the great economy.
Faith is of the contemplative mind; it embraces, it includes. It is therefore of the Great Mother, as the life and substance of the Cross; so also is it of Grace, elsewhere called Wisdom.
Finally, the Cross regarded from this point of view is called Bread, the substance of Life.
In a remarkable paper in The Theosophical Review, Nov., 1907, E. R. Innes speaks of a vision of a great drama of those Powers beyond the mind-spheres, which in the Indian scriptures are called Food and Eater—that is to say, the mystical union between the Not-self and the Self.
In the Chhāndogyopaniṣhad, for instance, we read of one who had passed into the heaven-world possessing a knowledge of the identity of the Self and Not-self. The transformations of his vehicles that thus occur in the inner states or worlds become as it were processes of natural digestion in his Great Body, for we read:
“Having what food he wills, what form he wills, this song he singing sits: