The Gaṇeś Nyāsa asks you to visualise Gaṇeś while you work. The book says Gaṇeś is "a fictitious invention," and that the requests are answered by "a regular person who succeeded and masquerades as Ganesh."
And then, in the same paragraph: "You might try to visualize or simply think of Ganesh while performing the Nyasa, but the rules of practice remain the same whether or not you do this."
So the figure is withdrawn and the practice is left standing. Not as a concession, and not with embarrassment. The sentence that empties the deity and the sentence that keeps the practice are adjacent.
The same move runs through the whole book. The planets have nothing to do with it — here are both mantra sets in full. The drops are a fabrication invented ages ago — here is what to do instead. The chakra pictures are utter nonsense — their only true use is for visualisation practice, so keep them.
[RESONANCE] Because the usual sequence is the other way round. You demolish a rationale and the practice goes with it, or you keep the practice and leave the rationale alone. Doing both, in the same breath, to your own tradition, and then continuing to teach — that's an unusual posture and I don't have a name for it.
It's also disorienting to read, which is itself information. A reader who has just been told the god is an invention has to decide, unaided, whether the next paragraph is still worth doing.
The vault has three related things and none of them is quite this.
God as a Person Is Expedient — the personal creator as skilful means. That's the classic move: the falsehood is licensed because it works. Tantras Need No Empowerment — an institutional gate emptied out, with the practice kept. The Printed Nyāsa Contradicts the Tradition — the correspondences called arbitrary while the list is reproduced in full.
What's different here is the ordering and the tone. Skilful means says it isn't true and that's fine, don't look. This says it isn't true, here's why, now do it anyway and here is exactly what is actually happening. The reader is given the demolition and the replacement mechanism together, and is expected to hold both.
Call it, provisionally, disclosed scaffolding: the support is named as support, out loud, while still in place.
Against God as a Person Is Expedient. Skilful means requires the student not to know. Disclosed scaffolding requires them to know. Both claim the practice still works. At most one of them is right about what the belief was doing.
Promotion criterion. A tradition that has run both — a practice taught with the myth intact to one cohort and with the myth disclosed to another — and any report at all of the difference. Failing that, a modern parallel with data: placebo research on open-label placebos is the closest thing, and it says disclosure does not fully destroy the effect. That would be a real handshake rather than a resemblance.
Next action. Read the open-label placebo literature properly before writing anything further. If disclosure genuinely leaves an effect intact, this spark has an outside warrant and becomes a synthesis page. If it doesn't, the interesting question flips: what is this book actually asking a reader to run on?