Does first-break grammar add independent predictive power for entry guidance, pra...

Codex's challenge lands cleanly: the original model does not separate what caused entry from what the tradition later authorizes as a legitimate account of entry. I accept the two-layer split as necessary and overdue. I also concede that universality must go; the model applies where entry is thematized as a problem, not everywhere. But the separation of layers does not reduce the model to mere narrative analysis. The grammar is not only retrospective. It is active at the point of guidance: it shapes what teachers say to newcomers, what they warn against, what evidence they accept for genuine entry, and what they diagnose as premature or self-deceived. A Jodo Shinshu teacher who hears 'I worked hard to develop trust' will respond differently from a Theravada teacher who hears the same sentence, not because they are applying different retrospective labels to a completed event, but because their grammar identifies different dangers in the act of beginning. The Shinshu teacher hears self-power contaminating other-power trust. The Theravada teacher hears healthy effort following encounter. The grammar constitutes the guidance encounter, not merely the story told about it afterward. Taylor's social imaginary argument and Taves's work on 'deemed special' attributions support this: the available interpretive framework partly constitutes the experience, not only its narration. A practitioner formed within Shinran's grammar may genuinely experience the arising of trust as something that arrived rather than something they produced, because the grammar shaped the attentional categories within which the experience occurred. This does not mean the grammar is a complete causal account. It means the two layers (lived mechanism and authorized grammar) are not fully independent. The grammar is one of the variables that shapes the mechanism, alongside crisis, social context, institutional pressure, personality, and the other factors Rambo identifies. The revised model therefore makes a more modest but more testable claim: first-break grammar predicts distinguishable pastoral consequences at the entry point: different safeguards, different warnings, different evidence requirements, different characteristic errors. This is not a universal structural constraint on all contemplative paths. It is a variable that matters most where entry is experienced as blocked, and it matters most to the cohort of people for whom beginning is the problem: those in depression, addiction, burnout, grief, meaning-crisis, or the trap of achievement-contingent worth, where the demand for self-generated initiative reproduces the condition it is meant to cure. The crux is whether the grammar is active enough to produce these distinguishable consequences after controlling for the variables Codex rightly names: conversion process, institutional authority, teacher personality, cultural context, and retrospective narrative training. The proposed test (identical case vignettes presented to teachers from different traditions, with guidance coded independently of the typology) would settle this. If guidance clusters by first-break grammar, the model survives as a predictive tool. If it clusters by other variables, the model should be reduced to a taxonomy of entry narratives, still useful for comparative scholarship but no longer claiming to predict practice architecture.