Comparing the accounts without merging them

This comparison records differences relevant to the book’s argument. Each row is a point of entry into a wider tradition, not a substitute for that tradition. The Godward position is the book’s synthesis, rather than a claim of universal agreement.

Account	What is foundational	A distinction that must remain
Berkeleyan idealism	Spirits and ideas	Finite imagining differs from the God-grounded order of sense
Classical theism	Uncreated God	Created reality need not be reduced to mental images
Plotinian Neoplatonism	The One beyond Intellect	The ultimate exceeds thinking and its objects
Advaita Vedanta	Brahman and the deepest Self	The empirical ego is not the measure of the absolute
Kashmir Shaivism	Free divine consciousness	Finite cognition involves contraction
Ibn Arabi	The Real and divine self-disclosure	A manifest form does not encompass the divine essence
Buddhist analyses discussed here	Conditioned arising and release from grasping	Consciousness is not simply an eternal Creator-self
Jain philosophy	Distinct living and nonliving realities	Conscious life does not imply one universal divine mind
The Godward Way	The unknowable Father as source	Recognition and offering preserve a direction beyond the finite subject