The inner boy in a messed-up family may keep on being shamed, invaded, disappointed, and paralyzed for years and years. "I am a victim," he says, over and over; and he is. But that very identification with victimhood keeps the soul house open and available for still more invasions. Most American men today do not have enough awakened or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses. And most people, men or women, do not know what genuine outward or inward warriors would look like, or feel like.

I think more and more people are recognizing how much adults and elders are actually needed. That's a gift of the sibling society.

The models of adulthood are disappearing fast. How can two people have a new marriage if neither of them is an adult?

As I've gotten older, I find I am able to be nourished more by sorrow and to distinguish it from depression.

There's a quality we could call vertical attention, which is an attention upward toward ancestors, spiritual states, angels, gods.

Every part of our personality that we do not love will become hostile to us.

I use the phrase 'sibling society' to suggest a culture fundamentally without fathers, mothers, grandfathers, grandmothers, or ancestors. The thinking is horizontal.