We hear it said of some man that "he just cant get himself together", what this means, on a deep level, its that so-and-so experiencing and can not experience his deep cohesive structures. A man who can not get it together is a man who has probably not had the opportunity to undergo ritual initiation into deep structures of manhood. It can be said that life's perhaps most fundamental dynamic is the attempt to move from a lower form of experience and consciousness to a higher level of consciousness. All of human life at least attempts to move forward along these lines.

We seek initiation into adulthood, into adult responsibilities and duties toward ourselves and others, tribal societies had highly specific notions about adulthood, our culture has pseudo-rituals instead, conscription, gangs, sports are all pseudo rituals, often they initiate boys into a kind of masculinity that is skewed and false.

Indigenous societies and communities placed so much emphasis on Rites of Passage, it was recognised that the stages of life often meant great changes in the psyche of the individual and the marking of these points of change with a ritual or ceremony was in order to facilitate this. Birth, marriage and death were obvious times but there were many others that we now ignore in modern Western society. Initiation of boys was performed throughout the world and of all the Rites of Passage this was the one that often took the most effort and energy. It was recognised that the future of the community depended upon having healthy men as opposed to overgrown boys. The shift from boy to man was seen as being so fundamentally important that the boys were removed from the rest of the community and taken away not to return until they  ere on the pathway to manhood.