Our family takes care of giving us the assumptions, foundations, and principles that teach us how to navigate the world.
Eventually, society—our larger tribe—takes over and provides us with the stories and narratives that allow us to know what group to identify with, what beliefs to hold, how to behave with other people, and even how to behave when we are alone.
Then, religion takes over to tell us how to think about god, and how to behave in the face of the infinite.
The Great Work is a long deprogramming process. You begin by setting aside all the identities and assumptions that the social group has given you: all the identifications with race, nation, and religion. All identifications with a human group being to be set aside as programs that have invaded your system. A lot of these programs have kept you trapped in a form that is limited, and are not your real self.
The Great Work is, in a way, a work of heresy where you begin to discard what society and religion tells you.
Family too. And corporations or employers as well. All such institutions potentially exert this molding power. This is a period of time, these present and coming centuries, when individuals must learn to locate and assert their own moral authority and ethical intuitions based completely upon cultivating their ability to peer inside their own soul life, deeply. The support of the gods which characterized a former period in earthly cultural history is gradually being withdrawn so that mankind can learn to stand on his own. The growing pains from the resulting tensions and conflicts between the desire to adhere to older conventions which are becoming drained of their spiritual power, and a too hasty jump into new directions which are clouded over by prideful egotism, will be intense. More disruptive and destructive than anything we have experienced.