Become a WE

The Quickest Path to Healing Relational Wounds

“Become a ‘We’ as fast as you can.”

Of all the advice that my father gave me in the 32 years that he was physically in my life, this was the most important. When he was dying from Multiple Myeloma, something awakened in him that transformed the way he saw reality. All of the time I knew him, my dad was a complicated mix of sensitivity and selfishness. Before he left to marry the bank teller from our local bank, I thought of him as being as close to God as was possible. Even though, I didn’t know about God in the theological sense, my soul knew for certain that my father and the Father of the Universe were one and the same to me. This, sometimes unconscious belief is typical for children and something that often subtly or outrageously impacts our entire lives.

My earliest memories were of him loving me so much—him and my Uncle Willy. When I was a baby my parents and godparents shared a duplex. I was the one child between 4 parents. I had two dads and two moms one day and then just like that, it was me alone with my mom and a sickly little brother. And then I was with my grandparents. And then my grandad died just before I turned 4. And then all of a sudden, according to my mother and grandmother, I became the man of the house--a psychological weight that no child should ever bear. But, I didn't know that at the time. So, I took this role that was thrust upon me very seriously.

I went from all the love in the world to the Void. The Nothing. And it was in that Nothing that a Light broke through. At first I didn’t know what the Light was. How I experienced it was me projecting the idea of my father out into the world trying to find someone who could once again give form to the Love my heart had known.

In this video below, I share with the community of Unity of Columbine Spiritual Center in Boulder, CO, where I was asked to speak for Father’s Day, how healing the Father wound—one of the fundamental wounds of the human experience—is critical for healing our world.

“When boys are young, many of us idolize our fathers. We want to be like them, sound like them, walk like them. We look up to them as superheroes. And when we find out they’re human—that they make mistakes, feel fear, or can leave—it’s devastating. So much so that many of us never get over it. And in our failed attempts to close that wound, we look for someone outside of ourselves to teach us how to be in this world.” — Myself

As I mentioned in my post Becoming My Own Father Figure, the wound of realizing our father’s humanity is devastating to so many men. It basically effs us up for life and too many of us are too cowardly to admit it. We are still little boys who need our dads to pick us up and tell us that everything is going to be okay. And some people think that admitting this is weak. It isn’t! It’s real. And if we are ever going to get our stuff together, we need to get real. Realer than we have ever been.

“We” Has Never Been Alone

When I was 15 years old, I took total responsibility for every projection that I ever put into the world about who my dad was “supposed to be”. I set him free. And in doing so, I set myself free as well. When I did, the “Father Figure” that I longed for no longer was limited to the body of Pedro Senhorinha Ramos Montero I. All of like became my “Father Figure” and showed up as I needed it and through whom I needed it always right on time.

As I navigated my journey with this awareness, it created tensions between me and my biological father from time to time. He wanted to be my standard of what I man should be. But, I didn’t need him to be that for me anymore. As a result, he often described me as “the weakest of all of his children”. But, after he got cancer and started to lean into his vulnerability, he and I became more like one another. He and I became a “We”.

In the video above, which begins with a recording of my father talking from his temporary deathbed, I get into what “Becoming a ‘We’” meant to my dad and how it could serve anyone living with relational wounds and the “Curse of ‘In-Divide-You-All-Ism’”. Look at our world right now. It is no secret that these individuals that we give our power to do not know what the hell they are doing. And yet, because so many of us have daddy issues, we surrender to the loudest, most single minded individuals who pretend to have all the answers. They don’t. WE DO! The unified ‘We’ that contains all of the relational intelligence we need to make a paradise of this world.

In the coming months, I am going to go deeper into what I mean when I say “relational intelligence”. But for now, I will give you the example of AI. What we call Artificial Intelligence” is actually a simulation of the relational intelligence of “We”. What AI is able to do that too many “In-Divide-You-Alls” are not—at least not yet—is integrate all of the specialized intelligences of siloed groups all over the world and integrate them into a cohesive construct that enables AI to approximate solutions that a unified intelligence with expanded imaginative capacity could develop. But, an Artificial We is nothing compared to the real thing. The destiny of all of us is to embody that “We”. But in order to access the maximum relational intelligence of the interconnected “We”, we have to give up the illusion of ‘In-Divide-You-All-Ism’ and the idea that any one of us has ever been alone. We must accept that, despite everything that tells us otherwise, the true “We” that we all are a part of is One.

All Is One

The core teaching of Yehoshua (Jesus), whose name means “salvation”, was the Oneness of all Life—The “We”. One of his most mysterious teachings was encapsulated in this statement:

“If anyone would come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever would save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a person if they gain the whole world and forfeits their soul? Or what shall a person give in return for their soul?

What he meant was to surrender the “In-Divide-You-All” for the “We”. This was something that my biological father was able to see when he touched the Void as he prepared to depart the corporeal bind. Before he lost his life, he came to see that he could not save what he previously thought to be his “In-Divide-You-All” life. He stopped trying to save that life and he found true Life—the Life that only “We” can know and enjoy.

In the song below, my friend Richard Wade Hunter Marr, sings this reality into being. Richard is now in jail. As far as I can tell, his major crime is that he is incapable of being anything less than “We”. Richard is autistic. He can only see the world as it is. This is a threat to the “In-Divide-You-Alls” who can only see separation.

“We” say “We” want a Revolution. Well, once “We” realize that “We” is the only Revolution that can heal a world that worships In-Divide-You-All-Ism, that is when “We” will be what “We” are always meant to Be.