Week 10/ 0?: A Rebirth/ Reflection/ Rededication/ Redirection
The Philippines was fruitful to say the least. We're back and look different. Same car, new engine.
A blank page is a great start. A blank heart is a great canvas to paint on. A humbled soul is a wonderful car to a hitch a ride with. An ATV is real fun to drive, real difficult to hold onto. A volcano is good place to climb into if you want to become a butterfly.
- poetry, or gibberish depending on how you feel
This is Mt. Mayon, an active volcano in the Philippines. Its first recorded eruption happened in 1616. I’ve been seeing it in dreams and visions ever since I was 23. I’m 29 now. And I recently visited the Philippines for the first time as an adult (last time I went was when I was 2 years old).
I went with my dear mother to re-engage with my culture, heritage, history and to answer two redeemingly intimate questions that are integral to my future development as a human being, storyteller, and child of God:
“Who am I”
and
“Where do I come from?”
I had a frighteningly stark thought a few years back trying to tackle what was next and begin to plot out the seedlings of a sequel to my debut one man show. That thought was, “I can’t afford to know where I came from.”
In grappling with that question, “Where do I come from?” I realized I couldn’t answer that question without visiting the Philippines, my Mom’s home country, because much of my behavior, values, and the way I was raised is informed by who my Mother is.
I couldn’t answer the question, “Who am I?” without answering, “Who is Loida Rosario Abad?”
I couldn’t answer the question, “Where do I come from?” without going there.
And so began the journey to the Philippines.
I didn’t go to Mt. Mayon when I was 2 years old. I don’t fully understand how I can explain to you that I’ve been seeing this exact landscape in dreams and visions for the past 6 years.
When I was 23 in the midst of a destructively debilitating depression the likes of which many around me had never seen, I came out of it a humbled man ready to surrender to the Lord who created me. That’s a more beautified way of putting it. Simply put, I was frustrated with being created at all, and I was ready to grapple with what it means to be alive at all.
And so I shouted to God as I believed in him then and said, “You know what God, I give up! Have it your way!”
— my prayers are sponsored by Burger King —
And so that Sunday I stayed up to go to church and the Sunday after that (I’m jumbling the dates here), I went to a listening prayer.
A friend invited me to a listening prayer, where through silent meditation and prayer you find out what God is communicating to you. 5 people who I don’t know are praying for me, silently, seeing if they get any answers and one of them says they hear the words, “Work, routine, and don’t laugh away the pain.” I was like, “How do you know I’m an unemployed, sad comedian?”
A piece from my one man show, “Nathan Mosher is Injured” - stay tuned for April 26th when I’m performing it live in Culver City
“Work, routine, and don’t laugh away the pain.”
That actually came to pass many years later. It’s called PPDK Productions, and you’re currently reading it.
“Work, routine, and don’t laugh away the pain.”
I’m writing this while currently substituting an AP Chemistry Class and I’m telling you the story behind the jokes.
The other vision I saw during that listening prayer was a stark landscape. There was a crystal clear, icy path that developed before me. On both sides it was surrounded by pure desolation. Everything was ashy black, burnt to a crisp. I knew that if I strayed off the crystal clear path, I would succumb to that desolation. At the head of the path it led to a dark black mountain. At the top of it was a volcano erupting lava and spewing out heat and ash.
I later learned that volcano is and was Mt. Mayon.
I’ll tell you how I found that out. It’s a crazy story, but these days I’ve suspended disbelief because my life is much more than “crazy”, it’s unbelievable, just like the view from Mayon.
As I began to rehabilitate my broken life, I began to work with kids, write again, and continue to explore prayer and meditation, delving into deeper and deeper states of stillness, eventually getting to the place where I could maintain stillness for up to 2 and a half hours. At that point I was exploring yoga and meditation through an Indian yoga teacher named Sadhguru. This was before I knew who Jesus really was. I was able to be guided in these states by the Holy Spirit thanks to the fact that I was baptized and had surrendered to Christ. I don’t recommend messing around with occult and New Age, although I didn’t know this then.
I recommend a writer I’ve been corresponding with named Kate Orson, because she came from the New Age and writes about how it can be ultimately dangerous. I’m not going to explain it here, but I’ll refer you to her Substack.
I digress…
Every time I would get into these suspended states of consciousness, stillness, in deep dreamlike reverie and prayer, this landscape would emerge.
There are many, many episodes that have emerged out of this landscape, and the unfolding story could become an entire book, but I’ll fast forward to one in particular, because this will illuminate the pathway to how I ended up at the Mayon Volcano itself.
One weekend, Sadhguru was in town, in Los Angeles, in person, doing his “Inner Engineering” workshop at the Los Angeles Convention Center. In lieu of attending I decided to fast and pray the entire weekend.
While in deep meditation, I ended up back at this landscape. By this point, I had been back here many times. When my therapist and I had done visualization exercises about health and wellness, namely visualizing a future of “perfect health”, this landscape emerged, except it wasn’t desolate, it was thriving with green vegetation, yet completely deserted of any human life.
In a previous episode of this unfolding landscape, I climbed up the mountain, jumped into the active volcano, went through a metamorphosis and ended up a butterfly, only to fly above the desolate landscape and see the overwhelming destruction, yet from a place of transcendent beauty.
This time however, I’m there and there’s a thriving village, thriving green, and everybody’s jovially alive. I look forward and I see a man, who I can only describe as my brother, because in the vision, that’s who he was to me. Call it a past life, call it a memory in the spirit, I’m not exactly sure how to contextualize these things within the veracity of biblical interpretation, but in this dream, he’s my brother. All of a sudden the village gets raided and a war breaks out.
All of a sudden, the village begins to get attacked. People are taken out. Things are burning. I see my brother get shot with an arrow straight to the heart. Everybody’s running and screaming and I run to his aid. I hold him in my arms and he breathes his last breath. He tells me, “Run.”
Now keep in mind, my body is currently in a state of complete stillness and all of this “memory” is happening in a dreamlike state of reverie in a prolonged state of prayer and meditation. I just want to pull you back real quick so that you’re not like, “Wait, Nathan, that happened to you?”
I don’t know if it happened to me, but I know it happened. Here’s how I know it happened.
Shortly after my “brother” died, I cried a deep wail and shouted, “I have nothing and I am nothing!” And in this dream, I felt everything. The cry for my “brother” was as real as the cries I had for my ex last February when we broke up. This felt as real as any other emotional response I’ve felt to real loss.
He said, “Run” and so I did. I ran quickly to the coast and boarded a wooden raft and set sail. And I didn’t come back til years later. When I came back to the village as an old man, the entire village was destroyed with volcanic ash, and it was completely desolate.
In the interim, I set sail and ended up at a small island off the coast of India, studied under a guru (who somehow has some relationship to Sadhguru), started a family, and decided to end my life back at the the place where I ran from, which I now know is Mt. Mayon.
All of these episodic additions to this “story” or “past life” or “memory in the Spirit”, or whatever this crazy tale is, have unfolded in dreams and visions over the past 6 years through deep states of prayer, meditation, and an unfolding relationship with the Holy Spirit.
I’m sure I’ll end up revealing more about what this all means as I learn what the heck it actually all means.
But I’ll tell you this. I know when I hear from Jesus because he addresses me directly as “My Son”. About two years back in the midst of a season of depression and rebuilding I asked him, “Lord, how do I know it’s you?”
He said, “From now on I will address you as my son.”
You can refer to my testimony if you want to know more about how I came to know Jesus.
After reeling from this memory of seeing my “brother” get killed right in front of my eyes, the Lord said, “My son, this is a real place in the Philippines.”
I said, “Where?”
He said, “Look up active volcanoes that have destroyed populations in the Philippines in the 1600’s”
So I did. Mayon’s first active eruption was in 1616. It killed about 1200 people. I looked up a photo it.
It was the exact place I had seen in dreams and visions. It was and still is.
Just about two weeks ago, I went there with my Mom and some of her friends. It looks exactly as I had seen in dreams in vision.
There’s a Franciscan church that they rebuilt which got destroyed when Dutch pirates raided the village in 1535. It got destroyed again when the volcano erupted in 1616. And they kept rebuilding it. It’s been rebuilt and destroyed many times. It’s remnants are at the Cagsawa ruins, right at the base of the mountain.
I went there the first day. I didn’t plan the itinerary, a local did. As I was facing the church, I realized I had seen that building. It was to left behind my “brother”, as he got shot. In the dream, after he died and I quickly decided to run to the coast, I turned left, because the coast was to my left.
So, about four hundred years later, not in a dream state, in the current year 2025, I, Nathanael Mosher, not, whoever this was in the dream whose brother got shot, pulled up Google Maps to see where the coast was.
I’m sure you can guess, it was to my left.
I had been here before.
Or at least, my “Spirit” had been, or I had been here in a “past life”, or honestly I don’t completely know yet.
I’m still learning what this all means. But I’ll tell you this:
Going to Mt. Mayon and the Philippines brought me closer to my Mom, taught me about “where I come from”, “who I am”, and most of all, something about “teaching people to write from the heart”. That’s another dream I had right before I left to Bicol, and maybe I’ll speak about that later.
Every time I go to a place the Lord has shown me in visions I become a better person, a better storyteller, I get closer to Him, and I learn a little bit more about what it means to be human. I don’t always understand it, but I obey anyways.
I can’t make this up. Or maybe I can. I am a storyteller after all. I really don’t know. I’m just telling you the truth of what I’ve experienced even if it doesn’t make sense to me.
Anyways, I need to wrap this up because I need to go hand a souvenir to the chemistry teacher I was substituting for back in January before I left to the Philippines.
Last year, the Lord also showed me another vision in a dream. It was an old performance space in Westwood that I used to perform at weekly called “The Improv Space”, except it was rebuilt and on the bottom floor there was a coffee shop. On the top floor there was a performance space.
That place is real. It’s called “The Paraprosdokianist” and it’s a venue where we house storytelling in all genres and spoken word forms centered around testimony.
It’s not “real” or “built” yet. It’s just a dream.
Well, I should say. I know it’s real. I know it’s real because the Lord already showed me. I just have to build it. And go where he calls me. He’s made so many of my dreams a reality time and time again. So I follow.
PPDK Productions is just a dream. And we’re just getting started making it a reality. But let me tell you something, it’s already real. You just haven’t experienced it yet. I have.
In lieu of a traditional content recap, I wrote this instead, because we haven’t posted anything all month. I’m starting my personal channel too and we’re gonna get back into the swing of things full steam ahead. I’m performing my testimony in New York with my friend Sean Conrad. You can get tickets here.
I want to get to know my readers/ listeners/ the people who have supported me in the past. I want to get to know your story. Leave a comment/ send me a DM if you’re interested in sharing some of your life with us. It might not make sense, but I know for a fact it’s interesting.
I’m starting a personal YouTube channel as well because PPDK PRODUCTIONS is centered around collaborations.
It’s going to be @nateprays on all social media platforms. That’s all.
Sincerely Yours,
Nathanael Philip Abad Mosher
AKA The Paraprosdokianist
Thanks for sharing this story, Nathan. Besides it being very well written, I feel it is very refreshing to read about your inner landscape meeting the earthly landscape in such a genuine exploration of self. Awesome journey inside and out!