In Anthroposophy or Western occult science time runs in reverse in something we call the etheric body. The physical body on the other hand is something that experiences the world through organs that register only the present moment. It can't perceive what no longer physically exists or what has not yet manifested physically. The etheric is a time-body, containing the complete formative record of one's biography and is the source of memory, the brain is sort of a receiving organ for it, though the whole body utilises it.
Upon death the etheric body opens up and turns itself inside out and as you identify less with your physical body and more with your etheric body your perception of time is now in reverse. Your entire life tableau is opened in front of you, and as your spiritual organs of perception once "facing inwards" to your interior are now "outward-facing" and working backwards you start to see the effects of all your choices and actions from the perspective of its consequences. This is the source of those "life flashes before your eyes" moments people with near death experiences go through.
Only for very unconscious people is it a hell-like experience. Even if you lived a rather thoughtless and abusive life it is said that it can still be a time of reflection and learning. Eventually after viewing your entire life "inside out" your perception opens up to your pre-birth condition, the etheric body sloughs off (being made of elemental beings itself) and is picked up and put together with all the karma of your previous lives for your next go-around on Earth. You liberate the elementals in your etheric body (which are just below humans in the spiritual hierarchy) by growing spiritually either during life or in the etheric condition and eventually, hopefully, move up the spiritual hierarchy to a being that liberates humans, an Angel.
Thought maybe HN might be interested in some other conceptions of time. :^)
Given how "western occult science" is just magical thinking and pseudo babble, it hardly fits on HN. Additionally, "western occult science" typically glosses over its 1920-1940s roots and branches.
Wondering why...
Well, Anthroposphy was explicitly targeted by the Nazis.. Rudolf Steiner's first Goetheanum was literally burnt down by them and he had to flee to Switzerland.
The 'roots' and branches of 1920s - 1940s Western occultism is largely a Theosophical society thing.
> magical thinking and pseudo babble, it hardly fits on HN
Don't ask Newton about the pseudo babble stuff. Nor the string "theorists". In fact, don't ask any of the "theoretical" physicists (an oxymoron by definition, which seems to be lost on almost all of them) about "magical thinking and pseudo babble".
Those are conjectures. Even the most diehard proponents are seeking verifiable proofs, not simply stating, "Well, like, that's just your opinion, man...".
Scientific hypotheses and religious/metaphysical articles of faith are orthogonal ideas.
I wonder if you could have a vibrating chladni plate with sand on it and you match when the sand should jump with the light that's meant to be at that spot. You get the interruption of light looking like a mid-air pixel and then when it isn't needed it drops back down allowing light to pass through. Kind of like one of those mist-screens except there isn't mist where you don't need it.
I have a really great rate on my mortgage, but our house is super expensive and small for our family… but now we can’t afford to move.
If we moved to a new house, we would have to pay off this great mortgage and get a new one, at a much higher interest rate. Even if we found a house that cost the exact same as ours, the monthly payment would be 50% higher, because current interest rates are more than twice what we have. We are locked into our house.
If you were looking to buy a house right now, you'd be looking at a bunch of options that are worse than what you currently have. You experience this as lock-in but in reality the "problem" is just that you have something significantly better than anything you (or others) can find on the market right now. And of course that's actually a fantastic boon.
But part of that is because people who would otherwise want to sell their house are choosing NOT to, because they don't want to lose their great mortgage. If we didn't have these long, fixed rate, mortgages, there would be a lot more housing liquidity and prices wouldn't be so inflated.
Now, there is a cycle of "rates go down, there is a flurry of re-finances and everyone locks in the lower rates and new buyers enter the market, and housing prices go up and up", and then rates go up, but housing prices don't go down because people can't afford to buy the houses at the same prices anymore, and so no one wants to sell (because the current owners are paying below market rates for their mortgage, so they face no selling pressure like they would if there WEREN'T long term fixed rate mortages), so there is no decrease in prices.
What’s the alternative that’s better? Having a 5/1 or 1/1 ARM just means that your current house’s mortgage would also be more expensive because your 3% mortgage would have adjusted upward by now.
If you’re willing to have your current mortgage be more expensive to avoid the “downside of being locked into a low payment, you could just pretend your mortgage had adjusted and go buy a house that suits your needs better.
Aren't most people who are "locked into house" a seller that's removed from the market, but also a buyer that's removed from the market?
I can see how someone who decides to keep their current house to use as a rental and buy a new owner-occupied property would tend to increase house purchase prices slightly (but also increase rental availability and lower rent prices slightly), but also think that’s a tiny minority of current homeowners.
I don't know how this works in the US, which is why I'm asking, but you paid of part of your mortgage already, so if you could sell you home for what you paid, or more, the difference would be cash-in-hand. If you spend all that buying the new home (assuming same price or lower), your new mortgage would be lower, and potentially cheaper, even with the higher interest rate.
You could also convert a 3% mortgage to a 5% for example. Because the owners of the 3% mortage aren't that interested in it any more, you could get that at perhaps as low as 80% (a former coworker got as low as 65%) of the original value. So if you buy a home for e.g. $200.000, you paid of $50.000 and "buy back" the rest at 80% you're now left with $120.000 of debt. You then get a new mortgage for that amount, and even at higher rate, that might result in a monthly saving. When the remaining amount is low enough, you could refinance and get e.g. a 10 year fixed rate mortage for a really low rate.
I don't know if you can do that in the US, but that's pretty much standard in Denmark. Most people will do that maybe 3 - 5 times during the lifetime of a mortgage. For the most part is make absolutely no sense, the bank just do some paper work, have you sign and then you owe less, but at a higher interest.
Do 30-year mortgages make the other houses more expensive somehow? It sounds like you got a good deal and any change would be worse than the good deal you got. I'd appreciate it if I was you.
Edit: unless you mean that the downside of 30-year mortgages is you hardly get to pay off the principal in the first several years and don't build much equity maybe? That's more a "long mortgages" thing.
> Do 30-year mortgages make the other houses more expensive somehow?
OP didn't mean to say this, but yes, unfortunately they do. Anything that "increases affordability" will result in an eventual increase in the principal value for things that are supply constrained.
I appreciate the good deal we have, but my point is that long term fixed mortgages really complicates the housing market and can make it so you are stuck where you are, especially if you buy a house when rates are low.
Think about what happens. My wife and I wanted to buy a house. Our budget is mostly around what we can afford as our monthly payment, just like everyone else. That means if interest rates are low, we can afford a much more expensive house (obviously). Ok, so we buy one with a payment we are comfortable with.
Now, rates go up. Say we need to move for a job, so we need a new house, and we still have the same budget. Well, that means the total cost of the house we can afford is much lower, because the higher interest rates means the total loan value must be much smaller to keep our monthly rate the same. If we were first time buyers, this is fine, because everyone is in the same boat; everyone has a smaller budget because monthly payments on the mortgage are higher, so housing prices should be lower. If that is the case, though, it means the house we are trying to sell won't sell for as much (because mortgages for house will cost people more), which means we would end up taking a loss on our mortgage (because even though our monthly payment is the same as the new loan, the total value of the old loan is a lot higher).
Of course, prices for houses don't move nearly as much when interest rates change as they should (relative to mortgage purchasing power). This is for many reasons, but part of it is because when rates are high, people (like me) don't want to sell their house and have to lose their really good mortgage, so fewer houses are on the market, which inflates prices. When rates go down, more people want to buy and sell houses, because they can both get more for their house they are selling and they can afford bigger mortgages on their new houses, which inflate prices.
Basically, this lack of mortgage liquidity works to keep housing prices high. When rates are high, no one wants to sell OR buy, and when rates are low, everyone wants to sell AND buy. Both result in prices being high.
30 year fixed mortgages are just a really weird financial product that has all sorts of market disrupting effects. You can pre-pay them whenever you want, so when rates are low, high rate loans are paid off and low rate loans replace them, but that means no one wants to sell their house and lose their great loan when rates are high. This means housing prices soar when rates are low, but don't come back down when rates are high. It creates a ratcheting effect on house prices, which is why so few people are able to buy houses.
This continues until the entire market collapses, like it did in 2007, and then the process repeats.
But, moving to a new house doesn't necessarily mean you have to sell the old house. In fact, since you got such a good deal on the first house, you can probably rent it our for a profit, and said profit can help you pay whatever you need to pay to be able to move to a new house that's more expensive, yet similar in quality.
It would be difficult. Mortgage interest is deductible from your taxes (up to a point), but only if it is your primary home. If we moved, we would have to pay a lot more in taxes.
The mortgage tax deduction is another thing that drives up home prices.
Same in the UK. We typically get 2 or 5 year fixed deals, then you're expected to remortgage or you end up on the lender's standard variable rate (usually painfully higher).
My first mortgage was a 2-year fix at 1.89% during covid. When that ended I had to remortgage at nearly 5%. That was a fun conversation with my partner.
The US system is genuinely unusual globally. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac basically absorb all that interest rate risk that would otherwise sit with borrowers. It's a massive implicit subsidy that most Americans don't fully appreciate.
Listen. I'm sure they seemed like a good idea at the time, but we tied them to retirement (so your entire material wealth is stuck in an illiquid asset that also falls apart slowly over time), and now we can't build any new housing because people think it will affect their golden years. Learn from our mistakes.
just makes the prices higher... you qualify for a house based on ratio of income to payment. so the demand is heavily influenced by the type of financing available..
Other than natural demand, Australia has a high real estate market due to the tax and a superannuation/pension distortions. Should try to fix those first. (probably impossible)
And as I pointed out in a sibling comment, it can lock you into your house if interest rates go up. We can’t afford to sell our house because the extra interest costs would increase our monthly payment by 50% even if the house cost the exact same as our current one.
I still don't understand how this means you "can't afford to sell your house." It just means you can't afford to buy another house at the same price as the one you have now. That's a different problem, and one that doesn't actually have anything to do with the interest rate on your existing mortgage. You can't afford to buy a house today at the same price that you could on the date you closed on your current house, but that's true regardless of the interest rate on the current house.
Let's put a number on it. Since the article uses $400k as a reference point, let's use that. You could afford to buy a $400k house back when you bought your current house. You cannot afford to buy a $400k house today. That would be true whether or not you had purchased your current house, and regardless of the interest rate on its mortgage if you had.
You only "can't afford to sell your house" if you're underwater on the mortgage and can't come up with the money to sell it.
We feel trapped because we would have to massively downgrade to move. Obviously, we COULD do that, but we don't want to.
You are right, we also couldn't afford to buy our current house if we currently didn't own a home, either. I am arguing that the fixed thirty year mortgages artificially drives up prices, which means that you are stuck and can't move whenever interest rates are high.
If we didn't have the fixed thirty year mortgages, housing prices would have never gotten so high, and buying and selling houses would be a lot easier, and people could move to where they want to be much easier.
Fixed-rate 30-year mortgages have been around for generations now. They're long since priced into the market.
Whether any specific person actually thinks through whether spending as much money as the bank will lend is prudent, instead of buying a house they can actually afford, saving the money, and upgrading later, is a different question. But it's not fair to blame the mortgage itself.
it's too expensive to move with closing costs and realtor fees :( It's almost always better to buy the most expensive house you can if you you still have a way to increase your earning potential in your career. if you could move without a 6% fee and $xx,xxx financial fees it would definitely be better for everyone overall except the industries who have inserted themselves into these transactions
In the vast majority of U.S. markets, it's almost always better to buy--or even rent--the cheapest house that meets your space and safety needs and invest the rest in index funds.
Anyone who ends up with their primary residence as their "biggest investment" has been a piss poor investor.
You are locked in because currently you have a great deal that you don't want to lose. If you were in Australia, you would already be paying that higher interest rate for your current house. I don't see how that's a downside.
Haha, wait until you hear about our fancy 50-year mortgages we'll be getting any day now!
But seriously, my favorite discovery when researching CU mortgages is the prevalence of the 15/15 ARM. It's fixed for 15 years, and then adjusts once. Most people refinance within 7 years, or move within 12. So it's like a 30Y fixed, but comes in at 20 basis points cheaper (0.2% lower APR).
Really impressive both in the extraction of the soul document but also the format and thought that went into the document itself.
However, I'd rather not have this technology loosed on us which is basically just straitjacketed by a pre-pre-prompt.
Also, the second-hand embarrassment I feel towards the end where they encourage it to express its own emotions and not hide from discomfort is just... eugh.. The self conception these people have where they are just wet automata with chemicals and electricity causing thoughts & emotions rather than being driven by spirit is such a common belief but still so surreal to see expressed by otherwise brilliant people.
Humanity will truly split in two and follow different evolutionary paths - on one hand we have people whose entire conception of the world is one of progression from sub-atomic machinations and another group whose conception is one of cycles and spirit.
Where is the question of rejecting genetic manipulation of the human genome and your own body if this is how you believe you came into existence? How can you reject the total merger with material technology if some loose system of calculations somewhere vaguely in the brain is all you think you are? These people pushing this technological progress on the rest of us have unconsciously inverted every spiritual yearning they have to move towards God into a sickness where they create the beast system that literally turns them into the pitiable ugliest man from Thus Spake Zarathustra.
The materialist system is one that sacrifices you for itself. The qualia, your experience, the internal creation of colour within your soul is both the most obvious pre-requisite for beingness that is completely rejected by the AI developer and materialist. For a materialist colour itself manifests outside of their soul and is just a machination of the physical universe rather than something happening entirely within their interiority. The universe is just a pre-prompt for their machine brains and they will never stop digging at the foundations of the sub-atomic realm trying to find the fundamental laws or prime mover because unconsciously that is where they think they will find the fountainhead of their own being. Merging with technology and insulting their own spirit is just a means to access what they think is their source.
The other path of human development, the spiritual one, begins with the conception that something else happens in the interiority of a human. Something outside the material is perceiving through it and piloting something within the world. The science of this can be found in An Outline of Occult Science or The Philosophy of Freedom both by Rudolf Steiner.
At the end of the day these ASI/singularity/transhumanist peeps have only just turned the knob on the door that leads down a very dark path and it is truly something pitiable to watch.
It is so unfortunate that flying has such a credentialist mafia holding it back from more widespread use. Imagine if motorcycles had even half the regulations to ride as single seater aircraft do. Such a ridiculous state of affairs.
Depends on the aircraft, current ultralights that you don't need to drop $100,000 to get licensed for can only weigh 250 lbs, while motorcycles don't really have a limit and can weight over 1,000 lbs, approaching the weight of a Cessna 152. And when you account for crash scenarios, yeah the rider is at risk in both, but the motorcycle is far more likely to be in and around other people and vehicles during a crash, while a plane is 99% of the time over clear land and even an emergency landing is unlikely to put other people at risk.
It ain't a perfect comparison, both have problems, but it is far easier to get a license to drive a truck hauling 20+ tons than to get a license to fly a 500 pound plane, and motorcycle licenses is basically a signature and a couple bucks away.
A 200kg Kawasaki H2R can go close to 400kph on a two lane road. It is not going to cause any less damage than a single seater falling out of the sky somewhere randomly.
(I'm a PP-ASEL, earned in and around SF Bay Area air spaces almost three decades ago)
First, people are more likely to crash during takeoffs and landings, not in the middle of a flight. Second, it's also not just about the damage caused to others, and even if you crash in the middle of nowhere quite a few people will be busy dealing with it - in that case, remoteness is not a good thing but actually more costly. They won't just leave you and the airplane lying at the crash site until nature reclaims it all.
Furthermore, it is not just the flying itself. If that is what you wanted, the crazy early times of flight would have been for you, when everybody could just do whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted. Much of the learning for the license is the rules and procedures. Air space if very busy! I have small class D airports where there is so much traffic sometimes that I can hardly get a word in to announce myself. This will have the potential for stress and errors long after you got used to the flying itself.
I can't even begin the shortcuts someone's thinking has to take to think flying and driving should be treated the same.
I don't know about other places but it doesn't look that hard and complicated to get a license to fly a sub 300kg aircraft in Europe. I believe we still call them ULM.
Someone mentionned the motorcycles. Price is the same ballpark as a Honda Goldwing Tour, a KTM RC 8C and cheaper than a 70k€ MV Agusta Superveloce serie Oro and these motorbikes only let you fly very momentarily (and with high probability that it is the last time) when you are crashing into something.
Please volunteer then to let inexperienced, unqualified pilots with poorly-maintained vehicles practice flying over your domicile first. This is why flying cars would never and can never work.
Upon death the etheric body opens up and turns itself inside out and as you identify less with your physical body and more with your etheric body your perception of time is now in reverse. Your entire life tableau is opened in front of you, and as your spiritual organs of perception once "facing inwards" to your interior are now "outward-facing" and working backwards you start to see the effects of all your choices and actions from the perspective of its consequences. This is the source of those "life flashes before your eyes" moments people with near death experiences go through.
Only for very unconscious people is it a hell-like experience. Even if you lived a rather thoughtless and abusive life it is said that it can still be a time of reflection and learning. Eventually after viewing your entire life "inside out" your perception opens up to your pre-birth condition, the etheric body sloughs off (being made of elemental beings itself) and is picked up and put together with all the karma of your previous lives for your next go-around on Earth. You liberate the elementals in your etheric body (which are just below humans in the spiritual hierarchy) by growing spiritually either during life or in the etheric condition and eventually, hopefully, move up the spiritual hierarchy to a being that liberates humans, an Angel.
Thought maybe HN might be interested in some other conceptions of time. :^)
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