Read This if Meditation has Never 'Stuck' for You: An Introduction to Shakti
Or, The Unhinged Lunacy of Windowshopping Your Own Refrigerator
Welcome back to the Cyber Ascetics Collective, thank you for being here.
Sometimes I go to my refrigerator to have a cheeky peek inside.
Just to look. Window shopping—nothing has changed in there.
I do it for the simple cheap thrill. Just to feel something, anything.
This post is for the deranged individual that sometimes checks their fridge just for funsies. It is also for the equally deranged “meditation/spiritually curious”—those who have tried to meditate but never really gotten it to stick.
Deadass, understanding the Refrigerator Window Shopping (RWS) phenomenon to what can only be described as an a*tistic level of detail got me to actually meditate every day.
For literal years, I had been “meditation-curious” and “vaguely spiritual”. I understood in some opaque way that meditation is excellent for everything from mental health to sleep.
That wasn’t enough to get me to actually do it.
I’d meditate like 10min/day for six days, but it never stuck.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that deeply understanding Refrigerator Window Shopping shifted my perspective on meditation and spirituality forever.
It has now been 169 days straight of meditating. The past 42 of those have been twice a day, morning and evening. It requires no willpower.
I understand it now.
My secret hope is that something will shift inside you while you read this article—the same thing that shifted inside me when I learned the things written here. These ideas moved me to finally meditate every day. With no end in sight.
This is a long one, and in exchange for your precious time I hope to give you the most authentic, potentially genuinely helpful and transformative essay you’ll read this month. The ideas here transformed my life, and I’m not saying that in some bullshit ahh internet writer way—I truly mean it. A rare and worthwhile transformation. I wish the same for you deeply.
P.S. the bar is in hell but this essay is 100% knowledge + lived experience straight from the beating heart of an IRL living breathing human (and this publication always will be—no AI slop)
A relatable yet distinct, hyper-specific moment:
You’re sitting on the couch, not doing much of anything. Just in one of those liminal zones between tasks, nothing much going on, taking a breather.
You find yourself getting up, walking to the fridge, and peering inside. The ketchup bottle wheezes and a shriveled lime whispers kill me too quietly to hear. Unfortunately, no shredded cheese in sight. Seeing nothing new or interesting, you shrug your shoulders and head back to the couch.
Think about this for a second.
This is a wildly absurd moment. Completely batshit insane.
You knew the contents of the fridge already. No one else had been grocery shopping.
You expended precious, limited energy to get up off the couch, walk over, pull open the door, look, then walk back to the couch.
For what???????
It’s almost as if nothing happened. You just yote 20 perfectly good seconds to the wind with nothing to show for it.
It’s completely and utterly ludicrous.
It would make perfect sense if you had grabbed a little snack to munch on the couch. That’s normal.
But I’m most interested in the hyper-specific case where 1. you already know the contents of the fridge and 2. you don’t actually grab anything to eat. Where you just look and leave.
It’s a widely relatable experience, and yet when you really think about it, it’s completely ridiculous.
So let’s begin to understand this.
The person in the hyper-specific scenario above seems to me possessed. They transform into the Refrigerator Window Shopper, and for a moment become more marionette than human.
They’re pulled on strings to the fridge to peer in.
Nobody consciously thinks to themselves “hmm, now I will go and peek into the fridge, grab nothing, and come back to continue doing what I was doing”.
That would be utterly unhinged.
Yet Refrigerator Window Shopping still happens.
So—what is pulling the strings??
Refrigerator Window Shopping is akin to scratching a mosquito bite. First, you have an itch, and then move to scratch it. This can happen completely automatically.
Having an itch is internal: you do not have to move anything to feel it.
Scratching an itch is external: you have to move your arm and fingers through external space to scratch yourself.
With a mosquito bite, the itch is loud. It’s easy to see the connection that the itch causes the scratching.
Without the itch, there would be no reason to scratch—I don’t usually go around scratching my body randomly if it doesn’t itch.
So from itch comes scratch.
Itch (internal) → Scratch (external)
Fridge Window Shopping is the same: it starts with some internal itch, which then turns into the “scratch” of getting off the couch, walking to the fridge, etc.
Itch (internal) → Refrigerator Window Shopping (external)
To be very precise, a general picture looks like:
Itch (internal) → Desire to be rid of itch (internal) → Scratch (external)
~
Have you ever deliberately chosen to not scratch a mosquito bite itch?
If you have, you may have noticed that the itch often grows stronger—sometimes to a point where it feels unbearable, and then you REALLY gotta scratch.
Here’s a graph:
Case 1: An itch starts completely unconscious. First, we’re not even aware that an itch is there. Then it builds until we realize that it’s there. Finally, after we become aware of the itch, it keeps growing until we scratch it.
Case 2: (below): An itch starts completely unconscious. It builds until we unconsciously scratch it, and then goes away without us ever knowing it was there.
Refrigerator Window Shopping often falls under Case 2: we’re not even fully aware of why we go to the fridge and look inside. We just kinda… do it.
For me, the RWS itch is often just a feeling of boredom (sometimes hope/curiosity that something has magically changed). Not even hunger per se. The emotion of boredom serves as the “itch” which leads to the “scratch” of getting up to go peep the fridge.
Without an itch, it doesn’t make sense to scratch.
Scratches come from an itch.
Here’s the point: external action can be directly caused by an internal feeling.
Put differently, an internal feeling contains the potential to become an external action.
Thank you for bearing with me through this lead-up—this is where things get interesting.
We’ve established that scratching (external action) comes from an itch (internal feeling).
The itch leads to scratching.
But why does an itch lead to scratching?
An itch is two main things: uncomfortable and distracting.
An itch demands attention; it is hard to ignore. Mainly because it feels bad, and we want to be free of that bad feeling, so we scratch.
Let’s do an exercise: Take a second to tune into your body right now as you continue reading.
Try to be utterly still.
Don’t even move a muscle. Just your thumb to scroll and your eyes to read.
Odds are, there’s probably somewhere on your body that itches right now. For me, my left eyelid and my chin could use a scratch.
Your lips might be dry. Don’t lick em now..
Tune into one of your itches, but continue to be still as a statue. Just feel it. If it becomes unbearable, let it become unbearable. Stay still.
.
.
.
Just take note of the spot that itches, and do not itch it.
Continuing to not itch it, feel free to unstatue and return to your body.
~
What did you notice? For me, this exercise feels like this graph:
When I really tune in to an itch, it grows and grows. It soon becomes mildly “unbearable”, beyond the point where I’d normally scratch it.
But then, the magic happens.
It crescendos up until it can go no higher, and then it starts to recede.
Slowly, it recedes until it vanishes completely.
No scratch, no nothing.
Key point: a scratch (external action) comes from an itch (internal feeling). But crucially, not every itch must lead to a scratch.
The two potential paths are:
Itch → Scratch
Itch → Let Go (itch dissipates naturally)
An itch contains the potential for a scratch.
Not every itch needs to be scratched—let’s go back to Refrigerator Window Shopping.
It’s absolutely absurd to window shop your own refrigerator.
It is more or less a complete waste of the time and energy it took to get up off the couch, walk to the fridge, open the door, look around, close the door, walk back, sit back down. All of that down the drain. The time, the focusing of the eyes, the blood pumping to the legs and the ATP sent to the muscle fibers to contract them all gone.
Another perspective—with those 20 seconds you could have:
read half a page of a good book
done 15 bodyweight squats
texted your mom “i love you”
gotten a glass of water instead
This “opportunity cost” is just another way of viewing the time and energy lost in one single instance of Refrigerator Window Shopping.
It’s not a lot; it’s not nothing.
The cost of RWS can be (very loosely) quantified as:
20 seconds [+ some amount of blood pumping + some amount of ATP + misc.]
But the cost itself isn’t important—we’re not trying to Patrick Bateman every single second of the day here. What’s important is just the fact that there exists some nonzero semi-concrete cost.
Call it “The Scratch Tax”. It’s the tax you pay in order to be free from an itch.
Some scratches are low-cost: the cost of scratching a mosquito bite is a quick movement of the arm and fingers.
Say you ask your wife to sleep with another man while you watch from the closet. You just really wanna watch and the feeling really itches. Well this, this could have a big cost too. For your relationship down the road. This is only hypothetical of course.
A quick summary of the main points:
Scratches come from itch
Scratches have a cost (big or small)
Itches don’t need to be scratched
Pay a Scratch Tax to make the itch go away. That is what it costs to free yourself from the discomfort of the itch.
Earlier we established an itch can go two ways:
Case 1: Itch → Scratch
Case 2: Itch → Let Go (itch dissipates naturally)
There is a big gaping hole now. Do you see it?
.
.
.
What happens to the Scratch Tax in Case 2??
What happens.
Case 1, you have an itch. You pay the Scratch Tax (some amount of time and energy) to scratch the itch. The itch goes away after scratching.
Case 2, you have an itch. You wait(???). You do nothing(???). It goes away(?????)
Do you see the imbalance? What happens to the Scratch Tax in case 2??
Where does all that energy go.
Bring it back to the couch. The feeling of boredom strikes. It itches. You have a vague urge to check the fridge, but this time you decide to just wait it out. After a while, the feeling of boredom passes and the urge to check the fridge is gone.
What happens to the Scratch Tax? What happens to the time and energy contained in the 20 seconds of getting up, walking, opening fridge, peering in, closing, walking back, sitting down?
In both cases, the time passes. Fair. But where does that movement go??? The ATP to the muscles, the heart rate increase due to movement, the extra blood pumped
.
.
.
It doesn’t go anywhere.
This shit is crazy to me.
All that wasted 20 seconds of movement is conserved. It doesn’t go anywhere! Duh!! You just continue sitting there on the couch! You don’t check the fridge!
The Refrigerator Window Shopper pays the Scratch Tax. They give the external world a fraction of their ATP, their time, their energy, their capacity to move objects in space. And in exchange for that energy, they get quick relief from their itch.
The Based Couch Sitter does not pay the Scratch Tax. They sit with the discomfort of their “itch” until it becomes “unbearable”, and then the itch slowly dissapates. Their itch is gone AND they keep the Scratch Tax in their pocket.
Put differently, the RWShopper spends energy to sate their desire to be rid of their itch; the Couch Sitter conserves energy, letting go of their itch by sitting with/through it, and letting it go down naturally with time.
The Couch Sitter trades internal pain for energy:
So it’s a fair trade: Fridge Window Shopper pays energy for quick relief; Couch sitter endures extra pain in exchange for energy.
As it turns out…
The yogis from time immemorial had a name for the Couch Sitter’s internal conserved energy.
They called it Shakti.
Shakti derives from the Sanskrit verbal root shak, which means "to have potential" or "to be able". This is a very deep concept—what’s written here is a VERY shallow introduction to one sliver of it. A very useful sliver.
In this essay we’re using an itch as an example of Shakti. The tension and discomfort of an unscratched itch contains all the potential movement, energy, and expression of the action of scratching.
In this framing, the Shakti (inner potential energy) is contained within the itch as a spike in the emotion of discomfort, and can be transmuted into the energy required to scratch.
But if a person does not scratch, then the Shakti is not “spent” into the external world—it simply remains within the human. Just as unspent money stays in a wallet.
If you felt the itch ramp up in severity during the exercise earlier, Shakti can be imagined as an emotional coil that literally tenses up—it feels like tension, like “ooooo I gotta let it out I gotta scratch I gotta lick my lips”.
This framework of Shakti is the essence of a lot of spiritual things, and helped me understand the common theme to a lot of disparate practices.
During Lent, Christians often will give up a vice for 40 days. Doing so allows them to experience desire for their vice without sating that desire. Lent can be understood as a crude Shakti printer/generator.
During No Nut November, gooners often will give up nutting for November. Doing so allows them to experience sexual desire without sating that desire. No Nut November can be understood as a crude Shakti printer.
During Ramadan, Muslims will fast from dawn til sunset. Doing so allows them to experience desire for food without sating that desire. Ramadan can be understood as a crude Shakti printer.
“Crude” here simply meaning “somewhat inefficient”.
Not to imply that Shakti accumulation is “the point” of these practices; just that these practices can be understood through the lens of Shakti
These practices each impose a restriction from the outside, in order to “force” a situation where you must sit through a desire without sating it.
“Discipline”, “Integrity”, “Stoicism”, “Cold showers”, “Fasting”, “David Goggins”, and so-on can all be understood as ideas or practices trying to get at the root, the root being Shakti.
In a sentence: Shakti is the energy conserved by not sating your desires.
Not some kind of mystical ~ e N e R g Y ~ by the way. Like the literal energy you have within yourself that allows you to do shit. Like normal ahh energy. The shit that you have more of when you sleep and eat good and less when you sleep and eat bad. When you check the fridge you lose some, and if you don’t check it you keep that instead.
It’s important to be precise:
Shakti only comes from the absence of spending.
Put differently, it only stays in the body when letting go of desires.
Here’s a subtle case to illustrate this:
Say you’re on the couch, and you feel an urge come up to go check the fridge.
Since you’ve read this essay, you know better now. You’re Shaktipilled as frick. You say to yourself “I’m stayin right here on this couch because I want more inner energy”
Very clever. But in this case, you’re just overpowering your desire to check the fridge with your Larger Desire to Become a Based and Shaktipilled Chad. That’s not letting go of anything; it is just crushing the weaker desire to sate the stronger desire.
Say you want some Doritos. If you leave the Doritos in the pantry because you Want To Become A Healthy Person, you are overcoming your desire for Doritos by sating your desire to Become A Healthy Person.
Killing a smaller desire with a bigger one. This is not Shaktimaxxing.
On the other hand, say you want some Doritos. If you notice your desire spike up and then sit and ride it out for no other reason, then congrats—the energy you would’ve spent sating that desire has circulated back into you. This is Shaktimaxxing.
IF you’ve ever tried nofap, or fasting, or cold showers, or any sort of psuedo-ascetic practice before, I hope you can draw on that experience to really feel what I’m discussing here as it relates to your own experience.
So what do these things actually feel like?
For me, the act of Shaktimaxxing in the moment doesn’t feel particularly good.
It feels like: giving up, a shrug of the shoulders, an exhale with finality, a release of tension, a subtle loss. But also, lightness.
It does not feel like: overpowering, domineering, being gung-ho, prevailing against all odds, piloting a ship in a storm, gettin ‘er done.
Sometimes it almost even feels pathetic, or sad, or painful.
It sucks to leave a mosquito bite unscratched.
It sucks to let go of the things you want.
Lemme get personal for a sec
In 2023 and 2024 I spent a lot of time and energy imposing restrictions on myself and trying to achieve goals.
For instance, I spent ~1 hour a day for 4-6 months learning a difficult cover of that song from Your Name on guitar starting from a complete beginner.
I also fasted from all media for 77 days in 2023 and again in 2024 (if you’ve read this far definitely check that essay out~).
I undertook my first two real running races—a 50k ultramarathon and a normal marathon. At 29, with no prior distance running experience.
I now understand these undertakings as crude, DIY attempts to print Shakti. Setting a goal is a restriction, and restrictions can help with letting go of desires to do other things.
All the time I spent playing guitar was time that I wanted to be sitting in my closet, watch my wife and her …friend… doing… stuff idk…… but I had to let that go to practice guitar.
However, goals can also lead to killing desires for the sake of the GigaDesire of acheiving the goal.
That’s what made my attempts crude.
But that begs the question:
Is there a vehicle or method or way to accumulate Shakti intentionally? If so, what would be the best way?
A simple, effective, and insanely difficult way would be:
Simply observe every desire that comes up during the day, and let them swell up until it’s unbearable, and watch as they fall. At all moments. Only sating a very select few.
That’s probably the ultimate Shaktiprinter. But I’ve tried and really can’t do that. There is an easier way.
Before that, a note on scale:
We’ve been discussing on the level of checking the fridge or scratching a mosquito bite. But when it comes to Shakti, there’s no limit to how large or subtle you can go with it.
90%+ of the actions we take on a daily basis are not physical actions, but mental actions.
Planning, schemeing, imagining, wondering what you should’ve said to that cashier, thinking about upcoming events and birthdays, the tasks you have to do, worrying, so-on and so-forth.
Most desires are not desires to check the fridge or have a bag of Doritos (i.e. desires to act in the external world).
Most desires are mental. Here’s an example:
“I’m going to a party. I had better plan what to wear. I’ll mentally analyze the setting, the guests, the ocassion. With that in mind, I’ll mentally sort through all my tops and bottoms, choose a color palette. Those shoes don’t go with that top. Hmm, black is best, but is that blazer too formal? Do I have.. oh! The cardigan grandma got me last christmas. I wonder how she’s doing. I should call her, let me make a note on my phone…”
The person above has a party coming up. He doesn’t know what to wear, which causes an internal feeling of anxiety.
All of this mental chatter is sating a desire. At it’s core, the desire is to be free of the itch of anxiety.
Each new thought is a Scratch Tax. It requires mental energy to pursue the chain from one thought to the next. If you’ve ruminated in the past, you may have noticed that ruminating is an exhausting activity—this is why. Thinking it through like this brings relief from the anxiety. But at the cost of energy:
party coming up → anxiety (internal) → desire to be rid of anxiety (internal) → think it through (internal, takes effort/energy; is a Scratch Tax) → anxiety goes away
The price to make the anxiety go away is the time and mental effort spent analyzing the situation.
Whether or not he “should” analyze the situation is a different point—this is just to illustrate that most itches, desires, and actions happen entirely in the mind. Exact numbers are unknown, but the ratio is on the level of 100 mental actions to 1 physical action.
100x more mental actions. Maybe more.
The implication: the best Shaktiprinter must address mental itches, mental desires and mental actions.
It’s an especially sticky situation since most thoughts seem to just happen automatically, and it’s almost impossible to Stop Them Directly…
To summarize (and then onto The Point):
An “itch” (bad feeling) causes a desire to be free of the itch; then there are two options: scratch the itch (aka sate the desire) or wait it out
Scratching an itch costs some amount of time & energy (physical or mental), this energy is “leaked” into the world. You spend it.
Choosing not to scratch and simply sitting through the “itch” keeps the energy inside. What you would’ve spent for the Scratch Tax stays in your own wallet.
This conserved energy is called Shakti, “inner potential energy”
It’s the “potential energy” you could’ve used to scratch.
Shakti only circulates back inside when a desire is fully released—it does not “count” if you kill a desire for the sake of sating a larger desire.
The vast majority of itches, desires, and actions are mental.
There are methods to “print” Shakti, and make it go brrrrr.
With all this groundwork laid, we can finally get to the Point.
When I learned about Shakti, a switch flipped in my brain. That very instant, that very day.
I realized what I was trying to do all along while pursuing “sigma” behaviors like media fasting and cold exposure.
I didn’t fast for 77 days for the hell of it. I had some sort of intuition that it would be worthwhile, and it was, but I had no idea what I was trying to discover.
At the root, I was trying to DIY a Shaktiprinting machine and make it go brrr.
But the yogis already did that 10 billion years ago. I was reinventing the wheel. The most refined Shaktiprinting machine ever created was right in front of my face the whole time, I just didn’t fully understand it yet.
Meditation.
To be clear: I do not mean that in an annoying ass “you should try meditation hurr durrr” way.
Meditation simply makes Shakti go brrrrr like nothing else.
Here’s why:
Meditation in all its forms is about One Thing. Literally. Focusing on one single thing.
It doesn’t matter if you’re doing simple breath meditation, third eye meditation or trataka (candle gazing), chanting a mantra or identifying with a deity.
The object of meditation is the only focus.
Let’s make it more concrete and just discuss Zazen (Zen breath meditation). In Zazen, the aim is to concentrate on the breath, while keeping the body still and the spine straight and upright.
You’ve probably heard of or even tried this simple breath meditation before.
For me, I could never see the point. WHY??? Why should someone just sit there and breathe? What is the point??? HOW do these benefits abound? What’s the mechanism?
In this frame, printing Shakti is the capital-P Point of meditation:
At any one time, the mind has desires pulling it in myriad directions. “Do I have something in my teeth” to “I should buy a boat” to “I have never been to Oovoo Java”.
Mostly, we fold to the mind’s whims. We ponder the boats, the jetskis, and how it might be to watch someone you love doing all sorts of watersports.
Every fold is a leak. Every fold is a Scratch Tax. Every fold saps a tiny bit of literal energy from us. Energy not as in anything woowoo or mystical or otherworldly. Energy as in the literal capacity to do shit, that we get from food and sleep etc.
Stanford’s bitchass says we have 60,000 thoughts a day, and 90% are repetitive. Whatever. Exact numbers aren’t important; it’s a lot. You n me both know we have a lotta thoughts and a lotta repetitive ones.
Most of that mental activity is going to be folding to some itch, some worry, some curiosity, some desire.
That’s 60,000 little old man piss leaks of energy a day. The brain uses ~20% of the body’s daily caloric energy intake.
Energy aside, pruning the hedge of desire brings a natural narrowing of focus. The smallest and most frivolous desires are easiest to prune, leaving only the deepest ones behind. The ones that give a human a sense of “meaning” or “purpose”.
That’s a topic for a different essay.
My hope is that you’ve had some experience in the past. Say you went through No Nut November. Maybe you felt a little stronger, a little more capable, a little more energized. Maybe you did a cold plunge once and deeply felt the resistance to the frigid water melt away into an uncanny calm after a few moments in the water. Maybe you spent a season of your life focused on a goal, and had to sacrifice some things you wanted to do.
Shakti is a way of understanding these things. The underlying mechanism. Like literally setting a goal and working towards it excludes potential other paths. The potential energy from these paths that could’ve been, gets funneled into the pursuit of the goal. Setting a goal is a crude way to harness Shakti.
I really hope this is resonating in some way. One question that might be remaining is this:
Why would someone want more Shakti? What is it good for? What does it do to a person to have more?
This is the crucial point.
If it’s not in some way self-evident at this point, if you can’t view or relate your own lived experiences through the lens of Shakti and see the merits, then the answer may seem thin or opaque.
Half of the answer is that it’s nice to have more energy. When you have more energy, you can do more of the things you want to do.
The other half of the answer is that accumulating Shakti naturally brings purpose and focus to all areas life.
Consider the difference between the Shaktiless Mind and the Shaktipilled Mind below:
So the two ingredients:
more energy + fewer desires = …
In a nutshell:
You stop chasing unnecessary things.
More energy remains inside you.
You get clearer on what’s actually worthwhile.
You naturally take better actions without effort.
Life starts aligning itself around your authentic path.
Take the Shaktipill, traveler. If it resonates. If you’re not sure what to do. If you’re like me and you’ve been blindly trying to cultivate Shakti this whole time without knowing that that’s what you were doing. If you’d like a little more energy.
As a sidenote, this is also (I believe) the essence of wuwei in Daoism. “Effortless Action” or “Non-Action”. Let all the crap fall away, and you’re left with The Way.
And as always, my 10 billion words can be summed up in a meme:
Thank you very much for reading this far. I appreciate your time and truly hope that you understand Shakti better now than you did before reading. Let me know if something shifted for you as it did for me. This essay is deeply rooted in my own lived experience and I hope that has come through.
Please feel free to leave any questions in the comments if I didn’t explain anything clearly enough!
Coming up next on the Cyber Ascetics Collective:
reflection on 200 straight days of meditation, 90 of those being ~twice a day plus yoga and pranayam
the schizo/psycho war, outlining/exploring the battle since time immemorial between the schizos and the psychos (immaterial vs material), looping in Luigi Mangione and Diogenes
discovered notes from the FIRST media fast in 2023 (incomplete; found in drafts)
If any of those sound interesting, please consider subscribing to receive them straight to your email when they drop:
See you again soon,
Your Pal Cuckfucius
Thank you, sage, for illuminating this for us. This really helped, similar to how one figures out finally the name and nature of an illness after decades of unconscious attempts and activities to cure it. I've read many things, but this one hits the way one needs to be hit to wake up.
Took me a moment to process “yote” as the past tense of “yeet.” Brill.