When many people encounter Jesus’ words—“If any man will come after me, let him deny himself…”—it is not at all clear that they grasp the radical nature of what is being asked of them. This is not a call to temporary restraint or religious self-discipline, such as abstaining from certain activities for a season. The deeper and more fundamental invitation is hidden in plain sight within a single word: yourself. What the Master is pointing toward is not the modification of behavior, but the relinquishment of identification with the separate sense of personality you have taken yourself to be. To deny yourself, in this sense, is to pass through the narrow gate—not by effort, but by surrender—into that living KNOWING which the scriptures call eternal life.

Then who is this “yourself” that you are being asked to deny? It is the image you believe yourself to be—the constructed sense of identity you present to the world and refer to as “I, myself, me.” This personal self, which you take to be who you truly are, functions as a veil, obscuring the direct KNOWING of your unity with the Divine. When the Master continues the invitation—“Take up your cross and follow me”—he is not introducing a separate demand, but revealing the cost of this surrender. To take up one’s cross is to willingly bear the dissolution of identification with the very “I, me, myself” that has been mistaken for Being itself. This is why so few are willing to follow, for what is relinquished is not comfort or behavior, but the false center from which the personal self has been living.

The denial of the personal self has never been meaningfully supported by mainstream Christianity. Had it been, there would be far more KNOWERS than believers. The Master does, however, go on to offer one of the primary means by which the denial of “yourself” is lived—an invitation so radical that it has been largely ignored throughout the history of the Christian religion: “Take no thought for your life…” To begin the practice of giving no thought is to enter directly into the denial of the personal self, for it is thought that continually sustains the imagined “I, me, myself.” This is the initial movement of taking up your cross, upon which the personal self is required to die. While this may sound severe, there is no loss here. What unfolds is a passage from the limited sense of the personal self into the infinite reality of the transpersonal self, the very reality to which the word Christ points. This is the lived experience the Apostle Paul gestures toward when he declares, “Not I, but Christ liveth in me.”

The denial of yourself is not about deciding to give up chocolate for Lent, or abandoning certain habits in the hope that this will bring you closer to God. Closeness to God is experienced only to the extent that you are not identified with a sense of separation—or more precisely, to the extent that you are no longer identified with the one who believes itself to be separate. This is the meaning of the Master’s paradoxical statement, “He who would save his life shall lose it.” The life most Christians are devoted to saving is the life of the separate personal self, the familiar “I, me, mine” that defines itself over against the world and against God. This is the life Paul names the natural man—the sense of a separate human self which cannot KNOW the things of God, because God does not KNOW separation. When this sense of separation is denied, not through suppression but through understanding, you open to the grace of unity, where what was sought as closeness is revealed as ever-present communion.

So the biblical meaning of “deny yourself” is far more radical than most readers of the Bible have been led to believe. It is certainly more radical than the common assumption that it refers merely to refraining from some personal desire or indulgence. In my personal experience during my Christian upbringing, I was never encouraged in the radical denial pointed to by the Master’s invitation to “take no thought.” Yet this practice of taking no thought is the real beginning of denying the self that functions as the veil between you and the Divine. It marks the beginning of taking up the cross of the personal self—a self that must die not in any physical sense, but in the sense that life is no longer lived for the preservation of a separate identity, but for the sake of the Divine itself.