Yajnavalkya Kanda. Adhyaya 3, Brahmana 4. Usasta: the Self within all, the unseen seer
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Each mantra is given four ways: the Sanskrit in its Devanagari script, the same sounds in Roman letters, an English translation set in our own voice, and then the line once more in plain words, for a first and unhurried reading.
Not every passage is opened to the same depth. A few central mantras carry the full cross-school commentary, where the schools are set side by side. The rest are kept here whole and faithful, set in their place but not expounded, so the book stays entire and nothing is dropped for being thought minor.
Where the schools read a line differently, the difference is kept open. None is crowned and none is corrected. Each is met on its own terms, and where they contradict, the contradiction is left standing for you to sit with.
The Self within all
Then Usasta, the son of Cakra, questioned him. "Yajnavalkya," he said, "explain to me the Brahman that is immediate and direct, the Self that is within all." "This is your Self that is within all." "Which one is within all, Yajnavalkya?" "The one who breathes through the out-breath, he is your Self that is within all. The one who moves through the in-breath, he is your Self that is within all. The one who pervades through the diffused breath, he is your Self that is within all. The one who rises through the up-breath, he is your Self that is within all. This is your Self that is within all."
Usasta son of Cakra asks Yajnavalkya to point out the Brahman that is not hidden behind anything but immediate and direct (saksat aparoksat), the Self that is the innermost reality of every being (atma sarvantarah). Yajnavalkya answers: that very Self is what is within you. When Usasta asks which one it is, Yajnavalkya identifies it by its work in the body: the one that breathes out through prana, draws in through apana, distributes through vyana, and lifts up through udana. The breaths do not move on their own; a conscious self moves them, and that self is the innermost Self within all.
In the commentaries
Sankara hears in Usasta's demand a request for the Brahman known with no veil between, saksat meaning unobstructed by any intervening thing, aparoksat meaning not a figure of speech but the very Self taken in its own person and not by a borrowed name. Yajnavalkya answers not by pointing outward but by turning Usasta to the breathing in his own body, and Sankara fastens on why. The body and the organs are by themselves inert; left to their own matter they could no more breathe than a wooden puppet could move without one who works it. That the breaths go out and draw in and spread and rise at all shows that a conscious principle, distinct from the lifeless instruments it drives, is present and at work in each of them. That driver, present alike in every being, is the Self within all.