Yajnavalkya Kanda. Adhyaya 4, Brahmana 5. Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi, again
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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 lump of salt
As a lump of salt has no inside and no outside, but is wholly a single mass of taste, even so, O Maitreyi, this Self has no inside and no outside, but is wholly a single mass of consciousness. Rising up out of these elements, it vanishes again into them. After it departs there is no more particular consciousness, I say. Thus spoke Yajnavalkya.
Just as a lump of rock-salt is one solid thing through and through, with no inside or outside, nothing but a single mass of taste, so this Self has no inside and no outside; it is one undivided mass of pure consciousness (prajnanaghana). Arising as it were out of these elements (body and organs), it dissolves back into them; once that has happened, there is no more separate, individual consciousness. This is what I mean, said Yajnavalkya.
In the commentaries
Sankara takes the salt-lump as the key image of the Self's nature: it is homogeneous pure consciousness without inner or outer parts, and what ceases at death is only the particular consciousness born of contact with the body and organs, not the Self itself.