The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c39.s1.8

v2.c39.s1.8

Nor is there any happier result to be seen in the second case adduced by Deussen. It is of course later in the Upaniṣads the doctrine that the whole essence of man is contained in the Ātman, ‘self’, that the essence of the world is also an Ātman, and that the two are identical. This idea he finds expressed in a sentence of the Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa,² where it is said that the various gods, the plants, and trees are in various parts of man, Indra in his strength, Parjanya in his head, the lord, that is Rudra-Çiva, in his anger, the Ātman in his Ātman, the Ātman in his heart, the heart in him, he in the immortal, the immortal in the Brahman. In this passage he thinks that the assertion of the identity of the Ātman is really a reference to the identity of the self of man and of the universe, an assertion of the fundamental view of the Upaniṣads wrapped up with a different view. The answer to this is clearly that the passage cannot be pressed to yield so much: it is possible that it simply has the sense that the body of the world is in the body of man, but it is probably merely a vague identification of self with self, without any profound meaning being either felt, or, though felt, hidden. The conscious identification of the universal spirit and the individual is a very different thing from such a phrase as that in question, and the theory that the phrase indicates a knowledge, but a degradation, of the higher truth, is too far-fetched.